Readers of my quit lit book ‘Going Under’ have loved this section of the memoir. As a mother of four kids, I have spent far too long in the kitchen! Are you a mum too? Do you relate?
February
Orange
It is the first full week of the new school term and the kids seem to be settling in well. Thank God for children who get up each morning and go to school happily. Late one afternoon, I pull my two favourite frying pans out of the cupboard, turn on the stove and pour the olive oil. Here I am in this somewhat dilapidated kitchen, cooking sausages. Again. Bloody sausages. How many sausages can one mother cook in her lifetime?
From when I was a little girl, I always thought I would have children. Giving birth was always in my life plan. Looking back, I think that I always wanted to know what it felt like to give birth. I hadn’t computed that, once birthed, children stay around for a very long time indeed. And you have to look after them, feed them, every day. Maybe if I had known how many sausages were involved I would have given the whole parenting thing a much harder look.
In one frying pan, I’ve got short, fat, organic, grass-fed beef sausages and in the second I have long, slim, vegetarian sausages. This is my family’s cooking life, since Paul is a long- time vegetarian but the children are not. For myself I prefer to eat vegetarian but I will eat anything. Anything! And if I’m in the joyful position of eating something that someone else has cooked for me (thought out, planned, shopped for, cooked) then I’ll scoff it with gusto, tears of gratitude dripping onto the plate.
Thin beef sausages, fat lamb sausages, many varieties of vegetarian sausages, chicken sausages, barbecued, grilled, roasted or fried like today. The kids love them, but I look at these sausages sizzling in the pan and wonder when the day will come that I pick up a fork and instead of poking it into the sleek side of a sausage I just stab it into my eye and scream. In Sydney I have driven miles across town to buy kangaroo sausages and even crocodile sausages just to relieve my sausage doldrums. The tedium of motherhood, the rancid repetitiveness of it, is all there in these two frying pans. So much of all this mothering malarkey was never for me.
‘I’m not cut out for being a mum,’ I would say in the early days. This self-defeating self-talk only made things worse. After my first son was born, I kept waiting for life to go back to normal and it took about three years and having a second baby before I realised that this was normality now and we were never going back. And this new normal involved a lot of sausages. Over the years I’ve found my peace with many of the more boring and repetitive tasks of motherhood. I have hung up the washing mindfully, peg after peg, slowly and carefully. I have folded the clothes, concentrating on just folding. At times, too, I have been able to pay other women to clean and iron – God bless them all.
But, today, here we are again, the sausages browning, a tray of roast spuds in the oven, a tray of beetroot and cauliflower, too. I open the oven to check they’re nearly done, my glasses steam up and the earthy, sweet scents of the beetroot froth out. ‘Honestly, I deserve a mother of the year award for this dinner,’ I say to the cats. But instead of presenting myself with a bouquet of flowers, I pick up my stemless glass of red wine and let a large mouthful tumble down my throat. One large glass of wine on an empty stomach is my go-to at this time of day, taking the edge off my maternal resentment.
Cooking dinner for the family has been my job and, after two decades of it, the only thing that amuses me is following the #everyfuckingnight hashtag on social media. But let’s not forget the excuse my boredom and dinner fatigue give me to pour that large glass of wine and numb my racing brain with it as I cook. And the second glass too. And maybe a cheeky third as we eat dinner.
In motherhood, as I tell every new mother, it’s the first twenty years that are the hardest.
PS Yes, we really do eat kangaroo sausages in Australia, and crocodile ones too. Here’s a recipe for kangaroo sausage rolls from one of the companies which mades kangaroo sausages.
Quit Lit Books I Love
Click here to visit my article about all the quit lit books I have found helpful on my alcohol free journey.
Read more about my quit lit book ‘Going Under’ here, it’s a great sobriety book for women, if I do say so myself.
