Years ago, when I got married, I had this naive idea in my head that things would be ‘uncomplicated’. After all, how complicated would it be to work all day and have a delicious dinner together at the end of an *exhausting* day of work. How difficult? Well… if you thought “very difficult”, you’re right! And the dinner that my husband and I dreamed of was that complete meal typical of southeastern Brazil: rice, beans, vegetables, meat and salad. And dessert. Ha!
We tried for a while, but it didn’t work out very well. Life was chaotic and we were often too tired to prepare anything so we would run to a restaurant. That was before we had kids… Once you have kids, well, things change a bit: there is a need for routine, small children get very tired at the end of the day and going out to dinner ends up becoming an expedition full of surprises. That’s when the issue of Brazilian food came back into play: we had to feed our children with something more nutritious than cheese bread and, although at that point in time our culinary skills had become much more, let’s say, abundant, we were in short supply of time and energy.
When I remember my mother, at the end of the day, bringing a plate of pasta with calabresa sausage to the table (plus salad and vegetables) that she had made while my father and I watched TV, I am shocked. Where did my mother get so much stamina? And how did my father and I come out of such a situation unscathed? In a modern world where both women and men work, how can this burden almost always fall on women?
While children are still young and have that tendency to experiment with everything, including dirt, grass and sand, parents struggle to provide their little ones with the greatest number and variety of vitamins, proteins, minerals and everything else they need to grow strong and healthy. But how do you do it, how do you show up with a colorful dinner (read: full of options) after a tiring day? How do you not lose your mind peeling a pumpkin at 6 pm while your child eats cookies stolen from the pantry – cookies that will most likely ruin his appetite for dinner, if not forever?!?
The answer to this affliction of life as a parent I found in my past and in the memories I had of my mother producing – voilà! – only one main dish and a salad. While my husband prepares a dish of some sort – fish, pasta, quinoa, I work on another dish (there are two of us in the kitchen, of course, in modern times). The children, now older, help with the salad spinner, preparing sparkling water in the Soda Stream, testing the pasta to see if it is al dente…
One recent Sunday, I woke up to the sound of the two of them chatting animatedly on the first floor. Amid the clatter of pots and utensils, I heard stray words and phrases like “pass me the baking soda” and “mix!” I woke my husband and we quickly went downstairs, apprehensive of the chaos we would find. The scene that awaited us was the polar opposite of chaos: my nine-year-old daughter in charge, with a cloth in one hand and a spatula in the other, while my six-year-old son happily mixed the pancake batter. “We didn’t want to wake you guys up, but we really wanted pancakes!” they said.
My original (and crazy) idea that I would provide them with a plethora of vegetables every day, at all times of need, is a thing of the past. Two years ago, my six-year-old son radically banned fruits, vegetables, legumes and meat from his diet – after so much exposure and so many options, he preferred to make an effort to ensure that his parents would have a lot of gray hair because of his habits. What does this boy eat, you ask yourself? Doesn’t he miss those pumpkins that he peeled so hard? It’s the little things in life that we can’t control and we need to, as the *wise* Elsa from the movie Frozen used to say: “let it go”. From the moment we stopped worrying about so many nutrients, while maintaining healthy calories and a balanced diet, our kitchen became more dynamic, inclusive, simple and, consequently, more relaxed. And who knows, maybe one day – and my husband and I dream of that day – Benja will go back to eating everything he ate as a baby? It’s up to parents to show us the right path.