From the first moment the Friends character Joey (played by Matt LeBlanc) first uttered those words—Joey doesn’t share food—my husband and I have used them as a familiar refrain for me. It doesn’t matter if we are out to eat or here at home, or (and maybe especially) with leftovers: Judy doesn’t share food.
If you’re not familiar with the television show, Friends, in this scene, Phoebe registers surprise when she learns that on a date with one of her friends, Joey got upset when the woman reached over and helped herself to a couple of his French fries. Rachel, on the other hand, expresses no such surprise, relaying a story about how a few days prior to this, Joey refused to share the two grapes on his plate with her baby girl, Emma.
Joey’s response to these stories? Loudly proclaiming this now-iconic line: Joes doesn’t share food. Personally, I can respect this stance. Maybe it’s because I am a bit of a foodie, though by no means a full-fledged foodie, or maybe it’s from living so much of my grown up life sans roommates, I can’t say, but when it comes to food, I’m more than a little bit like Joey.
Enter my children.
Somehow, having children seems to shift the universe in ways you cannot predict. For me that shift apparently included, ahem, having to share food. For the most part, when they were younger, this was not something we did. Instead, we opted to put samplings of the foods on our plates on theirs for them to try or not. However. However, as they got older and their neurodivergent brains became more obvious to us, and food became more challenging for each of them, admittedly, I was more likely to offer a taste of something from my plate if a child wandered my way with a curiosity about the food I was eating.
Even so, I was not prepared for the time my then 7-year-old sought out the take out fish and chips my mother-in-law bought and brought over with a few other take out items to our rental place in Tryon. Apparently the fried fish smell was as tantalizing to my girl as it was to me and I remember that she ate pretty much one full fried filet and while I may have shared it, I did so begrudgingly (and, yes, she’s reading this, but it has been a running joke how hard it was to watch her eat my coveted fried fish filet that day, being a New England girl who loves fish and chips and knowing how hard it is to find good options for that here in Western North Carolina).
This trend has continued into their teens, usually more so with our 17 year old than our 15 year old. Although there are times I can entice my 15 year old to try something new or something she hasn’t had in a while, she is not one to wander over and check out what I’m eating like she did when she was younger. Our 17 year old, on the other hand, has no qualms checking out the food on my plate. In fact, that’s how she came to try things like the quinoa chili I experimented with or the rotisserie chicken she discovered she liked, and, of course, more fried fish.
Like I said, the universe shifts when you welcome your children. Perhaps it shifts even more when they’re teenagers. Or maybe we’ve simply developed ways of doing life with our kids that work for us. All I know is that that once-familiar refrain that Judy doesn’t share food, has also shifted, though maybe not as much for my husband. There are still moments between us when he eats the last of something I’d been thinking about eating and I am convinced he would never eat without checking with me first (I’m wrong almost every time). Still, having these two remarkable young women in our lives has softened at least a little bit my strong reaction to sharing food. At least I like to think so.