When The Kids Make You Breakfast for Mother’s Day

May 12, 2013

My kids made me breakfast last Mother’s Day. There’s a pretty good chance they’ll do it again this year.

I’d be stupid to say they did it for me, really. Mother’s Day was an excuse to get in the kitchen and go crazy without having me in there butting in with my rules and safety concerns, my constant nagging not to stick their fingers in their eyes after they chop the jalapenos, my desire to use one bowl and not five.

Lucy was seven, Edie was five and, having served as my sous chefs since they could stand on the family “cooking stools”, they were hankering for some kitchen autonomy. Mother’s Day meant they could force me to stay in bed under the guise of relaxing.

I’m not going to lie. I was freaking out.

I imagined what every mother/home-cook imagines from her bed/prison on Mother’s Day—my kitchen being dismantled piece by piece, my progeny unloading cabinets, burrowing through spices, dishes breaking, boxes and bins clattering to the floor, a completely up-ended kitchen that would require a half-day of heavy cleaning and re-organization

I imagined how I would react when I heard Lucy say to Edie, “I think your hair is on fire!” or “I think Mommy needs another spoonful of cumin in her coffee.”

I wondered if I’d be able to just lay there in my bed, silently not helping, all the while hearing them search the kitchen for the bowl I know is right there in the dishwasher, also the only place they won’t think to look, ever. I prepared myself to enjoy whatever crazy concoction they served, no matter how awful it smelled, no matter how it turned my stomach, even if it was ice cream drowned in fish sauce. I practiced my smile, like I really meant it, and repeated the words, “mmm…yummy.”

Mother’s Day, and all its required relaxing, is stressful.

The neighbors had sent us over a dozen eggs from their ever-productive backyard chickens, and this made Lucy and Edie focus on eggs. Eggs for Mother’s Day.

Lucy decided that I would eat two eggs, fried sunny-side up, super-runny yolks, covered in chives and a little cheese, either cheddar or raclette. It was chef’s choice, but I could get behind it. Lucy grabbed the egg carton and inspected: blueish, brownish, greenish, speckled. She picked out Puff Ball’s eggs, the bluish ones—her favorite chicken and her favorite color. She set those aside for herself.

Then she chose eggs for me. The ones from the chicken named, “Gwen” because, as I heard Lucy tell it, “Gwen is older, like Mama.” Edie didn’t care which eggs she got because she hates eggs and most breakfast foods in general. She would make eggs for Daddy. She thought Daddy would like the speckled ones.

From the bed/prison, I heard the clatter of pans hitting the stove.

David, my husband, was relegated to procurer of things from the unreachable top shelf of the fridge—butter, herbs, cheese. He took his orders, fetched what they asked for, and kept his head down. If he even got near the stove, or tried to suggest something about the cheese, or how high the gas was, Edie stopped him and reminded him that he didn’t know how to cook (this is true) and so could not offer any advice.

He told me later she gave him the “the hand”.

I gamely pulled the New Yorker up my Kindle and started “Shouts and Murmurs.” I was going to get into this. I embraced the bed/prison. I didn’t think I’d have a realistic shot at finishing the New Yorker Fiction, too long, too much quiet time required, but “Shouts & Murmurs” seemed do-able. I went with that.

I heard David reminding them not to let the butter burn. Edie told him to shush. It was harsh. But he took it well and next thing I know he was next to me, handing me a cup of coffee, flipping through magazines on his iPad.

“I’ve been kicked out of the kitchen,” he told me, nearly gleeful.

Mother’s Day was looking up.

The girls cracked their eggs. Lucy is very particular about her yolks so, when Edie’s yolk broke, they stood over the bowl, and held a summit about how to handle it. Should they throw away the egg and start over? That would be a waste. But they couldn’t make a proper sunny-side up egg this way. Maybe Ju-Ju the cat would eat it. Ju-Ju likes people food. More discussion. More peering into the bowl trying to make the egg yolk come back together.

Finally, they decided Edie would make a frittata, or even better an omelette, depending on whether she felt she could flip it. They would decide on the fly.

Done. Summit over.

David had laid everything out on the cutting board. Lucy grabbed the big knife from the drawer and sampled the cheeses and, deciding on cheddar, cut slivers of it, and hacked away at a handful of chives.

About the big knife. Our kids use knives: steak knives when they were toddlers, our knives now. By six, kids who have been cooking alongside their parents are pretty adept at not chopping off their fingers. They understand that knife cut = bloody trip to the hospital in an ambulance, hours in the ER waiting room, possibly stitches and a long needle full of local anesthetic. Kids will do just about anything to avoid that. So we trust them to use real knives.

And I’ve told them, over and over, what I believe is fundamentally true—if you’re going to cook, you’re going to get cut. You’re going to burn your hand getting the cast iron pan out of the oven. You’ll get lime juice in your paper cut. You’ll itch your nose after dicing a jalapeno, and in the most jarring manner possible, clean out your entire sinus cavity. Or like Lucy when she was two, you might scrape your tongue on a box grater trying to lick off the cheese.

If you cook long enough, it’ll happen. You can minimize the pain with safety measures, a policy of no fooling around and attentiveness, but make no mistake—cooking, when done correctly, is a full-body contact sport.

And to prove that point, a kid-on-kid smack-down was happening in my kitchen. It was the chives. Edie hogged them. Lucy wanted them for my eggs. (She’s a purist, liking her eggs oozingly runny, with a little salt, nothing else.) Edie, working on the omelette, felt she needed most of the cheese and chives in hers.

Lucy found the “Omelette Defense” severely out of bounds and, from what we could gather from under the covers, Edie elbowed her in the face. Lucy pushed her back. There were accusations and whimpering, then all out screaming.

“I hate you, Lucy!”

“I hate you, too!”

David peeked out the door. “No fighting at the stove, girls.”

To which both girls ratted each other out furiously, and Edie started to cry.

“Mommy!”

David, God bless him, said simply, “It’s Mother’s Day, girls. Figure it out.”

The girls looked irritated by his lack of support. Lucy walked over and pulled the bedroom door shut.

Cooking can make people cranky.

Then, there was an eerie silence. For a long time. I presumed eggs were cooking, cheese was being shared and sprinkled, herbs falling like a light rain over the food.

Or they were dead.

I finished “Shouts & Murmurs”. There was nothing more to do. Silently and slowly I cracked open the door.

What I saw amazed me. A kind of intuitive cooking was happening.

They were looking at each others’ pans, deciding when the eggs were done. They were checking whether the whites shook all jelly-like, which meant they weren’t quite ready, or if the yolks were getting too solid and pale at the edges, which meant they were over-cooking and wouldn’t be messy-runny. Lucy saw that bits of stray cheese were frying a little in the pan. She leaned in and shut off the gas.

They weren’t following a recipe. They weren’t even cooking the way they had seen me do it. It was their own thing, all intuition and senses—sight and smell, the sound of eggs sizzling in butter, the sight of edges crisping up. It’s exactly the way I had hoped they’d learn to cook.

I notice they defer to me when I’m in the kitchen. They ask me questions about doneness, when food is ready to be turned, flipped or stirred. Sometimes they just hand the egg to me because they might break the yolk, but they know I won’t. I’m the sure bet.

It’s easy to take over and have them do less.

But when they are alone, and there is no one to defer to, they have to figure it out themselves. I cannot hog the process. There is no safety net, so they simply depend on themselves to make decisions about the cooking.

David, unsure of why I was peeking through a crack in the door, came over to mock me, but ended up hooked on the action.

When they could tell the whites were not like jelly anymore, and the yolks were still a jiggly molten orange, they grabbed the spatulas from the jar on the counter. Lucy worked her eggs and mine onto plates.

Edie got her eggs on the spatula but couldn’t quite negotiate the flipping. Lucy stepped in—all hurt feelings forgotten—positioning her spatula on the other side of Edie’s eggs. The omelette flipped up and landed sort of lopsided in the pan.

Close enough.

They let it sit for a moment and then, they each put a spatula under a side of the omelette. They were already moving when they realized the plate was not on the counter where it should be. So they carried the omelette, balanced across two spatulas, as if it were a hurt kitten on a pillow, cautious step after cautious step, across the kitchen. It was like watching a high wire act.

No one took a breath until the omelette made it unscathed onto the plate.

David and I both realized Edie had forgotten to shut off the gas, but we refrained from saying anything. Although it was killing me. I had this thought that maybe we’d be gassed to death. I felt the urge to cough a little.

That’s when I heard Lucy, rummaging for forks and napkins.

“Dude, turn off the gas.”

Edie ran over, switched off the knob. And like her neurotic mother, (apple meet tree, tree meet apple) Lucy walked over and worked the knob again to make sure it was off.

Ah yes, a family tradition of OCD.

David, seeing an opportunity, went out for coffee refills. They frowned at him a little, but he assured them he was simply on a coffee run. Lucy said he should cover the left side of his face, so he couldn’t see her eggs. He obliged and poured us more coffee, one-handed, shielding one whole side of his face.

I got back into bed. I pretended to read my Kindle. I waited to be called for breakfast.

But the call never came.

I expected a beautifully-calibrated table setting, maybe a cloth napkin, a wilted, hand-picked dandelion in a glass milk bottle, a hand-drawn card with hearts. What I got was much less refined. The girls brought their masterpieces to the bedroom. They shoved plates and forks into our hands and plopped themselves on the bed. Lucy flipped on the TV with the remote and Edie settled into my lap.

“Eat Mama,” was all she said.

This was it. Mothers Day.

Eggs and iCarly.

We ate our eggs, all lumped up on the bed together, watching bad kids TV. Edie ate nothing.

My eggs were lovely, a little over-salty (in a good way) with runny yolks that puddle neon-yellow, a mad scattering of chives and melted cheese. Lucy has a heavy hand, so there was never any hope for a light dusting. The omelette must have been pretty good because David inhaled it before I could get a taste of it.

Edie wanted to know if I was planning on licking the plate. I was, so I did.

It was Mother’s Day. I could lick the plate if I wanted to.

This made Lucy smile.

Is there anything better for a little kid? To cook something, completely by themselves, and watch their parent love it so much they throw all manners to the wind and lick the plate spotless?

David cleaned the kitchen, washed the dishes. The girls jumped on the trampoline in the back yard. I could hear them laughing as I started to read the New Yorker Fiction. I knew I wouldn’t finish it, but even the start of it was good, freeing. A few minutes for Mom.

It was a good Mother’s Day.

Which makes me wonder what they’ll make this year.

Maybe I’ll finish the Fiction this year. Maybe I’ll relax and enjoy the sounds of them in my kitchen—our kitchen—making something for me with their own sweet hands.

Yes, that’s it.

Still, I’m keeping the fire extinguisher by the bed/prison. Just in case.