How I met my mother
I have a confession to make. I am a woman in my thirties and I never learnt to cook. Cooking and womanhood were an association I didn’t wind up forging. Was it due to my patchy, convenience-driven, neo-feminism that never quite took off? Or was it circumstantial?
I’ve had the same cook for my entire adult life; if I want something new there’s always take-away, right?
In my defence, my writing is my cooking. It’s what sustains me. I can be creative with my words and all the mixing, pummelling, shaking and slicing that goes on in the kitchen - it goes on here in my word document as well. I apply heat with the best of them.
I know how controlling temperatures makes all the difference to the chemistry of the result. I understand that plating and serving are not the end of it. There’s always last minute seasoning - the editing on the go, so to speak - and then the taste of it on the palette, a lingering contentment which comes with creating something new.
So, with that kind of reasoning and this type of sublimation it was easy to get where I’m at: a mother of two whose last recorded experience in the kitchen had to do with heating milk in the microwave.
Nonetheless, one fine day, I made my then four-year-old daughter a sandwich and she celebrated like it was the first proper meal she’d had in her life. I’m not saying that her tips about spreading jam were not helpful, or that her applause didn’t make me feel chuffed.
But it did make me wonder if there was an important connection between cooking and nurturance, whether for self, or others, that I was missing.
Of course, there was only one place to turn to investigate this: I called my mom. And my mother and I spent eight days together cooking simple and wholesome meals. Something more than that took place though, in the kitchen.
It was a discreet thing, and separate from all the drama going on. I refer here to my paranoia around chopping vegetable ladyfingers versus my own lady fingers, my tears over frying onions; and then there was the incident we will simply refer to as the "red chili misfortune".
Somewhere in between all of that, I met my mother. You see, there was a decade-long gap I hadn’t filled. I had ticked off childish adulation, tween love-hate, teenage rebellion, twenties politeness - and sort of trailed off in my relationship with her without bothering to update it.
When you think about it, really - what is the function of parents when you’re a busy parent yourself? I hadn’t figured that one out yet and so she shimmered sylph-like somewhere in the periphery of my range of movement.
It took those eight days of being in a sweaty kitchen in the peak of summer, the children underfoot, the pressure cooker whistling, and the demands of the clock crushing tender chitchat like petals under boots, for me to find out.
My mother, now that I’m in my thirties, is a one-woman support system. We can see eye to eye, now, or disagree without picking up cudgels. We’ve seen some things in our times, and we share common experiences. She can take any kind of mess and put it in order without blinking.
However, she can also respond with messes and distractions of her own, now, and it’s time for me to me to accept them without blinking. My mother is free to be with me in a way she’s seldom been before.
We can argue, and we can kid around, and we can make things all at the same time. Because that’s what grown women do - we multitask so much it’s hard to remember there’s just two arms attached.
Cooking together and then eating that meal afterwards made me realise that her food is the food I want to cook - not when I grow up, but now, when I am grown up. Her seasoning is the seasoning that tastes right to me.
It isn’t gourmet food and we won’t be going on Masterchef in a deadly fight-against-time cook-off. We are just about okay in the best of times and we would be a disaster under pressure.
We’d either burn everything or start giggling uncontrollably or put the gas flame on low and slip away quietly to drink some coconut water. But these less-than-perfect dishes, this is how we do things, and it feels right in a way that take-away never will.
My son loved those eight days we spent in the kitchen. Now you’re like a real mother, he said. I sat him down and explained that as far as I knew, all mothers are real; the ones that cook and the ones that don’t.
Except for the unicorn mothers, of course, they’re probably make-believe the way all unicorns are. I loved those eight days too. They gave me a chance to rediscover my mother, in the third decade of my life, right before she turned into a unicorn.