The Bunch at Brunch
Newsletter 2026-07-10
It wasn’t just brunch. It was a declaration of independence. It’s a whole new world now that Betsy can drive.
A new brunch place recently opened in my suburb. That’s how I know we’ve made it. It takes a certain level of wealth to support a restaurant whose specialty is not quite breakfast and not quite lunch. Most people have to be at work at that hour, and retirees would never eat that late. The most important part of aging out of the workforce is waking up at 5 a.m. every morning for no reason. I assume the new brunch place is supported entirely by the independently wealthy, plus kids who are off for the summer and are independently middle class at my expense. Tuesday, that restaurant hosted a dine-to-donate fundraiser for a local school group. I’m not sure which one. Everyone needs money all the time. The least efficient way to deliver that money is by siphoning off ten percent of what you pay for pancakes. That’s never stopped us from participating. My kids demand that I be ineffectively charitable if it means they don’t have to eat my cooking. What stopped us this time was our jobs. The place closed by 3 p.m., when Lola and I would still be at work. That wasn’t an obstacle for Betsy. She asked if she could go out to brunch with her sisters. She wouldn’t let a lack of parental supervision stand between her and French toast.
Now that she’s practically an adult, she barely needs Lola and me at all, except for all the things we pay for, like the van, gas, insurance, and the meal she wanted to buy with my credit card. It was sort of for charity. How could I say no? Actually, I could have very easily vetoed her plans since I’m an awful person, but she never gave me the chance. She asked her mother, who gave her the green light. It would be Betsy’s first time driving all of her sisters at once without me. She’s driven with the whole family in the car, but only when I was in the front seat beside her to quietly freak out when things got dicey. I’m sure that, in some small way, me tensely grabbing onto the door handle and fearing for my life helped keep us safe. She was a great driver 99 percent of the time. That still meant that, one minute out of every hundred, we had a close call. I hoped one of those minutes of excitement wouldn’t occur on the short drive to the brunch restaurant. It was only about a mile and a half away, but down busy roads where I would never want the kids to ride their bikes. In a minivan, covering that distance would be safe and easy. That’s what I hoped, anyway. If anything went wrong on that first trip with all of them, I’d be too far away to help. I’d also be too far away to hinder. Maybe that was a good thing.
Their mini road trip would only be possible due to a loophole. Betsy’s new license doesn’t allow her to transport friends for the first six months, but she can drive siblings. The law assumed that would be roughly one other kid. The world is built for families of four, with two parents and two children, one boy and one girl. Lawmakers never imagined a sixteen year old driving around a party bus full of her own sisters. In a way, the law has it backwards. It assumes friends will be more distracting than siblings. You can’t have peer pressure without peers, but you can have never ending squabbles that trace their origin back to sometime shortly after the kids were born. Their first memories and their first fights aren’t separated by much. My biggest fear was that, while Betsy was driving, someone would tell someone else to shut up and World War III would break out. I hoped that their fear might keep them in line. They had to know that driving Betsy into a fit of rage would negatively affect all of their chances of survival. With luck, the fight wouldn’t start until they got to the restaurant. They might get thrown out, but at least they wouldn’t die. Maybe they’d even get some food before they got banned for life. All’s well that ends with biscuits and gravy.
Beyond the driving situation, I had some hesitancy about the kids going to a restaurant by themselves. Betsy had done it once or twice with her older friends who are past the six month moratorium, but it wasn’t something the younger three had ever attempted. Waffle has a habit of stirring up trouble with her siblings when she’s bored, which could easily happen at a restaurant where her food doesn’t arrive instantly. She only has the attention span for McDonald’s. Then again, the novelty of the experience might keep the younger girls on their best behavior. Without a parent there to handle the process, they might be afraid to act out lest they end up in restaurant jail. They might suspect that’s not a real place, but they wouldn’t have enough life experience to be absolutely sure. They also have a habit of behaving better in public than at home. I’m okay with that trade-off. It means strangers are impressed by their politeness and my drywall has lots of unexplained holes. As long as they didn’t also damage the walls at the restaurant, I figured they’d be okay.
