Fish Bones

Snapshots In My Time, Of My Time.....Hauntings.

My entire childhood

When I was small my mom liked to serve fish. Baked. Fried. The bad thing about it is that it was always fish with bones. Tiny white bones that made the fish impossible to eat. I grew to hate fish and it did not take long for that to happen. I was always getting fish bones caught in my throat. My mom would always say be care to look for bones adn to be sure to pick each piece apart to be sure you are not going to swallow a bone. I always looked yet I always swallowed a bone. Bone after bone after bone.

Those bones always got caught in my throat and then the panic would set in. I could not get it out yet I could feel it in the back of my throat sticking me. No matter how hard I swallowed it would not go away. What was the cure? Bread. My mother would get up from the table and get me a piece of dry white bread and tell me to eat it. The bread was supposed to be stronger that the delicate fish bones and break, removing it from my throat. Well that never worked.

I would eat the bread and damned if those bones weren't flexible. They would bent but they would not break. I remember some times I ended having to go to the pediatrician because 2 days after the fish the bone was still there. Finally as I got older I began to rebel.

I would refuse to eat any fish and we would have lone battles at the dining room table because I would not eat fish. I remember my mother sitting across from me and staring at me for 3 hours in a test of wills. Needless to say, I won. I did not eat the fish. I grew to hate all fish and never really ate any fish as an adult until I decided that not all fish was bad....just the fish with bones.

I bought all sort of bonelss fish, filleted fish and salmon. Today I am a fish lover. The thing that I still cannot understand to this day is why my mother would give fish with bones to kids knowing that there was always a bone stuck in my throat? How many times does it take tolearn that lesson? Apparently she never did. She still eats fish with bones it in. That is just about the only kind of fish she eats. When she came to my house many years ago, I served grilled salmon and that really was the first time she had fish at home with no bones. Now she does buy that.

To this day I never eat fish at her house. No matter what kind it is. It brings back memories of too many bad angry mealtimes, me choking on fish bones and me being unable to get that one fishbone that was stuck in my throat out... for days.