stuck
Motherhood

Stuck

He turned to me with a request that would appear odd to an outsider, given his size relative to me.

“Mom, can you help me get the lid off of this ice cream? It’s stuck.”

This is a kid who routinely needs help opening the lids to various jars and bottles, and it amuses me to no end that I can usually pop it open with a minimum of effort while he struggles to do the same, despite the six inches he has on me in height.  Used to the request, I took it from him, still chuckling while I attempted to unscrew the plastic lid, which was currently sealing the gelato in a clear plastic tub.

It was stuck on tight. Like, ridiculously tight. I passed it to my husband, who was equally unsuccessful at budging the lid.

We stood around the island staring at the offending jar. Disgusted, I went to my laptop and Googled “Talenti lid” and to my shock “problems” and “won’t come off” autofilled my search options.

Apparently, this was a genuine issue. There was post upon post about the problem, including an article in The Wall Street Journal! It turns out that the company had an “over-zealous lid-tightening machine”, and thousands of people had been taking to social media to show their frustration.

Better understanding the situation, I did what I had to do.

I grabbed a very large knife and proceeded to hack out a hole in the top of the lid.

“Thank goodness it was only a pint”, I thought as I doled out servings to everyone, knowing we couldn’t reseal it.  I wasn’t going to put the remainder in a plastic storage container. That’s too much work for a few spoonfuls of gelato.

It was a simple (albeit messy and potentially hazardous, given my knife skills) demonstration of the need to think outside the box for ideas to resolve a situation where we are stuck.

Later that evening, I reflected on it some more – about how when the the jar stuck, I assumed my SON was the problem. It was a knee-jerk reaction, probably because he always has issues opening jars, but interesting because he would typically blame it on the jar. When it comes to problems you face  personally, it’s far easier to point the blame elsewhere rather than recognize that the issue lies within – like, say, how I am stuck with an extra (ahem) twenty pounds that I can’t seem to lose (hello, Oreos) or how I struggle to fight distractions when I sit down to write (I’m looking at you, Facebook).

It’s not the cookies or social media. It’s willpower, plain and simple. Or that you need to work on arm strength.

But there are times when what makes us stuck just requires acceptance that what is, is, to no fault of our own, and all we can do is take a deep breath in and sort out a solution.

Maybe, there won’t be a solution beyond acceptance. Or, perhaps the only solution might be something crazy or drastic.

Like hacking into a jar of frozen gelato with a giant knife.

stuck
Original Photo Credit: Rhiannon Brown

 

This post was inspired by the prompt STUCK at Five Minute Friday.

The instructions are: “Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.”

Of course, I’m not entirely good with rules, so I do fix spelling and I will re-read in an attempt to catch any glaring grammatical errors.

And because Five Minute Friday has a group of lovely, inspiring Christian writers while I’m more of a “I love Jesus but I swear a lot” kind of girl,
I don’t always link up…

But I’ll encourage YOU to click HERE to visit the link-up, because there are some wonderful things to read over there.

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