No Matter How Many Chili Cook-Offs I Win, Everyone Still Sees Me As ‘That School Shooter’s Mom’
In these scary and uncertain times, community is more important than ever. And nothing brings a community together like a good old-fashioned chili cook-off! Whether you’re rich or poor, liberal or conservative, in perfect health or permanently disabled from the multiple gunshot wounds that nearly took your life, everybody can put their differences aside to appreciate delicious, homemade chili. So why, no matter how many times my chili takes home the blue ribbon, do people only see me as the mother of that ninth-grader who shot up his school?
It’s senseless.
No one can deny I make the best pot of chili in Hattonville. Year after year, I win the blind taste test at our annual chili cook-off. You’d think an achievement like that would put quite the shine on my reputation around town, but no. Everywhere I go it’s the same long stares and furtive whispers—not because they’re reeling from the zesty punch of Janet’s Famous Five-Alarm Fiesta, but because my son, Nathan, happened to murder 12 of their loved ones in cold blood.
What happened in that school was an unspeakable tragedy. I understand that. But there’s so much more to me than that one dark afternoon that shattered countless lives. I’ve been an active part of the community for years. I’ve served on the PTA, taught dance classes, organized bake sales—and I’ve done it all while raising three mostly wonderful kids. Oh, and then there’s the fact that I’ve won the Great Hattonville Chili Cook-Off four years in a row, with four different chilis. No one does that.
I won with turkey chili this year. Turkey! But still it’s always “There goes Janet Blevindale, the woman who raised a monster,” not “There goes Janet Blevindale, Chili Queen of Mackinshaw County.”
Yes, I ignored some warning signs at home that could have saved lives. I failed to notice Nathan was going down a YouTube rabbit hole of paranoia and hate. And choices I made that seemed harmless at the time, like buying him an AR-15 for his birthday, look different with the benefit of hindsight. But I also taught my children how to pick the sweetest onions and ripest tomatoes. How to simmer the beef with just a splash of Worcestershire sauce. How to add the chili powder in stages, to build subtle flavors that don’t overwhelm. Why can’t anyone scream in my face outside Sunday mass about that?
How many of these things do I have to win, people? A hundred? A thousand? Just give me a number, because I don’t know how to improve on my chili any more than this town knows how to pick up the pieces and move on. Should I start baking pies? It worked for Barb Reynolds after she got that DUI: One scrumptious bourbon pecan pie, and all was forgiven! Is that what you want?
I wish my neighbors would judge me on my chili alone instead of on my negligent parenting. But they can’t. They won’t. No matter how fresh the peppers, how juicy the meat, or how perfectly the sour cream counteracts the spice, they have me pigeonholed as the woman whose son put their children in coffins.
Enough is enough.
People are heartbroken, distraught, angry, and they’re taking it out on me. I get it. But if these families really have a score to settle, then why don’t they enter their own chili into the cook-off and try to take me down? It would bring them some closure, and it would bring out my A-game.
Lord knows I could use the competition.
Jesus Christ is King
