When tupperware always wins.
Before you have children there are some things that are alien to you. For example, you never need to say “I’m so so sorry” in Spanish, you don’t really need that handheld hoover, and the quest to find a method to remove plastic toy paint from your bath is a foreign language.
Your cupboards are in order, plates on top of plates, glasses in neat rows, cooking utensils matching and nicely displayed. Then you have children. Your cupboards are no longer your own, teaming with mismatching crockery (BLOODY WAYBUBLOODYLOO PLATES), cups, bottles, packets of organic rice cakes replace your packets of Squares, and in that cupboard, the one that used to hold all your booze and mixers (which are now scattered on various surfaces for easy reach when the day gets too much), is tupperware.
That’s right. Before you had children you’d make do with sandwich bags, foil, or if you were really desperate cling film. Even before the little monsters require lunch boxes tupperware starts creeping into your day to day existence, it’s like a new necessity, it’s trying TO REPLACE YOUR MAKE UP BAG. You try to resist, but you can’t, you don’t want to turn out like your mother, but you’re going to. Suddenly that cupboard, that lovely cupboard is stuffed to the brim with novelty jelly moulds, pots small enough to hold sachets of calpol and the spoon, little pots which fit rice cakes, bread sticks, carrot sticks. Pots to hold plastic spoons, tubs to hold puree’d food, then slightly less puree’d food. Pots for grapes, for apple sliced up, for raisins and blocks of cheese. Pots to put these pots in, REALLY BIG pots, to keep left over meals in for the nights you’re just too shattered to cook. Pots shaped like penguins, pots with lions on the lids, pots with spoons included.
If you’re like me, you start off with cheap ones, the type you get your take away in (WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FOIL ONES? I used to LOVE the foil!). Then they shatter in the freezer, or the are so weak that when you fill it with curry sauce it just explodes form the sides. So you upgrade. You upgrade to these.
And do you know what, it’s a present, it’s a treat you are excited. After all. IT’S FREEZER AND MICROWAVE SAFE. And don’t get me started on the “klip lock”.
But you don’t throw away your old tupperware, you keep it “just incase”. You push it to the back of your cupboard so that your new red lidded (it comes in green and blue and orange too I think), takes pride of place at the front of the cupboard, gleaming with pride just ready to be used.
So you bake things, you make things, you rejoice in the fact that you’re sure that if you quarter up your child’s sandwiches they fit into the smallest of the pack of five. You open your cupboard to select a new tub.
Everything falls out. And I mean everything. Cups, spiderman lids and pots, the perfect sandwich holding one, lids and bottoms which don’t match, and therefore are surplus to requirement. WHY IS MY CUPBOARD FULL OF TUPPERWARE THAT IS UNUSABLE?! Why? Because you MIGHT FIND IT’S OTHER HALF SOMEWHERE.
You tidy out your tupperware, you throw out the mismatching stuff…although some of your favourite stuff you might keep on your draining board for a few months because “you never know”. You put it all neatly back. You’re proud. Your cupboard is in order. You may even be so excited that when you’re husband asks how your day was you say AMAZING, before presenting him with the immaculate cupboard while you poor that first glass of gin (you can easily reach your ice and slice trays now after all).
The next day you go in to get a tub to put some grapes in for your child. It’s almost just an excuse, a reason to go and take a sneaky peak at the magnificent tidiness.
Everything explodes all over the floor.
You give up, you select the appropriate tub, you throw everything back into cupboard, you hold it in with your leg and one hand, and slam the door quickly making sure everything is contained. You may even put a bit of sticky tape across the door, just to make sure.
You just keep the stuff that you use daily on the draining board, until the lids and bottoms get lost.
You buy some more, this time you’re prepared, everything is neat and tidy and ready, this time it will be ok, your kitchen will no longer be an explosion hazard…
But it doesn’t last. The tupperware always wins.