Ife Cweam

The first time I had taste, I couldn’t go back. Ice cream. Ice cream has been my vice since the first time I ever encountered it, before I can even remember. Mint Chip. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. Cookies and Cream. Chocolate Chip. Tin Roof Sundae. Fudge Swirl.  Just about anything!

It all started out with my childhood cuteness. I just had to bat my big blue eyes (which since then have shrunk) at my mom and she’d cave like one does staring at a wide-eyed kitten.

“Mama, can I haf some ife cweam?” I would ask (not being able to say some of my consonants quite yet). Mom was usually in the kitchen working on the calculator (taxes I always presumed), or working in the kitchen—either cleaning or cooking.

As soon as she looked directly into my face, like when you look into Medusa’s eyes, she was lost (she didn’t turn into stone though), but she did give me ife cweam… under one condition.

“Ok, but you have to eat it right here…” she would say, not pointing to the table like you would maybe expect, but to the corner on the floor where our kitchen counter formed a “U” shape so I was out of site of the other children.

Now don’t get your buns in a twist—or whatever that phrase is. My mom didn’t have a favorite child; in fact, it was just my sister and I… She ran an in-home daycare with a few other children. Most of the time we had to stay in the basement, but when I got explicably bored or hungry, I would sneak up without notice of the other children and find my mom hard at work.

I would greedily inhale every bite of the delicious desert in my bowl, every taste even more delectable because none of the other children got any. After I licked the bowl clean, quite literally, my mom would tell me to go wash my hands and face and go back to the basement.

My addition to ife cweam reached a new level; one weekend morning I woke up and trudged to the kitchen with only one thing on my mind: ife cweam. With my hair completely wild and tangled and my eyes probably half closed I peered over the counter at my mom, in the kitchen of course, and asked “Aw you finking what I’m finking?” because of course, anytime you utter “are you thinking what I’m thinking?” the person you’re talking to will automatically catch a glimpse into your mind at that exact moment and know exactly what you are thinking. So not to my surprise my mom answered “Yes Chloé,” SCORE! But then followed with… “What are you thinking?” Well, maybe it didn’t work this time, so I came right out and said it, “ife cweam!” Duh!

Because I was not a completely spoiled child, to my disappointment, I did not get a bowl of ice cream that early in the morning, I would have to try a new tactic if my batting the eye-lashes technique didn’t work every time.

Well, as I got a little older, my strategy changed a little. Sometimes my parents would put the ice cream in the basement freezer instead of the kitchen freezer, and when they weren’t looking, I would grab a spoon from the drawer and go into the pantry and pull out the ice cream and set it on the washing machine. First I would take on bite, but I knew I would be hungry for more, so I left it out. Half melted ice cream tastes better than frozen ice cream anyway. As I’d travel into space or to some elfish country on my computer I would occasionally go back to my ice cream and eat just one more bite… One more bite until the pint was half gone and I realized what I’d done, regrettably closing the box and shoving it back into the freezer, hoping nobody would catch me.

At my lowest point, I had convinced my parents to buy a whole gallon of vanilla chocolate chip ice cream (for every one to enjoy of course), but as they went off to work in the summer (by now my mom no longer ran the daycare), and my sister and I stayed home, I would avariciously maul my way through the bucket, bite by bite. At one point I probably heard my sister coming down the stares and I forgot to put the bucket back into the freezer as I inconspicuously raced back to the computer to make it look like nothing suspicious at all was going on.

Hours later, however, after my parents returned home, I was asked to get something from the pantry. And there, sitting next to the washing machine, was half a gallon of completely melted vanilla chocolate chip ice cream. Wasted. Gone. Horror overcame as I didn’t know what would happen when one of my family members decided they wanted ice cream and discovered that there wasn’t any left, even though they just bought it a couple days ago.

That's when I realized things needed to change... I was a child glutton.

***I would also like to note that no, my mom did not just throw the kids in the basement and enjoy time to herself while she held daycare. 99.9% of the time she was with us coming up with fun activities for us to do. I usually caught her upstairs while she was making lunch, crunching number, or going to the bathroom--something along those lines.***