Self-raising children

I wrote this piece many years ago but it still feels real today, especially in this crazy Covid world as we juggle working and schooling from home. I’m learning new definitions of patience! My teenagers are now great cooks - the three cooked meals per day and associated dishes are wearing a bit thin though!

Self-Raising Children

The blast of warm air and sweetness hits me as I grab at the biscuit tray and bring it swiftly from oven to stove top, nimbly avoiding the grasping fingers of the eager audience.  Chocolaty bits ooze out of the pimpled faces of the sweet treats and little ones clutch at my legs. 

“Can I have one mum?  Mine, mine?  Mum, me?  Chocolate?” 

They look up at me with their flour tousled hair, biscuit mix smeared through crevices of sticky faces and fingers.  “Too hot,” I commiserate, and the smallest goes back to working her face deeper into the mixing bowl while the four year old makes the finishing touches to the spoon. 

I cast an eye around the kitchen.  An upturned bag of flour spreads its remaining contents across the bench, diverted on its course by stringy shards of eggshell, and dripping, along with spilled milk to join a discarded cruskit on the floor.  I turn my back on it, swipe at my kitchen ‘helpers’ with a wet face washer, and we make the burdened trek to the car. 

Strapped in with a peace offering each, we hum and chew happily along to the latest motherhood sanity-insanity tea, coffee and cake morning.  Without these gatherings I would probably have long ago hired a nanny and gone back to work.  Except that my brain doesn’t work anymore.  And that isn’t the way things are done here in the country.  Instead we all bake incessantly and gather for endless cups of tea.  We share scone and soup recipes, stories of sleep and sleeplessness, feeding, weaning and toilet training, all with remarkable hilarity.  Our kids stuff their little faces and free range with the chooks.  Not everybody’s idea of good parenting, I’m sure.  To my mind though, the mess, the sugar high and the probable bruises are a small price to pay for a bit of almost uninterrupted adult time.

My mind wanders to one of the mums with whom I had shared the mother baby ward in post-natal depression land.  “Let him take the spoon himself Larissa,” the nurse had coached her gently, “can you see that he wants to feed himself?”

Larissa, rolls of flesh peering over the top of her pajama bottoms, hair falling in greasy strands around her face with its too small, too dark eyes had murmured into her chest:  “But he will make a mess.  I like to feed him myself.”  The nurse had gently taken the spoon and moved around to sit alongside Larissa, giving her baby the spoon.  “Here, let him show you how he loves to feed himself.”  The baby missed his mouth and smeared the white, sticky stuff around his fat little face.  But he was smiling.  Larissa was in tears. 

This incident had allowed me a rare moment of smugness.  At least I was doing one bit of mothering right.  Letting my baby feed herself.  I’d have let her wipe her own bottom and take herself off to bed at night if I could have. 

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One mum sits opposite me with new babe snuggled into her breast.  In spite of my harrowed memories of those early days of parenting, I smile wistfully.  Breastfeeding can be an agonizing experience with the pressure to produce, perform and persist.  But I had loved it.  It was another thread I could hang onto of something I could do well.  My baby had been placed on my belly at birth and had wriggled and sniffled and mouthed his way to his target.  Fresh as day, he had known just what to do, as did my breasts.  I was in awe of the human and food producing system I had become.  Thank God my body knew what to do.   

Another mum who has been in this town for longer than I have leans over to me and says:  “Thank God for you and Margie – before you two started coming along, all we ate at these mornings was rice crackers and hummus.”  Margie and I, having instantly bonded a few years earlier over being the only two breast-feeders in our mothers’ group, and therefore the only two with babies who didn’t sleep through the night, had introduced evening gatherings and wine to this group, and so I decide to take this comment as a compliment.  Jeepers, in the old days they all smoked and took Valium to get through these early parenting years.  Wine and chocolate were an acceptable step-up, I decide (preferably not, unfortunately, while breastfeeding).  I do make a note to myself though about perhaps learning more about how to cook with lentils.

Later that week the telephone rings one evening.  I answer, expecting it to be someone from India.  No one rings on the landline any more.  It is the kindergarten teacher. 

“I’m sorry to ring so late,” she says, “I just need to know, um.  I’m sorry, I just need to have a bit of a chat with you about the cake you brought in for your son’s birthday today.” 

“Yeah, sure”, I say, glancing guiltily over at the two-minute noodles my children are gobbling up. 

“Well, are you familiar with the food policy?” she asks? 

“Um, no peanuts?” I reply, that prickly, schoolgirl, I’ve done something wrong here feeling, starting to spread. 

“Well, there are quite a few allergies, sensitivities and food preferences in this class.  We have a list but maybe I forgot to give it to you.  I’ve just had a few phone calls from parents tonight who have been wondering what their children ate today because they are a bit hyperactive.” 

O lord, I moan, under my breath, my eyes rolling.  “Yes, sorry, well, it was a cake.  So.  There was sugar.” 

“Sorry,” she responds gently, “there’s one little one whose mother doesn’t like her having sugar.” 

“Oh.  And there was chocolate.”

“Yes, there are two who can’t have chocolate.” 

I would have thought the fact that it looked like a chocolate cake might have alerted her to the fact that there was chocolate in it, I think to myself, although I would learn years later that these people have uncanny ways of replacing sugar, dairy, eggs and even chocolate to make healthy things that look exactly like chocolate cakes, and taste even better.  But I was new to this game. 

“Right,” I stumble.  “Sorry.  Anything else, for future reference?” 

“Yes, the flour should preferably be biodynamic and one little boy can’t have eggs and another can’t have dairy and one little girl has a nut allergy.” 

Is that why my son keeps asking me what his allergies are? I think.

Years later, I have learned many new kitchen tricks through the sometimes inspiring, sometimes overwhelming and annoying wholefoods habits of my peers.  Tonight, the local biodynamic meat oozes its glutinous, wintery satisfaction onto the slop of organic potatoes, mashed with cream, butter, salt and dill.  Lentils poke their beady eyes from behind anonymous pieces of vegetable, which melt into juices flavoured with lemon rind, prunes and cumin seeds.  We have mercifully moved on from mush, cheese cubes and self-doubt, and I am proud and salivating at this latest creation. 

“Eeew, that is disgusting” snorts my eleven year old.  “I’m not eating that.”  “It’s delicious, just try it,” I retort, hearing the echo of decades worth of such similarly inspiring motherhood statements.  “I’m not eating bloody hippy lentils and what’s this?” he gags, stabbing a piece of slow cooked prune with his fork.  After last night’s dinner table lecture on protein, vegetables and carbohydrates, and how to eat like a budding AFL football player (he is apparently allergic to vegetables), I have run out of steam tonight and so I call on him to leave the veggies and the lentils and just eat the meat and potato.  He holds his nose as he lifts a fingernail sized piece of potato towards his mouth, grimacing and making vomiting noises.  “Just eat it!”  I bark.  “I can’t,” he squeals, “why can’t you just cook like normal people?”  “Cook for yourself then,” I snap back. 

So he does.  Butter sizzles and spits and he swirls the eggs around the pan as they quickly catch and colour.  He dishes them up, adds a grind of salt and pepper, and inhales them in three swift mouthfuls, finishing with a smile.  Discarded eggshells with their stringy remains litter the kitchen bench. 

I turn my back on the mess, and on him.  Well, I think to myself, the nurses did teach us right from the beginning to let our children feed themselves.