 | When Cookies are more than Caloriesposted by KJ Hannah Greenberg, Aishes ChayilMonday, January 16th 2012 @ 10:29 AM |
Only in my home does vegetarianism come in two flavors: “exotic” and “healthy.” The former refers to work-intensive interventions such as making cucumber sushi or hummus latkes. The latter refers to easy efforts such as cobbling together tomato rice soup or cilantro and red cabbage salad. The first mentioned dishes are produced by my children, while the second mentioned dishes are made by me. Given my roles as a teacher, writer, and editor, I only spend part of my waking moments as a domestic.
Although my sons and daughters, b’ayin tova, have pensively attained their teens and twenties, in no sense do they voluntarily contemplate, let alone actualize, chores. They cook only when they feel inspired or hungry. Otherwise, my offspring would sooner sell off all of their Lego properties to maraudring hedgehogs, would more quickly shred bedding for vicious Komodo dragons, and would prefer to do-si-do with anthropomorphized kumquats, than scrub a toilet, fold a towel, or chop an onion.
When it’s time to take out the trash, suddenly, my kids enlist to visit amusement parks, museums, and nature centers. It seems that the sight of scrub brushes, brooms, sponges, and the like, send my children into spasms of research; that is, introducing cleaning implements into their vicinity causes them to experience an immediate need to investigate public facilities’ admissions policies, hours of operation, and temporary collections. To prove the essential nature of this impulsive call to scholarship of theirs, as they cross our threshold and step out into the great beyond, my children wave their USB sticks at me. If I were a “proper mother,” they posit, I would realize that young ones are meant to capture important data, not to wash floors.
Fortunately for me, such conniving can often be deterred if I mention “cookies.” Cookies are fun to make. Cookies taste good after they are baked. Cookies provide a significant number of hours of messy distraction. What’s more, while my junior staff—I mean my offspring—are preoccupied with sifting, mixing, spilling, sloughing, and dripping (i.e., with making cookies), I can photograph, or record in some other way, just how cataclysmic is their destruction to our kitchen. Some number of dozens of frosted bars and of sugared balls later, I can demand chores from them in exchange for not revealing, to their father, the condition in which they left our counters and floors.
This redress begins by my waving bags of chemically-laden chocolate chips under their noses and by my mentioning how the shelf in our pantry, the one that has been set aside for vile ingredients, is overflowing with sacks of both brown and white sugar. In worst case scenarios, I also allude to the chopped nuts and sprinkles, which I usually buy just for cookie making’s purpose.
It used to be sufficient for me to rail my children in merely by letting them peek at what I was putting on my plate. Not only did such actions pull them from sandboxes, easels, and mountains of unsorted puzzle pieces, but such actions renewed those kids’ interest in fruits, vegetables, and seaweed. For some reason, such tactics, the ones that worked with my preschool set, fail to raise the attention of my college-bound darlings. Likewise, my creating “restaurant plates,” i.e., my crafting of fanciful arrangements of leftovers, no longer causes my boys and girls to stop plotting how to escape from having to remove the lint from the dryer, water the succulents, or dust the bookcases. Rather, I now must offer them unsalted butter, imported maple syrup, miniature nonpareils, and real vanilla, accompanied by a healthy dollop of blackmail, to get those tasks done.
Nonetheless, I remain of the opinion that teens and twenties are old enough to share in the housework. My life ought not to be focused, at this stage of their development, around shuttling them from one point to another, emptying the bathroom garbage can, and mating mittens. In balance, their discretionary time ought not to be completely filled with hauling the recycling, trimming the bushes, or washing the past day’s pots. I think we should share responsibility.
My kids, armed with library cards, train tickets, and zoo passes, don’t agree. Once more, I find myself resorting to reminding them how wonderful brownies taste and how irresistible chocolate rugelach tends to be. In response, they pause, check our supply of baking paper, cinnamon, and bicarbonate of soda, and then reassure me that after they watch the live, American-style football game, comparison shop for trigonometry books, and find just the right shade of black socks for their father’s birthday, they will return home to sample my results. Wise to my ways, they add that they hope I will enjoy my solo efforts at fighting the dust bunnies under the sofa, cleaning up the dog poo from the sidewalk, and washing our nonexistent cat.
