As a kid, I’d mix up grapefruits and pomegranates. I remember Costco trips, sitting in the shopping cart, the pink, green, and red fruits rolling around with me. My mom had a thing for POM – a google search reveals black bottles, “WONDERFUL. ANTIOXIDANT SUPERPOWER. 100% P❤️MEGRANATE JUICE” plastered across the bulbous plastic. I liked fruits as a kid. Going strawberry picking, more red ended up in my little belly than the little cartons my mom toted. One night, reeling from the sheer volume of sweet-sour strawberry in my digestive system, I stumbled my way to my father’s office. “I’m hot–” were the only words that came out of my mouth, until orange-red stomach acid and citric acid came out of my mouth too. Forgetting that we’d gone strawberry picking, my dad watched in horror as his son blew red chunks on his carpet. Blood red, the same red that pomegranate juice made, sloshing around those Chinese calabash gourd-shaped bottles of POM.

I ate pomegranates by the spoonful. I liked extracting each little kernel, but I was slow, too slow for my stomach. My mom was more adept, flicking beads of sweet and tart into a bowl. After my strawberry escapade, I was wary to eat straight from the fruit. Watching TV, my mom would spoon-feed. My first watching of Mulan was accompanied by one or the other, pomegranate or grapefruit. I don’t remember. What I do remember is something a little sweet, a little tart, a little bitter, chewing slowly, unconsciously, as I watched Mulan get kicked out of the army. I would shake watching Pocahontas – I’d hide my head under a pillow, only surfacing when my grandma would come with fruit, coaxing me out with a treat.

I’d always wistfully wonder what the tea my dad kept in his beat-up Stanley tasted like. Thirsty in the car, I knew it was a gamble, whether there’d be lukewarm water or tea, something forbidden to seven-year-old me. “Caffeine isn’t good for little kids,” my dad would say. It wasn’t until I was eight, that I got to try my very first sip. I knew the smell – his thermos always smelled a bit of leaves and flowers. I’d gotten the faintest hints of the taste; even when it was water, there was something a little medicine-like, herbal and bitter, something like the grapefruit LaCroix that I’d tried and pretended to like when my friend’s dad offered. With the amount of tea my dad drank, I assumed it was delicious, sweet and fragrant. I was surprised when a sharp, harsh mouthful of leaf-water hit my tastebuds. I must’ve made a face, because my dad laughed and said that I’d “learn to like it with time.” Eager to prove I was quick, I choked down another gulp.

My mom raised me with myriad four and eight character sayings. I think one of her favorites was that “nothing tastes more bitter than regret.” My mom has always told me, if you grow up “eating sweet,” you’ll live life “eating bitter.” Better to work hard in your youth, then enjoy the fruits of your labor in adulthood. For elementary school me, that meant free time was time wasted. My parents would turn down other parents asking to arrange playdates – he has karate, he has piano, he has hockey, he has to be doing something. Free time was something I stole for myself, whether it was reading to the dim glow of a Snoopy night-light or an hour of Friv before my parents came home from work.

I “ate bitter” lots while playing piano. My hands would go numb on Tuesdays, knowing that I’d disappoint my piano teacher for my weekly lesson yet again. After every tear-filled lesson, I’d beg my mom if we could switch from Svetlana to someone else. I got a rough response: “No matter what, the teacher must be Russian or Chinese. That way, they’ll push you to work hard. No pain, no gain. You don’t get anything out of a gentle teacher.” Eventually, I internalized it. Hard times would surely yield results, I told myself.

Despite the disappointment and yelling, I never seemed to learn my lesson. My mom, eager to cultivate the talents my teacher foresaw in me, sat with me every night, monitoring my practice. I found solace in pretending I had to poop; the bathroom that used to be my time-out corner became my sanctuary. It had everything I needed – a lock, books I’d hide in the crook of the U-bend of the sink pipes, and a whirring fan that drowned out the sound of turning pages. Stealing time, I’d reread The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins until I knew it by heart, memorized it better than the prelude or waltz I was supposed to have memorized by Tuesday, just 3 days away. It was so sweet, stealing a bit of time for myself, that I accepted the bitterness of Tuesdays, of the fights I had with my mom.

Every fight, the topic of quitting came up. I always technically had a choice: “Great, you can quit right now! You’ll just have to pay me back for all the lessons.” Now of course, my income consisted of birthday and New Year’s red packets (#passiveincome), hardly enough to cover weekly lessons. As I got older, my mom dropped the second clause. I could quit right then and there! And even though I had that choice, I thought of my first taste of tea, the face I’d made. I’ll learn to like it, I’d tell myself. I’d rather have the bitterness now, rather than live with the bitterness of regret in adulthood.

My work started bearing fruit. Though I’d never made my piano teacher particularly pleased with me, I kicked hard enough to keep my head barely above water, and that was good enough to win competitions. Each trophy or certificate certainly didn’t taste sweet to me, they were just nice mementos of the bitterness I’d endured. I remember a fight after winning my first competition – I developed the guts to say that I quit, then tossed and turned until two in the morning. At the time, I had a tiny Nokia flipphone, one with Plants Vs Zombies, and more importantly, a calculator app. 6 years x 50 weeks x whatever a lesson cost came to a terrifyingly high number. I backtracked and texted my mom: “Im sorry I was angry… I dont want to quit… You were right…” In the morning, I received a sickeningly sweet response: “glad you are mature, say sorry. your piano is making you my little prince!”

In my head, I’d quit since seventh or eighth grade, ever since I switched piano teachers. In practice, piano wasn’t something that my mom was okay with fading from my life entirely without something to show for it. The deal was simple: I just had to pass one more test, then I’d be done. In the winter of freshman year, I did it. I passed, and the piano became nothing more than a piece of furniture my sisters had to sit at, a piece of furniture that I was free from. My mom’s prophecies and sayings never really came true. To her, I’ve learned the lesson. Work hard, eat bitter, set yourself up for a sweet adulthood. To me, I’d been doing something different all along.

I’ve long stopped drinking milk, but to childhood me, that glass of milk before bed was ritualized. Most of the time, I’d have a little treat with my milk, whether that be a couple slices of my dad’s salami, some apple slices, or a Costco freezer pop. I was a bit of a food scientist – I’d try different methods of eating and unorthodox combinations (NEVER mix Danimals with milk, EVER) to get the most out of my food. Through my experimentation, I’d long realized that sips of milk made my popsicle taste that much colder, that much sweeter. If I could vary it up with salami, the saltiness made the perceived sweetness even greater. After artificially-flavored popsicle, apple slices tasted less sweet in comparison.

I wasn’t learning to endure bitterness like my mom wanted. I was learning to orchestrate it. All of my stolen moments of sweetness between the bitterness of practice and lessons weren’t just failures to properly eat bitter. They were bites of popsicle between the bitter stretches – the sweetness that made the bitterness survivable, or maybe the bitterness that made the sweetness pop. My mom thought she was teaching me to acquire a taste for doing hard things. I ended up learning something different, choosing strategic doses of bitterness that made everything else taste sweeter by comparison.

I came to this realization only recently. I’ve developed a taste for sitting Lower Left – and that means that the three water dispensers behind the salad bar are my go-to beverage options. Sometimes, the middle dispenser has these thick cuts of grapefruit, and for whatever reason, maybe the bright pink color, I’m compelled to take some water back to my table with me. It’s not very good tasting. To be honest, I can’t taste the grapefruit at all – it’s just sort of bitter and pithy. It’s a bit of a long story that requires some knowledge of inside jokes and mental gymnastics that I’m not prepared to go into here, but I’ve dubbed it revenge water.

My mom would see revenge water as proof her lesson worked. I’m voluntarily eating bitter, showing discipline, toughening myself up. There’s a tiny bit of that – the fact that I can choose something hard or bad just because I can, some kind of agency dressed up as asceticism. Yes, it’s great to have the gift of choosing what to drink, but it really does make everything taste a little bit better. The creamy tomato soup is sweeter. The taco pizza tastes slightly saltier. Sometimes I double revenge water with sparkling water, and the sparkling water tastes clean and crisp in a way it didn’t before.

I bought a pomegranate two days ago while shopping for Thanksgiving groceries. Cracking it open, I prepared for an experience something like revenge water, bitterness by choice. I was surprised – it wasn’t bitter at all. Sweet, tart, nothing at all like grapefruit. I’d been mixing them up this whole time, confusing two fruits that were really, nothing alike at all.

In a month and two days, I turn eighteen. According to my mom’s saying, I should be done eating bitter by now. I worked hard as a kid, endured strict teachers and late nights, and so I should be home free, eating sweet in adulthood. Everyone’s been pushing this idea of being done with the hard things, moving on to better times – college is where life starts! Senioritis will hit you like a truck! My mom even begged me to take five classes the next term instead of my usual six. In some ways, I suppose it’s all true. The senioritis has hit pretty hard and I haven’t done a lick of work on my Regular Decision college essays yet. Life has felt sweeter, more relaxed with my girlfriend at my side. In other ways, here I am, spending the night after Thanksgiving pounding my head on my keyboard, coaxing out this blog post, a few phrases at a time.

I don’t feel like someone who’s done eating bitter. If anything, adulthood feels less like crossing some finish line and more standing in a grocery store, holding fruits I thought I understood and realizing I’ve been wrong for years. Even as I swirl seeds around in my mouth as I type right now, I brace myself slightly for a bitterness that each aril I bring to my mouth lacks.

In a way, it’s a bit disappointing.