right now

17Mar09

I’m uncomfortable in the kitchen. It’s a place that will always remind of me my mom’s four day long preparations for Korean meals in the middle of the Mid-West where I was sequestered during my childhood. There weren’t the warm delicious smells of apple pie and browned butter wafting from the oven. It smelled like vinegar and hard work. It was a place that I didn’t like to bring my friends to because if I opened the refrigerator, a glass jar filled with octopus tentacles and open tubs filled with tofu bricks were lurking inside. I’d have to endure their wrinkled noses and ignorant sideways glances.

I haven’t always been so inept in the kitchen. After a series of photography classes I took in college, I finally decided that mixing chemicals, shaking film canisters in precisely timed intervals and using tongs to harvest the black and white photograph that magically unfurled on a glossy white piece of paper qualified as training for the other lab at the apartment of my first marriage. I started to throw dinner parties. One or two of them were a success.

It would usually take about 2 hours to find a few recipes that I thought I could choreograph all at once and then a concentrated trip to the grocery store for exactly the ingredients that were called for. If I deviated at all, I knew the result would be complete garbage and someone would be throwing up later that night. I had actually food poisoned myself more than once to know that I couldn’t be trusted once I strayed from the cryptic instructions of Food & Wine’s collective recipes for 1996. By the way, ‘Tbs’ and ‘Tsp’ look insanely similar. They could have chosen different letters for the abbreviations. The inverted ‘p’ has played tricks on my panicked line of sight to ruin my fair share of meals that rely on just a smidge of chili powder versus a dollop.

My guests would be treated to bizarre experiments of Indian curries and Italian rice salads that I had learned to prepare the same day. Every spoon and dish was somehow dirty by the time the meal landed on the table. The kitchen looked like a war zone. Some angry poltergeist had opened all the cupboard doors and pushed the packets of flour and cans of broth out onto the counter and sometimes onto the floor.

When I go to people’s homes now, I’m drawn to the kitchen to chat with friends or strangers just like everyone else. But the thought of producing something, like a chopped onion or a whisked bowl of eggs, to contribute to a salad or breakfast just makes my stomach knot up. The disproportionate amount of pressure I feel to perform when someone expects me to “cook” in front of them, makes my brain seize up and stop working. It’s the same kind of thing that happens to me when I’m asked a relatively complicated question in French or what the multiplication of 368 times 57 is.

My husband thinks I’m spoiled because I never offer to cook anything for my beautiful family. I don’t know how to explain to him how much effort it takes for me to dissect the simple steps in the three part procedure that scrambling an egg involves. What, for him is a no-brainer: 1. eggs out, 2. whip ‘em up, 3. pan/plate, is for me an overly complicated deconstruction of how my mom would show off how well she cracked an egg with one hand while I always created an irreparable trauma to the side of the eggshell that would embed microscopic shards into the batter/sauce/soup that I was momentarily invited to help with. Eggs were always green or the same consistency as leather after I was done cooking them. I think she reveled in her superiority over me. Maybe I missed the love that she injected into her scoffing. Who knows. Maybe it was me who was being the asshole.

I’ve been fantasizing about re-creating the Chawan Musi that Max loves so much in restaurants. My mom made it perfectly while she was here helping with Baby D last summer. I rejoiced in her failed attempts though. I admit it.

So much shit has happened since I last wrote about anything on this blog. The only reason I’m sacrificing sleep to stay up and write is because I want to remember what it’s like to be in the trenches. And we are definitely in the thick of it now. I’m still working and so is the mister, but we are sorely in need of more of everything. Space, time, resources, patience, compassion, all of it. I look back every now and then and briefly remember how Baby D used to stretch, like a good lengthening stretch right after you’ve woken up, when she was just days old. It was a silly revelation that explained why my bladder and my cooch was always feeling like they hated each other when I was pregnant with her. Incontinence, one of the many things I won’t miss about being knocked up. The thing of it is, I can barely remember that sensation. It’s such a faint memory that I’m almost not certain that I haven’t just fabricated the whole experience. With Max, he used to shake his head and cause a fluttering sensation when he was still on the inside. I don’t remember if it was extremely uncomfortable, but I just know that it used to be a vivid memory.

I want to remember this particular thought that I’m having at the moment – It is more difficult than I ever imagined to be a better parent than my own. I remember distinctly that I marked every misstep that my mom made when she mocked me for being squeamish for watching her extract the fucking eyeball from the center of a whole squid or for not being able to peel an apple with the same fluid dexterity that she and my dad used to skin that sucker in 35 seconds. She laughed at my eggrolls because they always betrayed their structural flaws when the deep fry overwhelmed the overworked eggwhite lock that I couldn’t get right. She could be a colossal jerk.

Every night, I fail my son when I order dinner for him. Every night, I fail my son when I lose it and just shut the door on his whining, wailing cries for attention. His fear of the dark mirrors mine and I still do that to him because he’s spent an hour and a half fucking around and experimenting with ways to stall and ask for a tissue, a drink of water, a pee on the toilet, his small blanket, no, the SMALL blanket mommy. I’m scared mommy. I still shut the door because I know that he’ll stop manipulating after I open it again…IF I open it again. Tonight, my husband opened the door, because I was just too pissed at my three year old. An irrational response to irrational behavior. Max wakes up his sister. She wakes up Max. Repeat three hours later. Wait an hour. Repeat. It’s 5:00 am. It’s 4:00 am. I sound like my mother. My father even. I’ve overestimated how easy it was going to be – to be a different and a better parent.

Max can be wonderful. He’s a tough kid, but he is amazing.

I’m going to make that Japanese egg custard.

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