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I’ve always loved the feeling of having a newborn’s tiny fingers wrapped around one of mine, because it’s a moment in time that will quickly go by. Soon that tiny hand will be big enough to grip a bottle, then hold the side of the crib to stand up, then be traced around on a page, then throw a football,
then hold a diploma, then wear a wedding ring, then hold my grandchild.

Making the most important part of Sunday dinner, soon after my kids and I moved to Las Vegas in 2008. With Brianna.

S
omewhere over Ohio, I start to register the anticipation in my taste buds. Even if I’ve managed to doze off, I know I will wake up when the captain says, “We should be landing in about twenty minutes.” Then I start to count forward. Thirty minutes until I get off the plane in Philly. Fifteen minutes to wait for my bags. Forty minutes in the car.

I’m heading to QVC land. The studio sits on acres of vibrant, tree-filled property in Pennsylvania. In the fall, the trees lining the streets along the way look like a mosaic of harvest colors. But I’m not really focused on that right now.

During the flight, I looked over my notes and the photos for each of the porcelain dolls that I’ll be showing live on air within a few hours. These are dolls that I’ve designed; I’ve handpicked each detail right down to the lace edging on their anklets. But I’m not really focused on that right now.

On my iPhone are at least thirty-five business e-mails that downloaded following my five-hour flight from Las Vegas. Almost all of them need an answer before the day is over. But I’m not really focused on that right now, either.

Once I’m in the car on my way to the QVC studio, my mind and my mouth are focused only on one thing: a milk shake.

It’s not just any old milk shake. About fifteen minutes from the QVC studio is a local convenience store where you can fill up your tank with gas and get a milk shake, too. The shakes come in a sealed plastic cup that you set on a self-help mixing machine. Just push your button of choice, thick or regular, and presto: dessert time. The only inconvenience is choosing vanilla, strawberry, or chocolate.

It’s almost sad that I haven’t made any effort to divert my thinking pattern from “I want a milk shake.” But it’s because I’m traveling. I know it’s a behavior that was conditioned in my childhood. Whenever we traveled, on the road, we would get to eat dessert as a meal, sometimes even two or three desserts.

I’m a dessert-loving Osmond. All of my brothers are as well. My kids rarely skip dessert, and I would guess that every single niece and nephew would choose sweet over savory any day. It’s a sugar-driven legacy passed down from my mother. Thanks a lot, Mom!

My mother always kept a stash of chocolate hidden around the house in various places. I would sometimes find her near a closet door, nibbling on a square of chocolate. She would look over at me and grin and say, “Just a little afternoon pick-me-up.” Now, when I look back at her life, I know that it must have been her way to combat her fatigue. I understand completely, Mom.

A good snack, especially something sweet, was my mother’s way of giving both comfort and reward to her children. A job
well done got a cookie or two, and a tough day ended with some cake and almost always ice cream. It was the instant smile producer for all eight of my brothers and me. When my mother was a child, at the tail end of the depression, sweets were a luxury saved for special events. When I was a child, desserts and baked goods were much more available, easier to make or buy, and affordable for almost every American family. Now it seems in many households that it is the only food group.

My mother loved making homemade treats and would page through magazines and cut out recipes and catalogue them in countless notebooks, always wanting to try baking something new. Of course, great farm-raised vegetables and fruits and nutritious meals were always a part of our everyday life if we were at home. My mother could even make eating the healthy food into a fun experience. She would sample a new salad recipe, and whichever child took an immediate liking to it had the salad named after him, and it would be forever known by that title. When it was time to make dinner, she might say, “Let’s have Merrill’s salad tonight.”

Even our garden had personalized rows. Wayne cherished his corn on the cob rows. I had raspberry plants that were known as mine, and Donny was fiercely protective of his sweet peas. We each had our own favorites when it came to fruits and vegetables, which is most likely proof that people’s taste buds are as unique to them as their hair and eye colors. I think my mother understood that because of her own eating issues.

My father, on the other hand, thought that food was a gift, God’s bounty of the earth, and should never go to waste but be
appreciated. I have vivid taste bud memories of countless mornings as a little girl from when we first moved to California and we all had to suffer through the delight my father found in harvesting the huge grapefruit tree in our backyard. This tree produced grapefruit like it had been injected with a fertility drug. Even the smallest new twig held on to a nasty, sour, three-pound yellow grapefruit. Every morning, my father would present each of us with a huge, sixteen-ounce glass of fresh-squeezed juice. My father relished every sip, but it put the rest of us in pain; it was like swallowing liquid aluminum mixed with WD-40. My brothers and I even attempted to “downsize” the crop by lobbing countless grapefruits over our fence into our neighbor’s yard. We almost got away with it until Mrs. Nickeleye (who had a really good eye) called our father and insisted that we come over and take our “gifts” back home. I think even my mother tried to give large baskets of grapefruits away to our other neighbors so that we could be spared the tumblers of juice every morning. When she couldn’t get rid of them, she would stir a tablespoon (or two or three) of sugar into each of our glasses to make the juice more drinkable.

I don’t think my mother meant to leave us each with an insatiable sweet tooth. She developed her own during our years and years of touring the world as a family of entertainers. Eating dessert first was frequently her only option.

My mother’s love for people around the world still has an effect today. I often get fan mail from people who remember how “sweet” my mother was. She loved every culture we visited and appreciated the beauty of their music, crafts, arts,
architecture, rituals, and holidays. And the people loved her back, bringing her the best-loved foods of their country. What might have been a culinary delight to the locals would get to my tenderhearted mother right in her sensitive stomach. She never wanted to be rude, but if it wasn’t a food that she recognized from the first decades of her life, it was doubtful that she would be able to chew and swallow it. Her mother was the same way. Grandma Davis would get queasy just at the sound of other people chewing. I don’t remember her ever sitting at a table when my brothers were eating dinner. She would stand at the kitchen counter to eat, and then it was always a one-flavor food like a baked potato, some warm custard, or her favorite, vanilla ice cream, and she would keep Pepsi on hand to settle her stomach at a moment’s notice. My mother was never introduced to foods with any kind of spice until she met my father.

Right after “One Bad Apple” became a number one hit for my brothers, we went on an extensive world tour. In my mother’s journal from that spring and summer, she noted many times her inability to eat what was available. In Mexico City, one entry in May of 1975 read:
“Between shows, George
[my dad]
sent out for chicken. It still had feathers on it and was greasy. The boys and George were cleaning the dressing room when it arrived. When he saw the feathers on the chicken he just deposited it all into the garbage can. It was so funny.”
My mother then had to lie on a couch until her feelings of nausea passed. Four days into our concert tour of Mexico, she wrote:
“I have only had onion soup and nuts since I’ve been here. I’m afraid to eat.”
She probably thought she would fare better
in Brussels the next week, only to find that she couldn’t swallow the backstage meal that had been prepared to welcome us. She wrote, “
The sandwiches they served were raw hamburger and raw fish. Ugh! The cheese and the chocolate were good, though.
”

When our family was invited to dinner at the Malacca Palace in Malaysia and chilled monkey brains, a local delicacy, were part of the appetizer plate, my mother could barely sit at the table. In that case, she wasn’t alone. We were all particularly chatty that day, so we had an excuse not to eat. After all, it’s universal etiquette not to speak with your mouth full, isn’t it?

My parents had no idea what we would be facing on the next leg of our tour, which was to London. Thousands of teenagers had filled the terminal at Heathrow Airport and were packed tightly against one another in the tiered outdoor balconies to see our family step off the airplane. They were stomping their feet, pounding their fists on the railings, and chanting, “We want the Osmonds. We want the Osmonds.” Even more were waiting outside the airport terminal. This was before the days of high security. As we were being hustled off the plane, down the stairway, and to the limos that were waiting for us next to the plane, my brothers and I looked around awestruck. The noise of chanting was resounding off the walls—the voices of thousands of girls, some of them screaming and crying. My brothers got into the limos first, and I followed close behind. For some reason, I turned at the last moment and saw one of the balconies starting to sway and bend. Pieces of concrete
were falling and people started to scream, but this was a different scream from before. The girls on the balcony below began to panic, fearing that they would be crushed. I was terrified for the girls, but the police were directing the limos to move on as quickly as possible. We read later that six girls had been injured, but not critically. After this, airport officials banned the Osmonds from flying in and out of Heathrow. They could no longer risk the possibility of people being critically injured and, at that time, didn’t have the resources for crowd control.

We arrived at our hotel to find that it, too, was already mobbed by thousands of fans. They were trying to sneak in the service loading docks and climb up fire escape ladders. I think we were only there one night before the hotel manager told us that for our safety and the safety of his other hotel guests we would have to move on.

Our tour manager secretly found a flat, which belonged to a sheik, that we could rent and use as our home away from home. We thought that would solve the problem, only to find out that Osmond fans had posted themselves on almost every corner of that section of London. When they saw us on the move, they were able to decipher exactly which way the car had turned and discover our final destination. Smart kids, right? They managed this all before the days of cell phones or even pagers. We barely got into the flat before screaming fans surrounded it, day and night. I’m pretty certain the poor neighbors were never fans of ours after that short stay.

Finally, in an act of desperation, our tour manager moved us to a small castle in the countryside where the Jackson 5
had stayed a couple of months earlier and had managed to go undiscovered by the fans. And boy, was it ever undiscoverable. There wasn’t a store within miles, which seemed like a nightmare to me at the time. I loved London culture and fashion, and there I was, stuck with heavy brocade drapery and candle-holding wall sconces. I felt as if I had been banished to the 1800s. There was no Disney princess charm to this castle for a young girl.

The promoter offered to hire a private cook for the castle, and my father thought that was a great idea, especially for the sake of my mother. He could tell that my mother had reached her limit of fish and chips, since she wouldn’t even eat the fish. Even though my dad and I were adventurous eaters, trying everything that was offered at least once, he could see that my mother was suffering. My brothers, as children, were all “safe” eaters as well. They liked traditional cooking, and the only tradition they knew was American family style.