Mendolonium

I aspire to be great.

It’s a rather pretentious thing to say; it is, nonetheless, true.  I am searching for great and meaningful work to do in the world.  I think every day about what it means to be a great mother.  I would like to be a great chef.  Not Alton Brown, Christopher Kimball, TV-star great, but someone who makes consistently delicious, creative, and ethical food.  My problem, of late, is someone is always in the kitchen with Mama. I feel quite competent in the art of basic cooking with children;  I’ve memorized my favorite recipes to avoid having to waste precious time looking them up, I can do almost anything other than dice one-handed, and I have indoctrinated my three-year-old with a love of cooking so fierce he will turn down time outside/Legos/TV in favor of baking a pie.  Following recipes is not enough for me though.  Quite frankly, I couldn’t follow a recipe properly if I tried.  Jeff has shrewdly observed that I use recipes like a compass; simply to point me in the right direction.  So without even thinking I develop new dishes.  I would love nothing more than to spend hours upon hours in the kitchen, perfecting a recipe, feeding batch after batch to a willing army of taste testers, until I got it just right.  These days I am lucky if I get an hour or two a week to myself in the kitchen.  It turns out it is quite challenging to do anything great in an hour.   Even when the kids are asleep there is someone in the kitchen tormenting me, the incessant noise of the baby monitor, flooding the space with it’s staticy white noise until inevitably a baby cries out and I have to go soothe him back to sleep.

It’s a small microcosm of the greater challenge of mothering:  balancing one’s own dreams against one’s needs and desires to be with one’s children.  Right now that balance not in favor of greatness in anything other than mothering.  I tell myself that they’ll be older won’t need me nearly as much in only a few short years.  The baby will sleep soundly through the night just as his brother now does.  I try to to convince myself that living in these joyous sleep-deprived moments is enough for me.  It is true that my world won’t end if my butternut squash soup isn’t quite right.  It is equally true that I stay up late at night smelling the ghosts of flavors melding together, adding and subtracting ingredients in my head in search of the perfect chocolate chip recipe.  I think about the implications of proposed health care legislation for women or carbon emissions reduction as often as I think of creative ways to engage my sons.  Mothering is great; but it isn’t enough for me now nor ever.  I need to find my way back to a path that will lead to more great things.

Today that means I am going to concentrate on one recipe at a time; taking as many one hour chunks of time as I need to get it right.  It means we might eat butternut squash soup once a week for the next two months, but in the end what a great soup it will be.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 1:13 am and is filed under So What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?, Someone's in the Kitchen with Mama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.