It’s all my mother’s fault.

It’s all my mother’s fault.

Like everything that is less than perfect in my life, the poor choices I’ve made with regards to crappy eating practices, unhealthy fitness routines and any number of reckless engagements in a multitude of bad-for-you habits can all be chalked up to my mother.

It was she, after all, who was hovering over me when I tasted the miracle of my first McChicken; when I understood that a telephone could deliver me these fantastic flat Italian pies, right to my front door; when I chose Brady Bunch over exercising a bunch. Surely she’s responsible for cultivating a lifestyle that struggles mightily to stay on the good side of health, even with the child a full quarter century out of the parent’s direct care. Somebody’s gotta be.

I jest, of course. My mother is no more culpable for this state of physical negligence than Ray Kroc and, indeed, I resent terribly people who seek to blame anyone but themselves for imprudent behaviour on any front.

Still, it is illuminating to hark back to one’s younger days in order to see how extant lifestyle patterns got their beginnings.

As the child of two working parents, I did enjoy my fair share of fast food in my youth. I remember we’d order pizza every Friday, and that I hated any toppings but cheese. And even then I used to peel the rubbery top layer off my slice, and lick the little wells of tomato sauce caught in the crust’s moist dimples beneath it.

We used to get Harvey’s cheeseburgers, too, our reward for holding out for a late dinner on those nights when our parents went out. “You can eat something now, before we go,” my mother used to offer my brother and me, from behind a cloud of perfume and escaping-the-kids anticipation, “or wait until later and we’ll bring something back.” We always chose the latter.

But there were plenty of healthful parts to my childhood, too. My mother used to insist that we play outdoors basically any time we could. If homework and chores were done, we were hustled into the air to do what came naturally. What did, almost always, was a blast of physical exercise that would struggle to be matched in adulthood. We skipped, played hopscotch, kicked the can, hid and were sought.

Everything was muscular when we were children; nothing was undertaken without physical effort. Sitting in a chair for hours on end was anathema to us. We lived on the sidewalks and the bottoms of our sneakers knew every square by heart. That I occasionally powered these efforts with special sauce and Lik-M-Aids just means I was a typical kid of the 1970s. And that I’m struggling now to reconcile physical activity and sensible eating just means I’m a typical adult. Full stop. And my mother needn’t wear a stitch of it.