Kitchen time
Lila has recently started wanting to help me more in the kitchen. Now that she’s tall enough to reach the counter and old enough to follow a recipe, her involvement has moved from “help” to genuine help. She can peel veggies, mix batter, knead dough — almost everything except wield a knife. An interesting side effect is that when we start cooking, she starts talking. Actually she’s pretty much always talking, but when we’re working together in the kitchen, she starts talking more deeply, sharing more personal thoughts.
There’s been a lot of conversation about cancer here lately. Lila knows a child who lost her mother to cancer a few years ago, and another whose mother is very ill with it now. I’ve been trying to follow Lila’s lead in terms of how much to talk about it; her lead, it seems, is to talk about it a lot, especially when she’s helping me in the kitchen.
The other day we were making mashed potatoes, and I was pointing out that not everyone who gets cancer dies from it. Lila has two now-healthy grandparents who illustrate this point quite nicely. But Lila focuses on the grimmer statistics, and is clearly perturbed that something hasn’t been done about this. “When I grow up,” she told me as she peeled potatoes, “I will find a medicine that will cure cancer. And the cure will only take a few days, so it won’t even be a big deal anymore.”
I imagined this as I chopped the peeled potatoes for the pot — cancer as a mild bacterial infection, say. I’d like to see you, but turns out I have cancer, so I’ll be lying low this weekend. Let’s get together early next week, ‘kay? If only. It occurs to me how it must seem to Lila like grownups have made a mess of it — we must seem so incompetent, allowing diseases and other things to get out of hand. She’d fix it all herself if only she were old enough.
“What kind of medicine would it be?” I wanted to know.
“I don’t know. Some kind of plant, maybe?” Lila mused. ”Something we didn’t know was actually a cure, all along.”
When she’s not cooking with me or Chris, she’s often engaging in another favorite pastime — playing orphan with Stella. I suspect this is another expression of her underlying anxiety about her acquaintances who have, in fact, lost parents, but I don’t think she realizes the connection. As far as she’s concerned, it just makes for extra dramatic play: children in peril, getting by on their own wits, despite the lack of grownups in their lives — or sometimes despite the involvement of incompetent grownups in their lives. I hope and believe it’s a healthy expression of her innermost worries. I have to admit I prefer the cozy cooking chats, even when the topics are so sad that I try to hide my eyes from her, so as not to confirm how vulnerable the grownups really are.
