Bacon and Eggs

On the first day of summer vacation after the end of 4th grade, my mother gave me an apron - it was terry cloth, and it was yellow and orange with flowers on it - and told me she was going to teach me to cook.   I had since I was very young "helped" her cook, by putting the butter in the bowl when she made macaroni and cheese, or tried to stir in the flour when she made bread.  This would be the first time I made something by myself.  We made bacon and eggs.

It was the summer that I was preparing to change schools.  As a child, I had emotional issues - which I am only in recent years coming to understand the origins of.  As a result, I was teased mercilessly - today you would call it being bullied.  My mom thought that changing schools would change that.  So we spent the summer cooking various things -  but what I remember the most was the bacon and eggs, which I cooked almost daily because that was the first thing I learned, and snickerdoodles.  I so rarely felt safe and secure, yet when my mother focused her attention on me and tried to include me in things, I felt part of the family.  I cannot explain why I didn't feel that way otherwise.  I suppose now that I understand everything that was going on during that time in my life, I realize that I always had a fear of being abandoned and forgotten.  My mother being available for me abated my fears for a time.

When my two oldest daughters were small, I included them when I was cooking, and encouraged them to help, however they could, when they were very small.  These days, one of them is simply a picky eater, and the other is vegan; so we don't cook together often, but then did learn a few things; not only about cooking, but about family and including each other in simple things like making a batch of cookies or making a grocery list and deciding what we would have for dinner.

I don't know if my mother realizes how much that first cooking lesson impacted my young life and my life today.  It has a lot to do with the way I raised my daughters. Everybody has a core need to feel included, to feel like they are not alone, to be part of something outside of their own selves.  I am an introvert to the core, but being singled out to be a part of something, just my mother and me, gave me something I wouldn't have had otherwise - the knowledge that no matter how much other kids teased me, put me down, made me feel worthless, that I AM loved, that SOMEBODY is always thinking about me, that I am NOT alone.

Cheaper than a shrink - and tastier, too

I love food.  I love to buy it .  I love to cook it.  I love to eat it.  Cooking, from the meal planning all the way to sitting down with a hot plate of whatever, is my favorite (and most effective) form of psychotherapy.  It helps me focus - if I need to stop obsessing over something, the process of preparing a dish breaks my concentration from what I was obsessing about and I come out with a different perspective.  If I'm feeling anxious, making the shopping list helps me focus my energy in the right direction. If I'm depressed, eating some good old fashioned home cooking like Mama Ryan or my Mama used to make has a way of making me feel like I'm home again; I have a sense of safety and security, and that pulls me out of the pit.

I have a cookbook that was put together by my aunt after both my grandparents had passed away.  It is full of all the recipes that I remember from my childhood, and when I first received my copy, I spend moths preparing everything I loved. Some things don't just fall together right, even if you have a recipe to follow.  It took me a long time to get my Mama Ryan's recipe for chicken and dumplings just right - the way it tasted when she made it.  Others I tweaked ever so slightly, and I think Mama Ryan would have approved; after all, most of her recipes she got from watching her own mother and others prepare.  They were never written down, just handed down to each generation.  A few years before she was diagnosed with lung cancer, I and other family members had her sit down and give us the recipes that she had always prepared from memory.  Just like her handmade quilts, her cooking was something that we would always remember her by.  Other recipes that she got from others were written down - on anything from notecards to the backs of receipts, to old Avon bags. These were all stuffed into her various cookbooks, and I was lucky enough to inherit all of them.

One of my goals in life is to have something like this to hand down to my children and grandchildren; one day  many years from now, maybe one of my grandchildren will be cooking something for their family that they learned from their mother or father, who learned it from me.