Family Connection through Cooking

Today I made 37 meatballs. Also this weekend, I made 8 dozen cookies intending to give them out to family, but I forgot to do that.

I live with one other person, but I instinctively cook for a family of 10, which makes for a lot of leftovers and frozen meals. The chocolate chip cookies will join the shelf in our freezer with the pizzelles, and at least four meals of meatballs will be in our near future.

I like to tell myself that my cooking habits are convenient because it means that I don’t have to cook very often, but in reality I have little control over the quantity that I cook and I have learned how to work with it.

Cooking and baking are very interpersonal activities for me. I realized this more fully when the pandemic first started and I was no longer able to invite people over for dinner. My love for making food is rooted in my love for people. I tend to put no effort into what I eat if I am not feeding someone else, as seen by my occasional canned olive dinners when my husband isn’t home.

I remember when my mom taught me how to bake years ago. She homeschooled me, and when I started to learn about fractions, she pushed aside the math textbook so I could practice by making cookies instead. This was the practical math, the kind I would use all the time. I spent happy time in the kitchen with my mom, chopping potatoes and wrapping stuffed cabbages.

I desperately want to be a career-driven person; there’s that part of me, the fighter, who wants everything that people have thought about me to be wrong. I want to fight the assumptions people have made about me since I got married so young. I want to yell and kick the whole world in the shins by having an impressive education and fulfilling career in my chosen field.

And I do want that. I want to continue my education after college, and I want to find a job that will serve my community. The problem is about the order of my loves: I will never want that career as much as I want to foster children.

When I cook such large quantities of food I often find myself thinking of a future where I really will need to cook that much. I think of the people who are not in my life yet, people who I will love and care for. I hope for that.

I think it’s wrong for me to assume a dichotomy between my desires the way I do. So often I feel stuck between wanting to write and teach and wanting to raise a family, I think because I forget how long my life will probably be. I never expected to live this long. I’m ecstatic about the possibilities I have because I am alive, and I’m trying to remember that I don’t have to do them all at once, that it isn’t really all or nothing. That it’s okay to want more than one thing.