Bruce Cameron

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2010.

When my children get together to tell scary stories, one of their favorites is The Time That Dad Cooked.

By “the Time” they are actually referring to a stretch of several months when the only person cooking the food was the same one who paid for it — a concentration of power that very decidedly worked against them.

My oldest child was, at this point, a teenage girl, and therefore had valid reason to suspect I might want to poison her. The other two were younger and felt free to behave as badly as they wanted because their si...