This Failed Grocery Run Reminds Me How Far I've Come

Adulting is hard. There are bills to pay, things to clean, hours to keep, and sometimes Google doesn’t have all the answers (blasphemy, I know).

On top of it all, I’m the dad now. Which means even smaller, less experienced humans look to me for guidance, security, and . . . competence.

On the days--and there are many--when I want to rend my clothes and shout to the heavens, “I don’t know what I’m doing! No one knows what they’re doing!”, it helps to remember how far I’ve come.

Because I used to be a teenage boy. And teenage boys, despite their many good points, have a unique capacity for cluelessness.

Recently I remembered an experience I had when I was fifteen or sixteen, and my young men’s president (the Latter-day Saint near-equivalent of a youth pastor) sent his son and me for ingredients we would use in a dessert.

With shopping list in hand, my friend and I approached the grocery store with the kind of confidence only teenage boys could have who are about to make gigantic fools of themselves.

Among the few items we needed were yellow cake mix, cream cheese, and evaporated milk. The task was simple--and we were never trusted with such a duty again.

First the yellow cake mix.

You have to give us credit for even finding the baking aisle. We grabbed the first yellow-colored cake mix we saw.

And my friend’s dad just about died when we returned with lemon.

This is not a yellow cake mix. Mind = blown.
Image credit: Duncan Hines

The cream cheese was easier. We knew where to find the refrigerator it was kept in, and we felt confident in our hunt for an item we were already familiar with.

The only problem was that my friend’s dad never specified what flavor we needed. So we put our heads together, and proudly returned with something we thought everyone would like.

My friend’s dad just about killed us when he pulled tubs of strawberry and blueberry cream cheese out of our bag.

It comes in blocks. And plain. Who knew?
Image credit: Amazon

Now for our greatest challenge: the evaporated milk.

Somehow we ended up in the international isle. The cans we found were small and said "Made in Guatemala," but leche was Spanish for milk, so we felt okay about buying them.

My friend’s dad was speechless when we presented him with our cans of dulce de leche.

Truly, we had mastered a forbidden art.

Image credit: Tenor

But we used everything in the dessert: lemon cake mix, strawberry and blueberry cream cheese, dulce de leche, and whatever other abomination our teenage boy minds had conceived.

It wasn’t bad.

Now that I’m married and have a few years of shared kitchen duties under my belt, I’ve become not only a decent cook, but a fairly accomplished grocery shopper. In fact, I’m proud to say my wife has even called me from the store on occasion to ask where to find things.

And I never mixed up yellow cake mix and lemon cake mix again.

In so many areas, I still feel as clueless as those teenage boys in the grocery store. But when my life and responsibilities start to overwhelm me, I remind myself how far I’ve come--and what direction I’m going.