I Can Cook! And Lots of Other Things You’d Never Know I Can Do

By the end of our Thanksgiving meal, life as a mother, as someone who is (can it only be?) eight-and-a-half months postpartum, and as a still relative newcomer to my new home — it was all beginning to seem manageable, pleasurable even.

And then Ellen turned to Mike.  “You and I should have monthly Iron Chef-like competitions,” she said.

Ca-thunk.  That was the sound of my perennially left-out, insecure thirteen-year-old self dropping like an air conditioner out of a New York apartment window into my stomach.

It’s true that Mike’s turkey was a piece of edible art.  And Ellen is the only person I imagine has the culinary talent to turn green bean casserole into something approaching gourmet and without a hint of canned soup in sight.

But there was a time, not so long ago, when I considered myself a pretty awesome cook as well.  In fact, it was Thanksgiving just fifteen years ago (eegads, fifteen years — can I still say “just”?) when I tested the waters of my fantasy escape-the-law-firm job of opening a catering business by cooking a kick-ass meal in a tiny apartment with a kitchen that measured approximately one foot by three feet.

Granted, I’m not much of a foodie these days and pretend that it’s just that I really like the taste of unadorned food, not that I’m too lazy to cook a proper meal with seasoning and sauces and stuff.  Nonetheless, I’m more than a little bit sensitive about the cooking thing, for reasons I can’t begin to articulate.

All I know is that when Ellen summarily eliminated me from the Iron Chef competition it made me really sad to think that no one knows I can cook — and that maybe I no longer can.

Why No One Knows I Can Cook

To be honest, my contributions to the collaborative Thanksgiving meal were not all a sparkling success.  The mashed potatoes were surprisingly uninspired — due, I feel certain, to the fact that I abandoned my grandmother’s old hand potato masher for the convenience and lumplessness of a hand blender.  The kale salad was pretty great but way too un-Thanksgiving-y for my dining companions who are not still nursing and therefore are able to eat butter-saturated dishes that make you say ohhwwwhh at the end of the meal.  The pumpkin chipotle brittle didn’t even make it to the table (and for this I blame either Mark Bittman or his editors who denied him sufficient space in his 101 Thanksgiving ideas column to explain just what it means for the sugar to turn “golden”).  And the cranberry truffles?  Even if I hadn’t made them too soggy I would have deemed them inedible.

The apple pie, it is worth noting, was perfect, but no one seemed impressed.  And Stan gushed over the chocolate chip cookies.  But come on.  They’re chocolate chip cookies.  Not a great culinary challenge.

Stan, by the way, was perfectly content to keep out of the kitchen until it was time to do the dishes and instead to watch football and the boys at the same time, leaving the cooking to the real chefs. But I wasn’t.  And that, perhaps, was my problem.

I have always relished the big meal preparation — the juggling of dishes, the working out of which step to work on when, the decision of what can be done the night before.  There is nothing like sweating through those last moments when it is all happening at once and coming out the other end with a cornucopia-like spread on the table.

There’s nothing like it, that is, when you don’t have to take into account the needs of two small children while cooking five dishes at once.

Somehow, factoring in time for nursing down to naps, preparing bottles, making instant mac and cheese, and even rather triumphantly going to the park for an hour because everything was so under control rendered my cooking — to put it nicely — nothing to write home about.

And that’s where I started to see a larger trend.

Lately I feel like I’m just not good at anything.

I’m fine.  I’m okay.  Things get done and life doesn’t fall apart.  But it seems as if Mike is forever reminding me that I shouldn’t pack the dishwasher so tightly.  That “our” laundering skills aren’t up to getting Jake’s white socks to be white as intended.  And that it would probably be a good idea to take my iBook in to be serviced immediately since I spilled a glass of water on it yesterday and while it is working just fine at the moment it could give up the ghost at any time.

There’s plenty Mike doesn’t point out as well.  Millions of times each day when I pucker my lips in exasperation and snort, “I don’t have time to do it right, I just have to get it done!”  Hundreds at least when I trip over laundry baskets full of clean clothes waiting to be folded.  Lazy yoga practices, full price internet purchases, toys tossed back in the toy box despite the dog slobber still glistening on their surfaces.

Obviously, I don’t have time to do everything.  That comes with parenthood.  I can live with it, however anxious it sometimes makes me.

But what I’m having trouble with now is the corollary to not having time to do everything.  Doing everything half-assed.

It’s not the way I was brought up.  It’s not how I feel good about myself.  But it’s also not anything pretty much anyone else cares about.  Just me.

Why Exactly Are We Our Own Harshest Critics?

Eight and a half years ago I had my astrological chart done by a professional.  In the hour-long consultation that followed he made one observation in particular that seemed to fit like a key into a jumble of confused machinery that was running me and my law professor life.

“You have no planets in air signs,” he said.  “That means you have absolutely no propensity for higher thinking.”

Did I mention I was a law professor at the time?

The explanation we worked out together still makes a lot of sense to me.  I followed the path my family showed to me with solid determination, even though it would have been so much easier to follow my love of art and spirit and creativity.  And I succeeded.  Because that’s what I do.

I’m not the only one, of course.  We are, most of us, raised in a culture of success.  The point is to be the best, not merely good enough.  And the way we are now sensitive to the needs of kids who just aren’t the best in a particular subject is to give medals for effort.  Instead of, say, changing the expectation that we all be winners in the first place.

This is the reason I still have moments in yoga class when I feel defeated by the fact that someone else can perform a difficult asana that still escapes me.  It’s the reason I feel a pang of envy when Lily’s friend just nine days older than she is crawling and cruising while Lily lies on her tummy squealing.

It’s why so many of us have days when we just don’t feel good enough.  The way I felt when I faced up to the fact that I don’t have time to be a good cook right now.  Unless, of course, those chocolate chip cookies count.

But if you take a step back, you realize that all of these not-good-enough scenarios require someone else who’s better, a foil against whom to gauge our own mediocrity.  We feel inadequate only because we see someone else who feels better — at least from our own, uninformed vantage point.

Yoga is, in part, about learning to melt away that dichotomy:  me versus you, this versus that.  We are, to put it in holiday greeting card language, all one.

More to the point, once you train your mind to stop setting yourself up in comparison to everyone else, the competition’s over.  Instead of racing, you can relax and enjoy the run.  Or the asana.  Or whatever it is you’re doing, whether it’s tossing together a rushed meal that may not merit a stunning review from Frank Bruni but fills your family up nicely or spooning jar after jar of prepared (organic!) baby food into your daughter’s mouth because if you don’t have time to cook you surely don’t have time to do the homemade baby food like you did for Jake.

So, sure, I can choose to feel like a small, sloppy child whose projects never turn out quite right.  But I could just as easily choose to see the beauty in what I’ve made, even if it doesn’t measure up to what I imagined.

It is, I suppose, partly about giving up the notion of goals — set ideas of what you need to accomplish — and embracing the intention — the kernel of what is motivating you, the beauty in your actions, the good in whatever it is you end up accomplishing, as long as you did it with heart.

So next time you feel rushed and uninspired and like you’re just getting by waiting for the mythical time when you can let your true talents shine, take a moment to recognize just how talented you are in navigating the everyday pieces of your life.

Even if they do produce inedible cranberry truffles.

Be Light (and check out Bakasana)

Over the past week or two of yoga, I’ve discovered a new twist to my practice.  Not trying.

I’m the kind of person who works at it.  New asanas rarely come naturally to me.  Relaxing?  It’s a strenuous activity for me.  Everything, even slowing down, requires effort, as far as I’m concerned.

And then I found this light spot right over my heart.  I focus there and … I fly.  Literally, when we’re talking about something like bakasana (crane pose).  But it works for anything — asanas, savasana (corpse pose/final relaxation), and, gee, life too.

So mostly I want to invite you to just find that lightness.  Put a little less grunt work into life and a little more trust.

And if you want to take it onto the mat, then, yes, see if trying less makes your bakasana fly.

Bakasana Instructions

Tagged as: cooking, feeling rushed, mediocrity, trust, yoga and motherhood