marriage

What’s For Supper?

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Remember me? I am the one who is constantly thinking of food. A trip to the grocery store is torturous for some, yet I relish in wandering the aisles and seeing what’s new on the food scene. This will eventually lead to me googling recipes that will include my new ingredient. This is my happy place. My world of wonder. That is, until my husband, Wiseguy, calls me at 10am at work and asks, “What’s for supper?” I am not sure what sort of trigger that phrase is for me, but my heart starts palpitating, my blood pressure goes up, and I feel like She Hulk ready to SMASH! I will try and explain.

We have been married for almost three decades (I could have said twenty-seven years, but decades definitely makes it sound longer). The first few years were filled with my desire to create a loving home with delicious home cooked meals. Growing up in a European household, with a stay at home mom, did not provide me with the fortuitous education of any culinary skills. Even when asked to assist my maternal unit, it was to circularly stir something in a pot and I, apparently, did it wrong every time. So, learning to cook for my new husband and stepchildren was at the top of the To Do list. It went so well! Kind of.

Wiseguy actually could cook. So imagine when, I meticulously imitated my mother’s way of making sunnyside up eggs. I poured an inch of oil into the pan, turned the heat on high, cracked the egg over the pan and was immediately assaulted with hot spits of oil upon my person. OUCH! My husband came over to assess the situation and asked two very good questions:

  1. Why did you pour all that oil in?
  2. You do know there is a dial on the stove so you can put the temperature higher or lower?

Hmmmm, lessons learned. For eggs I started using a pat of butter, and most of my cooking was now done on lower heat. That fixed the breakfast portion of my culinary life.

Supper. At my childhood home it was always called dinner. Apparently, the term dinner is for fancy meals. Regular, everyday persons, call it supper, but I digress. My first attempt at roast beef was extraordinary! It was sooooooo good! The pizza, that is. My beef was hard as a rock and you could easily shingle a roof with it. Lesson learned. I would not make roast beef again for another twenty years. Now that’s trauma for you.

Fast forward to today. The children are grown and living on their own. When special occasions occur, I will still go out of my way to make the most wonderful food and spoil my loved ones. With life encompassing just me and my Wiseguy, I have sort of become disinterested and fatigued in the daily need to create creative meals. It appears that after decades of blissful marriage, the only thing left to discuss is: “What’s for supper?” Everyday. And then you die. Right? Does anyone else feel that way?

Again, being brought up in the European standards, we don’t get the luxury of, say, having a bowl of cereal for dinner. That is not an option. The European ethos states: For all dinners (American translation: supper) thou shalt char meat, accompanied by a hot carbohydrate (potatoes / pasta) or rice. Thou shalt attempt to have vegetables of the green variety, cruciferous, if desired by your husband. If not skip the veg and enjoy your meal. Done. My favorite meal if my husband isn’t home? I grab a slice of salami, layer a slice of cheese upon it, and add a pickle. Roll it up. Eat it. Dinner done and there is no clean up! But noooooooo…we are recreating the lives of our ancestors on a nightly basis.

I believe that my creative juices for cooking have gone to the wayside. I have fried, boiled, broiled, grilled, baked for almost thirty years. Add to that working forty five hours a week and then coming home, not to relax after a long day, but to happily prepare a delicious meal in forty-five minutes. (Truth be told, it takes an hour. Still working on that ultimate time goal.) Saturdays used to be my happy-go-hunting day for exciting new foodstuff or newly introduced condiments, to be prepped and ready to surprise my Wiseguy with an exhilarating and adventurous new recipe. Now I prefer to step outside our front door and enjoy life outside the home which would include restaurant lunch dates where SOMEONE ELSE does the cooking for me. No planning. No cooking. No clean up.

Maybe, I’m just in a stagnant cooking funk. This might miraculously lift soon and I’ll be back to pouring over cook books and searching out new meal ideas and then BAM! Back to being gloriously excited about meal making again.

It’s 10:00am. My cell phone will be ringing soon. Oh, there it goes. Hubby is calling me. Wonder what he’s going to ask?

One Step at a Time…

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“…One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind…”  Thank you Neil Armstrong. Neil will always be remembered and quoted for saying this phrase when this astronaut landed on the moon.  It is a phrase that can be applied to many phases of our lives.  The most memorable comparison for me is when I get informed that any child has gone from crawling to walking.  Yes…one small step…

I am sure you have noticed a trend in my writings regarding children.  I am amazed at their tenacity.  I adore their independence. I marvel at their simple wisdom.  We adults oftentimes lose perspective of our lives because we have been educated.  We are taught to follow certain paths in our schooling.  From kindergarten to elementary school. From middle school to high school.  Perhaps we have advanced to College courses or even University.  Education is very important and yet I admire the free spirit of the young.  Don’t get me wrong, being brought up by universal standards of quality (and the wooden spoon of “tough love”)  I can now appreciate even more the wonderful open qualities of youth.

It was repugnant to me when my parents would refer to me as the “Pepsi” generation. I believed it was supposed to mean something like “you are so spoiled you don’t drink water, you drink Pepsi.”  I still haven’t really figured it out, but it sounds about right.  (Note:  my parents never purchased name brand so that is why I assumed this was something they heard and adopted).  Anyway, every generation goes through the “you have no idea what it was like when I was growing up.”  To be fair to my parents, they were right.  They were raised in a village with many many siblings (no, not 4 or 5…try 8 or 9).  Schooling was done by grade 3 due to farming obligations.  They worked hard to make their lives better and better for their children.

Wiseguy and I had started our lives in a less-than-prominent-societal situation.  We fell in love (so cliche), but it was true.  We moved into an apartment.  No real funds.  First and last month’s rent.  No furniture….seriously….no furniture.  A room on the 11th floor of an apartment building with a wonderful balcony.  Our view of the sky was magical.  There were no buildings around us.  We could actually see the CN Tower in Toronto from our balcony is Mississauga (yes, that is a city in Ontario, Canada).  Yes, we were that weird couple that got together for love and not money.

So, our lives as a couple began as one small step.  We found each other.  We became best friends.  We knew that we could live as a family.  We decided to throw caution to the wind and move in together.  A simple one bedroom apartment.  A small starter home.  We married a year later.  There were many doubters.  There were many personal and family consequences.  Again, we decided to do what we thought and believed was best for us.  Many doubted. Many disbelieved.  There were those beautiful few who believed in us and they are always remembered and special in our hearts.

The years have passed, sometimes feeling slow but nowadays feeling so quick.  We have raised 3 beautiful children.  We look at our wonderful grandchildren and I am in awe whenever I see them.  I was once asked why I quiz children and “bother” them.  I honestly answer, “I don’t bother them.  They are smart and I LOVE hearing their answers.”

Children are magnificent!  I can tell you honestly that what they think about is waaaaaay more interesting than what you have to work on at work.  Their minds are agile and fresh and ingenious.  You used to think like that until you got pigeonholed at school.  Think the same.  Act the same.  Behave the same.

Yes, our world is comprised of structure and rules.    I am not saying this a bad thing.  However, sometimes thinking and behaving “abnormally” can be fun!  Grab a box of crayons and a colouring book but DON’T colour inside the lines.  Oh I know there are new colouring books for adults…very intricate and detail oriented.  Your mind goes CRAZY if you colour outside the lines.   Even better, get a children’s colouring book and colour a monkey purple and green and pink.  Believe me, not colouring to “specific norms” will feel really weird and almost heart wrenching.  I slowly got over the “brown monkey” syndrome when I coloured my monkey green and yellow and my granddaughter said, “Here, add some pink to his head.”  Hmmm, sharing and good advice from the eyes from a child.  Monkey can be different just like people are different.

I just received a text (yes, I am a modern Baba a.k.a. grandma in Eurospeak) that my youngest grandson took his first steps yesterday.   Little “Jumpin’ Jack” will be one on May 19th so Mr. “I’m-on-the-move” has decided that there are too many adventures in life that he needs to explore and got his groove on early.  Congratulations little JJ (Jumpin’ Jack!)  May your new elevated levels of adventure be as fun and exciting as you hope them to be.  May your bumps and bruises heal quickly.  May you always know that every adventure you undertake will always start with one step at a time.

 

 

 

Us

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Us seems to be a very short title, but I believe that sometimes less words are more integral in describing a thought than a run on sentence  full of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs…and nothingness. This two letter word is so full of meaning and definition. It is a concept and way of life that I am finally beginning to fully understand.

We begin our lives as wonderful, dependent, little bundles of cuteness. Some babies are born into loving families. Others are born into dysfunctional families. In the end, there is a beginning. We emerge and grow and learn. Some lessons are taught to us and others we discover on our own. Life lessons. The world is our educator. In most cases we are taught to find our perfect soul mate so that we can live happily ever after.

Poor girls, we try so hard to find Prince Charming everywhere we look.  We can overlook the flaws in order to have someone to hold us and take care of us. Right? Heck no. Nowadays we want the handsome Prince, but he had better know how to wash dishes and do laundry and make  dinner. We are very busy women folk. Not to mention adding child  bearing and raising that child. Who’s going to do all that?

Fast forward in life…career woman,  make dinner, make lunches, attend meetings, get stuck in traffic, driving children to and from school and after school?  Dance or karate or baseball or soccer.  Grocery shopping, clothes shopping.  Hang out with significant other. Who? Oh yeah,  I remember you.

I remember when we used to jump into the two door sedan and just go driving. (Can’t do that now because gas prices are so crazy and we  have a mini van not a cool sporty vehicle). Remember when we would go out for dinner and just talk about nothing. (Dinner out now means going out when we get a coupon in the mail and then talking about bill payments or house renovations). Remember when it was just the two of us? Us.

I remember the early dating days. Money? We were lucky if we had 40.00 between the two of us. We would talk for hours. We would write little notes and letters to each other. There was no texting or e-mails.  It was pen to paper and it was beautiful and thoughtful.  Little things were monumental. A cup of coffee, ready-made, and nice and hot when I woke up. Sitting around on the balcony of our rented apartment and just enjoying the view.  Beautiful.  Calm. Quiet. Some music playing softly in the background.  Bliss.  Us.

Us then became extended us. Children and elder family. Family obligations. Us went from having no furniture to an apartment overflowing with stuff. Suddenly Us took a back seat. Everyone and everything else was more important. Keeping children happy was number one. There were bills to pay and items to purchase. There were future houses and mortgages. New / used cars to be purchased as old ones fell apart.  Schooling and weddings and grandchildren. Work became the most  important thing because money is needed to pay for everything. We were ships in the night….literally…since we ended up working different times of the day. What happened to Us? We talked about date night and once a year, for our anniversary, we could count on that, but otherwise, Us became a non-existent thing…until tonight.

Tonight was special. Tonight you created magic. You decided to cook up a beautiful meal. I came home and did not have to prep anything.  We sat around and talked. Not about bills. Not about renovations.  Not about anything that adults would deem important. We talked about the sky and the perfect weather. We talked about your shopping spree at the grocery store and how meticulous you were in picking what you thought I would enjoy most for dinner. I was your primary concern and nothing else mattered. I want you to know how much I appreciated that and love you for it. My meal was excellent. The flavours were invigorating and the company was my favourite part. We sat outside. Just Us. The two of Us.  I realized more than ever tonight that in the end, we are in the “Us” part of our lives. The children are grown and living their own lives.  Taking care of elders is no longer part of our responsibility. All we are left with is Us.  You and me, as was before, but newly modified.  Husband and wife, grandparents, friends and lovers.  Another new exciting stage of our lives.

I love you, my other half of “Us”. Thank you for making tonight a special time and a special memory for me. I enjoy being able to date you again. The serenity and peacefulness. The non-drudgery of everyday life.  The laughter (including piggy snorts…my specialty).  You refocused my perspective and helped me don my rose-coloured glasses that I had misplaced.  Living in the pink is a pretty nice place to be.