Family
What I Love Now That I Am in My 50s
These are things I used to hate in my teens.
Michelle Kondrich
I grew up in the 60s and 70s and I never wanted to be domestic like my mom and married sister. Their constant advice about learning to cook and clean felt like harassment, which got much worse in junior high when every single girl was required to take year-long classes preparing us to be homemakers: sewing, cooking and home nursing.
I didn’t want to be a wife, a seamstress, a cook or a nurse! I wanted to be a writer, traveling, living in New York City in a hip little garret. But these classes were graded, and so I reluctantly attended.
Cooking class made me loathe kitchens. Paired with partners, we had to wear hairnets and long white aprons. And the food? We made mashed potatoes out of mixes. We made hamburger helper. We had tests on the nutritional value of the food pyramid, a shape of which that has since been shown to be totally wrong. Nothing tasted very good and the one time I mentioned to my partner that our cookies tasted like rocks, the teacher threatened me with an F.
But home nursing class was even worse! Taught by a school nurse who wasn’t allowed to even give us aspirin, we had to pay for our own home nursing textbook, and we had to rip out the one and only chapter we were all interested in: how to deliver a baby at home. We took turns reading through the text about how to cool a fever with alcohol, why soup is good when you’re sick, and what to do for gangrene, something none of us ever expected to encounter. If you snickered reading a page about flatulence, you were sent to the principal. Of worse, you got an F for the day.
But the lowest pit of hell was sewing class. The sewing teacher was an expert who loved the girls who were already sewing. I couldn’t thread the needle of my machine (my friend Mary always snuck over and did it for me.) We couldn’t choose what we wanted to sew — only the best sewers could — and they chose a complex midday blouse that was as difficult to sew as it was ugly. I passed with a C minus.
By the time I got out of junior high, I vowed never to cook, nurse or sew again.
But then, years later, I got married. And I had a child. And a home. And everything changed.
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Worrying about your child is as natural as breathing. I had long ago thrown away the home nursing book, but I gratefully took the one my mother bought us. Something real was at stake now — a family and we needed to be the first line of defense. The first time, our baby had a cold, I went into action. I read book after book about what to do for a toddler’s fever, and most importantly when home nursing needed to become a doctor’s visit. Getting a child to eat healthy was a lesson in itself, one especially gratifying in its cause and effect, because our son never missed a day of school!
What was so wrong about those classes? First, they denied creativity. Following recipes by rote felt like work. Instead, I began to improvise to discover flavors. Who knew that maple syrup and hot sauce braised vegetables were delicious? Who knew that you real grated ginger made all the difference? My kitchen is sometimes chaos, but always creative, and that feeds me as much as the food.
Sewing class had been all about following a pattern, which always confused me. That all soured any joy I might have had. While I never became a sewer, just last week when I had a plain black shirt, I wondered what it would look like with embroidered words on it? It looked great! And a habit was born.
I keep thinking about how those classes have been different if a passionate teacher had shown us how much she cared about fresh ingredients, or the beauty of a well-turned hem? I got educated about all of those things, not in class, but through life experience, so that what was once a chore is now a kind of gift.
And of course, the biggest ingredient that those classes forgot to teach us, was that caring for yourself, for another person is love, and love is the biggest healer of all. Love is in the soup you cook when someone doesn’t feel well, in the hem that you deliberately sew creatively with a contrasting thread. And that’s the best kind of lesson learned — and it’s one where you keep on learning.
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