I went to get a haircut yesterday and my hairdresser got talking about the endless chore of making lunches for her kids, who are at university. This woman works six days a week, standing on her feet all day. “Why don’t they make their own lunches?” I asked. “They don’t know how,” she began. I looked skeptical. “When I tell them to make their own, they say they’d rather not eat,” she said. Ah yes, the old guilt trip. So she takes their requests, sometimes its noodles or other special Chinese favourites, other times it’s a plain old ham sandwich. One too many ham sandwiches and she hears about it.
I spent a good part of the weekend on schoolwork and another big chunk of it on cleaning my apartment, getting groceries and preparing snacks and lunches for the week. There’s no one else to do it for me and I’m grateful that my mother taught me and my brothers how to cook and “keep house.”
My hairdresser is not making it easy for her future daughter-in-laws, nor for her sons if their wives won’t agree to be their mothers.
Sad that families can get into that kind of a rut.
Lunch is not the only things the younger members of a family can prepare.
On a average week, one day my eleven year old boy (with some help from his younger sibling) will prepare a lunch of “pesto pasta”, plain yogurt mixed with nuts and seed and some fruit for both he and his seven year old brother.
They will work together later in the week to prepare a dinner of Rotini topped by a tomato sauce with fried bacon and mushrooms.
This will be followed by a completely child made breakfast of pancakes with apple or berry sauce (and the remainder of the package of bacon, fried well done but not too crispy).
Finally, when going to a meeting with a number of family friends my oldest bakes his delicious Gingerbread Loaf.
I am a blessed Papa.
I think that my boys are comfortable in the kitchen because we all enjoy food together, we do not hover over them or correct their mistakes when they try to prepare something new and we do not get too hung up about having to do some extra cleanup.
It probably also helps that there are also times when they know that if they want something to eat, they will have to prepare it themselves.