too many cooks

When I went to tuck my seven year old into bed one night, she asked me sweetly, "How did you learn to cook so well?"

I stifled the urge to laugh out loud. Because she was serious. Even though she doesn't eat at least half of what I cook.

She then proceeded to tell me that she thinks she needs to start learning some recipes and practicing cooking meals so that she will be able to take care of her own family one day. Big stuff.

Sure enough, the next evening during dinner preparation she pulled up the small chair we use as a stool to the kitchen counter and announced that she wanted to help me. Two other little people saw what was happening and went to get their chairs too. Suddenly I had three quite incompetent cooks "helping" me during the pre-dinner madness hour with a meal not designed for little hands.

For them, this was clearly way better than the PBS show I had just put on television intended to occupy them while I made dinner. For me, it was one of the most stressful 15 minutes of my life.

There was a sizzling pan on the stove and my 2-year-old kept grabbing the knife. The 4-year-old was hungry, so helping mostly involved snacking on pieces of food that looked interesting to her, and pushing her brother off of his chair. The 7-year-old genuinely wanted me to teach her how to cook at this very moment and it could not wait.

The panic was rising in my chest at the chaos of it all and I had to make a choice: shout telling them all to get out because I really just want to be alone for a few minutes so I could concentrate on getting my starving family fed,
or...
let them help.

Pasting on my smile and my most believable calm face, I had the distinct sense that what they were learning in this moment was less about the actual "how to" of cooking, and more about an overall attitude toward being the kitchen.

To be honest, I don't always have the best attitude about cooking, mostly because it comes around so darn often. I feel largely that I live in a world of women who love to cook... but I am not one of those women. It is frustrating when 30 minutes of preparation time translates to only 7 minutes of actual eating time. And another 30 minutes of clean up. I do enjoy occasional baking because treats are always optional. They can be made when I feel like it, and when I don't, no one is going to have a hunger meltdown. Cooking dinner is an entirely different kind of mandate.

Another part of the problem is that I don't feel that good at cooking, or efficient at piecing together a meal. I have only recently begun to do more of it in an effort to get my growing family to eat well. In our beginning years of marriage we went out to eat regularly, and I made an embarrassing amount of macaroni and cheese from the box. In college I thought I was cooking healthy when I microwaved a "Lean Pocket" instead of the more fattening "Hot Pocket". Before that, I was too busy with school, or too uninterested, to learn.

I have to be careful about how these feelings towards the kitchen are unintentionally communicated to the little copycats I am raising. In the end, I don't cook for my family because I always love cooking, or because I love getting under the table to wipe up the crumbs for the 3rd time in a day, or because I love seeing what I cooked sit untouched on a child's plate. I cook out of a sacred sense of duty and responsibility to my family. They have been entrusted to me, and it is a privilege to always have enough food in the pantry to feed them.

Letting my children help in the kitchen is more than just a fun way to kill some creative time. It is part of my responsibility to them. These little people are the next generation of caretakers for their own families. They need training in the skills and the attitudes for doing that well. It wasn't exactly convenient for me, but I had an open invitation from my children to train them up in the way they should go.

Kids have a small window of years when they think helping is actually fun. Ironically, it is these same young years when they are not that helpful. Oddly, I don't believe that means we are not to let them help. Instead it reminds me to stuff down my goal-oriented plans for getting dinner made at lightning speed and instead allow a messier kitchen, a delayed meal time, and a lot more noise, in order to plant a seed of helpfulness. The skills are not yet there, but the opportunity to train up an attitude is.

Keeping people fed is almost a full time job around here, and I could use some help. These little hands are the servants of the future. It starts right here in my kitchen.

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."

Proverbs 22:6