Single Parenthood & I: The Best Pasta Sauce in the World and Autonomy
They have the things that they like and you have the things that you like. When they intersect, it feels special.
My older kid and I have started to cook together. He is nine years old, not implausibly dyspraxic, and very keen to learn. He’s very proud of the Smash potato that he made at his mother’s the other week, claims to be able to cook rice, and is now moving onto the fine art of Italian cookery. Tonight, we are making a pasta sauce.
I probably shouldn’t have set expectations quite so high. I’d got the idea that it was time to dust down my cooking skills and make a pasta sauce rather than buy a jar from a brand that used to be eaten by felt puppets. And when I presented it to the kids, I described it—with no little hubris—as The World’s Best Pasta Sauce. To my considerable surprise, and categorically not because they’re still just about at the age at which they just blindly agree with everything I say, they shared my assessment.
The first thing to get him to do is to wash his hands, and it is a sad reflection upon the amount of time that I have free that underneath his fingernails are a considerably greater risk to public hygiene than anything on his skin. Five minutes, half a gallon of antiseptic hand soap, and three cries of “stop trying to scrub my fingers off”, and we’re good to go. His idea of cooking with me is largely standing around watching, but I give him things to do which I hope will let him feel that he helped. I explain as I’m going along why I’m doing what I’m doing. By the time it’s served up, they’re eating a meal that, so far as he’s concerned, he’s cooked himself.
But he wants to learn, and that means a lot to me. Firstly, it’s an obvious life skill to learn which really does come in useful when you get older, but also one which many people simply don’t bother with while they’re young. And secondly, it’s… him. This was his choice. Cooking may or may not become a lifelong passion for him (it isn’t really for me, though I can hold my own in the kitchen), but he approached me to do this. It was something that he wanted to do, and not only time that he wanted to share with me. I’ll try to explain.
As I’ve mentioned on these pages before, without doubt the most nourishing thing about being a parent has been watching these two sproglets start to form into fully functioning adults. At nine and seven years old they still have years and years to go, but it’s a process that starts when they form their first facial expressions, right the way through beyond the years-long torture that is puberty and beyond.
There is certainly a point at which it starts to accelerate. First they’re babies. Then they’re toddlers. Then they’re little kids. And then they’re kids. But you can see the signs of the future person already starting to grow. Sometimes it can be as simple as a look that one of them throws you or a grunt of affirmation. In that brief moment of time you witness a vision of the future, a 14 year-old who’s briefly travelled back to remind you that this is part of who he’s going to become.
But in amongst all this come the accoutrements of their lives. Their hobbies, interests and passions. And older kid craves creating things. If he’s not drawing a mildly frightening picture of a place called “Eyebrowsland” (a normal suburban street, except everything had eyebrows), he’s making jewellery from bits of plastic, sellotape and string, or he’s building a huge place in Minecraft called “Catland” (exactly what you’d expect it to be), or he’s designing a new card game (which comes with rules which would be complicated enough if they couldn’t only be learned by listening to a single seven-minute long sentence from a nine-year old with a tendency to wander off-topic after seven seconds).
He loves making. Turning one thing into another. That cooking should appeal to him—I should also briefly mention that, like all 9 year-olds, he also has hollow legs—isn’t really a great surprise. And it’s also one thing that we may be able to share in common. Neither of my children have any discernible interest in football, which they still tend to consider “daddy’s job” and little more, and I’ve never really tried to foist it upon them. We occasionally go over the park and kick a ball about and they’ve even been persuaded to sit down and watch bits and pieces with me, but if it’s going to fall into anything like the sort of relationship that I’ve had with the game over the years, it hasn’t started yet.
My kids love spending time with me and, while my time is limited, I do try to set some time aside one afternoon per week after school for us to do something. Sometimes we meander up into town, mooch around for a bit and then grab an ice cream in McDonald’s. Or we may go to the park, or for a walk along the beach. Sometimes we sit and read together. I can’t draw. I can’t create works of art. I’ll always sit with them while they do and I’ll always admire their terrifying masterpieces, but it’s not quite something we share.
Every night from Sundays to Thursdays we have hot chocolate, then sit and watch the television for half an hour. We’ve watched Bluey. We’ve watched Adventure Time and Animaniacs. We’ve watched documentaries about Sri-Lanka and the Solar System, and shows in which the most beautiful jewellery is made.
And I like to think that I’m learning things too. Do you know what vegan ivory is? I do. But while these are things that we do together, they’re not quite things that we do together. Cooking something together once a week could be. And I hope that he loves and will look back upon loving these times together as much as his silly, sentimental old dad does.
He’s already completed the journey from baby to kid. Slowly but surely, he’s now turning into a teenager and for better and for worse, that will bring fresh challenges. But we’ve had enough of those over the years and we’re still here. We have our weird little family and we’re hoping that it will get weirder this year. And as I survey the wreckage of the kitchen, the pots and pans, and that kid, the bottom half of whose face is now the colour of a tomato on account of having just licked his plate clean, I remind myself to savour these moments as they happen, because they can’t and won’t last forever.
Image by Salah Jalal from Pixabay.