The Ughness of Preparing Dinner

I have many failings as a mother.  Could the worst be my inability to produce a decent dinner?  I’ll let my three kids take a vote on that.  Mealtimes with Mama might come up on top.

My lack of culinary skills starting early.  While at my mother’s knees, I learned to sew and that on a treadle machine.  Cooking?  She never endowed her children with a love of it.  And her skills?  She was a meat-and-potato-type woman, which is why my father ended up with gout.  (On the bright side, she made a potato salad no one could beat and her spaghetti sauce was admired—by my daughter.)

My mother never mastered the broiler.  Too much trouble to clean was her assessment.  On the rare occasion when we had steaks, they were fried in a pan on top of the stove, and our treat was bread soaked in steak grease.

My first experience with cooking after marriage was making my husband a dish I learned in Girl Scout camp.  He was not impressed.  On the other hand, the only thing he ever managed to make was an omelet, although he was a mean hand with cold cereal topped by 2% milk.

Naturally, I breastfed when the kids came along.  That was until they could move to a sippy cup.  For my last child I got ambitious and made my own baby food, so much healthier, I was informed.  But kids grow up and they want more than a sippy cup and mush.

For the longest time I suffered from depression.  It started about four thirty in the afternoon, when I knew soon enough I’d have to put a meal on the table, and it ended about seven, when the kitchen was cleared for another day.  I was a great one for casseroles, and I can remember my older son asking hopefully, “What are we having for dinner tonight?”  And I’d answer “Crap 24,” or “Crap 290.”  He got the picture quite quickly.  We’d be eating crap again.

Did they starve?  Well, okay, the kids were on the thin side.  But always when they came home from school I would have cut-up fruits and fresh vegetables for them to munch on.  And I would always have homemade chocolate chip cookies available.  Did actual meals really matter?

When each child in his or her turn decided to become vegan, I thought, well, that’s it.  Why even bother?  And yes, I had sort of bothered before.  My stint in the kitchen shrank further when my two oldest went to college and I had just the younger one, the one who left the freezer door open all night and spoiled everything inside.  Enough said.

Finally free of children, just my husband and I were left to contemplate dinner.  The saving grace here was that he ate his main meal at lunch, thanks to the subsidized university cafeteria where he worked.  So it was just a matter of putting something in front of him.  I would make a large batch of pasta and serve him at six.  For some reason by the third day of pasta he only reluctantly came to the table.

Me?  Hey, now that we no longer had to eat en famille, I eat at 7:30 in front of the television, within reach of my bourbon on the rocks.  That 4:30 depression.  Long, long gone.

Has there been an upside in my lack of culinary skills.  You betcha.  Each of my children have become gourmet cooks.  And they owe it all to me.