Jan 9, 2017 3 min read

Perhaps harder than it was saying goodbye to you is trying to express my gratitude to all of you who emailed me, and the editors, about my column ending. I am grateful and humbled that so many of you care to hear my stories. It is very validating and heartwarming. Thank you.

My husband called me at work the other day to ask if I wanted to meet him and the kids for dinner to celebrate the return of my column. Of course I said yes; eating dinner in a restaurant nears the top of my “favorite things to do” list.

He told me that he had a couple of stops to make before we met up, and that he had dropped off our girls at the grocery store to do the grocery shopping for me. All I had to do was show up and pay, and bring the girls to the restaurant with me. It was a win-win, as grocery shopping after work nears the bottom of the same list.

When I got close to the store, I called the girls to see how close they were to completion. They informed me that they had been goofing off and hadn’t really started yet. I wanted to yell, as it is worse to think you’ve avoided a dreaded chore and find out you haven’t than it is to just have to do it in the first place. But, I didn’t. I’ve grown as a parent and a person in the past two decades.

Instead, I went into the store and grabbed a cart and began shopping on my own. After hitting the produce section first, I began to pick my way through the aisles for teabags, peanut butter and toilet paper.

In about the third aisle, I saw my girls at the opposite end. They were pushing a cart that was pretty full of items that I was pretty sure were not on my list. I pretended not to see them at first, so I could monitor their behavior, but they saw me almost immediately. My middle girl yelled “Mom” loud enough that I think she awoke some of the chickens in the poultry case, and they came running toward me.

I prepared for a hug that never came. She stopped short, though she excitedly told me about her day and chatted with me until her sister caught up.

We combined buggies, me noticing the Oreos, hair ties and ramen noodles that were extraneous to my list. We hit the cereal aisle on our way to checkout, they having already grabbed milk from the far side of the store.

It wasn’t until they unloaded the cart onto the conveyor belt that I saw the eggs (but mom, ours are too fresh to peel when hardboiled) and the name-brand soap (I don’t know what kind we buy, but this smells right).

I didn’t even know that there were eggs that cost $4 per dozen, did you?

The lines were too long to leave them to exchange the items for the ones I normally buy, so I sucked it up and paid the bill. But, on the way to the restaurant, we talked about price comparing and bargain shopping. I also told them if they wanted dessert after dinner, they could plan on having those Oreos, or perhaps some of those golden eggs.

Laura Zoeller can be reached at zoeller5@verizon.net.