Every year on Mother’s Day women around the globe are subjected to a supposed “treat” – the Mother’s Day Breakfast. This big breakfast, normally consisting of eggs, bacon, coffee, and pancakes, is in fact just a crappier version of what we’d be eating on Sunday morning anyhow. The only difference is the Dads and kids cook the meal, yay!

The flavor is off. The kitchen is a disaster. Pancake batter and coffee grounds slopped all over the counter tops and back splashes. Syrup and bacon grease rubbed into the cracks and crevices – it’ll take her hours to get these stains out.

We top it all off by forcing these poor, beleaguered mothers to eat our slop in bed. The crumbs spreading all over her fitted sheet, her child using the duvet like it’s a stack of paper towels at the Rib Shack. Happy Mothers Day, mom!

“It’s ok you know, we can just eat at the table.”

“No, no! You’ve worked so hard this week, let’s eat in bed, IT’S FUN!!!”

***

On this morning I also was rushing around the kitchen preparing the pancakes and coffee. As any parent will attest, you always feed the children first to keep them at bay. Their tiny stomachs are the lit fuse of a stack of dynamite, the minutes leading up to meal time like the opening theme song of Mission Impossible. Will we deliver food to their mouths in time or will the dynamite explode resulting in the Chernobyl of all tantrums?

I was ahead of the game in this regard. My boy had a fully prepared pancake, buttered and plated sitting in front of him ready for consumption.

But oh, was he angry with me! I had cut the pancake up into pieces, whereas he wanted to eat it whole. Oh father, what have you done to me!? My father, my father, why have you forsaken me by cutting it up when, clearly, I wanted an uncut pancake!?

I insisted it was the same, but he would hear none of it. He wouldn’t eat it.

Like an NFL head coach pacing the sidelines, every father has playbook of parental tactics that they employ in these situations. I dialed up one of my favorite defensive schemes:

“Fine, if you don’t want it you don’t have to eat it. You can have a small bowl of dry cheerios and I’ll eat your pancake.”

Little Godzilla roared. He wanted the pancake and probably knew I wanted him to eat it too. We were two gladiators locked in psychological mortal combat on the floor of the coliseum.

I dialed up another play, an old school one from the 1960s.

“You should be happy to eat this pancake, there’s lots of kids in the world who would love to eat this pancake right now.”

***

We feel so entitled to our breakfasts, in fact we take them for granted. But Lord knows we could have just as easily found ourselves born into another situation. We could have been eating breakfast in China.

For the most part, no one can compete with China’s culinary traditions. Certainly not white people, whose flavorless, bland potlucks were causing a loss of taste and smell years before the virus came. Perhaps African Americans do a bit better – their potlucks cooked up with YOLO-like abandon, a truly mouthwatering roll of the dice for your arteries and blood sugar levels. But even they lose all breakfast credibility when talking about how great grits are (not to mention their other monstrous culinary crimes against rice).

China has one of the oldest cultures on the planet, that has refined the recipes and techniques over thousands of years. There is no such thing as “Chinese food” – it is in fact multiple large strands of cuisines, melted down, mellowed out, and placed onto the buffet of some joint called Golden Pagoda right off the freeway just outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana.

So, we won’t go into the encyclopedic listings of delicious Chinese dishes, it is suffice to say that when it comes to lunch and dinner, China is king.

But when it came to breakfast they got very cocky. They tried to pull the wool over our eyes, by serving up dinner flavors for breakfast. Like Fat Elvis, they’re living off that previous success. Perhaps they thought we wouldn’t notice. Like they could slip one in there, pull a fast one on us.

Here is a way to test what I’m saying, answer the following question: what is Chinese breakfast? Don’t know? There’s a reason for that. Or rather, imagine Golden Pagoda Buffet put up a big sign saying NOW SERVING BREAKFAST, would you drive right by the IHOP to check it out? Be honest.

***

As my son and I continued to lock horns, I knew there was almost no way for him to realize how good he has it right now.

You could be eating a thousand-year-old duck egg, or a you tiao 油条 (oil stick). You could be eating one of those mystery meat sausages from Lawsons. You could be eating zhou! 粥 (China’s version of grits. WHY!?)

But the more I thought about, the more I realized how wrong my thinking is. Essentially what I’m teaching him is: ‘If you have a great breakfast you should be happy, because other people have worse breakfasts.’ And by extension the logic would be ‘If you have a bad breakfast, you should be unhappy, knowing that other people have it better than you.’

Why be grateful? Is it because we have it so good and it could be a lot worse? Not really.

I actually think being ungrateful is the key ingredient to a miserable life. You can have so much yet focus on lack and start to feel depressed. It’s a tried and true method for creating unhappiness.

Our society is not structured to cultivate gratitude either, it must be an intentional act. We’re bombarded with images of fit bodies, palatial houses, wealth, youth, and good times. Even our friends curate their online branding to show us the best 2% of their day to day existence. Sickness, boredom, loneliness, failure, and monotony are generally scrubbed from the feeds of our social media and television screens.

It’s not about the pancake. What I want for my son is contentment. I want him to experience joy by acknowledging the good things happening around him every day.

In that sense, Mother’s Day is a holiday for all of us. It is an intentional exercise in gratitude. No matter whether your mom is the parental equivalent of salty grits or a gourmet omelet, we are invited to stop and be grateful to the imperfect women who bring us life…

And to say “thanks for everything” by force feeding them burnt pancakes with maple syrup.

A Breakfast Roast: My Tribute to Mother's Day