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It happens a little a time, before she knows what's happening.
Sam has always loved to eat and she learned quickly that the easiest way for her to get the food she wanted was to make it herself. So she taught herself to cook.
Sam also learned that people who cook need people to feed.
In high school feeding people was easy. Spencer would try anything once, Carly would try anything she watched Sam try first and Freddie could be force fed.
When Carly and Freddie left for college, Sam needed new people to cook for. She discovered that the best people are the ones who are obligated to eat whatever she wants to cook.
Boyfriends were always a good option; sometimes she'd make deliberately vile things just to see if whoever she was dating at the time would choke them down. Husbands, unfortunately, took their wife's cooking to much for granted; Sam disposed of two before she finds one who at least pretends to be grateful.
The best people to feed, Sam decides, are children, especially hers; she can punish them for not eating her meals. Grandchildren might be even better; she can still punish them and they think Grandma's cooking is a wonderful treat.
Sam thinks her life's been a little like that story with the mouse and the cookie and the escalating circumstances.
If you give a Sam a lamb chop, she thinks, she's going to want mashed potatoes to go with it. If you make her mashed potatoes she's going to want to mash them herself. If you let her mash the potatoes she's going to want to add seasoning and so on and so forth until she's standing in her kitchen, stuffing a turkey and directing the host of children who are acting as sous chefs.
Sam can feel the other adults watching from behind her at the kitchen table. She wonders what her oldest friends think seeing her now, the plump, graying, tyrannical matriarch of some six kids and seven grandchildren, eight counting fetuses.
Her sister never stops to question Sam's life. Nothing makes more sense to the Puckett twins than not being like their mother, whether through Melanie's pristine elegance or Sam's maternal authority.
Spencer and Carly are happy she's happy, but neither of them is really sure when she changed from an angry, scruffy kid to a happy, productive adult. Spencer settled down but never grew up, he doesn't understand maturing. Carly was always too old for her age, she doesn't understand being immature.
And Freddie, Sam is absolutely sure, is not paying the slightest bit of attention to her. Instead he bounces his youngest granddaughter on his knee, a little girl with a few wisps of blond hair and black eyes.
Because Freddie grew up with Sam, from enemies to frenemies to friends, lovers, partners. Grandparents is merely the next step.
After all, if you give a Sam a lamb chop she's going to want to raise a family with a nub; that's just the way escalating circumstances work.