I needed to have a talk with Frank. Frances needed some help over this hurdle. I think the best thing would be if the two of them developed a relationship where they had some man-to-man chats. But was such a thought just a form of bias? Should a man be more efficient at dealing with such things than a female? But then wasn’t it really about having a model in your life that you could get guidance from?
Still debating the subject in my mind, I got up and went to get the boys some milk. I supposed that Frances could have gotten it out of the ice box, but stuff like that was supposed to be my job, and besides, it got me out of the conversation about cats.
“Scrambled eggs sound good?” I asked.
“Pancakes,” Carlo shouted out, forgetting the quiet voice rule.
When Frances shoved an elbow into his side as a reminder, Carlo sighed and added, “Sorry.”
“But, please, could Mrs. Penn make them? She makes bunnies.”
“I might be able to do that,” I said, thinking about elongating “the ears” of a round pancake.
But Mrs. Penn had already bolted up to head to the big mixing bowl.
“I better watch,” I said. “If you’re not here one day, I’d fall down in their estimation.”
Mrs. Penn laughed. “Not a chance, Shama. You’ll always be their heroine, well, at least until they turn into teenagers. Then no adult ranks high.”
Turn into teenagers? Did Mrs. Penn think I’d be allowed to remain here pretending to be the boys’ mother for that long? I guess my face reflected that I was thinking over her comment. She patted me on the back.
“They will still love you, Shama, even when they’re arguing with everything you say,” she said. “That’s just a necessary component of growing into themselves. We don’t want teenagers to become us. We want them to blossom into their own possibilities. To get there, they have to go through a bit of an ugly side.” She laughed, but I could tell that hers was the voice of a woman who’d lived through that cycle.