TheBanyanTree: Dancing in the Kitchen

[Monique Colver]

It's my favorite way to clean up in there. That wasn't how I was brought up. I was brought up to respect the kitchen and not try anything fancy in there. Maybe I got it from my mom, who was not the one raising me to respect the kitchen. We lived apart, and my mom was not a good cook. 

I don't mean in the same way I'm no longer a good cook, unable to use knives and forgetting what I meant to do. That's recent for me. My mom was never a good cook, though she did try to make sure we were fed when we saw her. Sometimes that meant eating bar snacks, or having food delivered from the restaurant next door while my brother and I sat in the corner booth of the bar while our escorts bellied up to the bar. 

Good times.

Her husband-by-custom taught her how to buy the cheesy boxed potatoes, remove the flavoring packet to use for seasoning, and throw out the rest of the box. When I was hiding from the world for a week and she was living alone she cooked for me most days, even if it was just fried hamburger meat and onions. Her third husband made her make us eat canned spinach, possibly the worst thing I'd ever tasted. I still bear a grudge against spinach. 

My mother may have danced in the kitchen, though not with husband 3. Husband 4 could do a soft shoe in the kitchen though, I'm pretty sure, though that stopped when mom was diagnosed with liver cancer. After that he'd try to be happy and kept her well fed and cared for, though his heart wasn't in it anymore. He was supposed to be resting when she passed. I sat beside her, my sister taking a break, and I held her hand through the last of it, and then we had to tell him, and as his heart broke into a million pieces and spilled out of him in great wracking sobs I wished to never see anything so personal and devastating again. 

My stepmother loved to cook and was good at it, and she liked to be considered fancy. Once I was out on my own I hated going out to eat with her. She would watch the hostess and the waitress, and she would tell them exactly how their service was inferior, what they needed to do to be a real waitress, and how she had worked so many years in restaurants, as the best waitress in the south valley, so she knew.

She only danced when she thought she should be congratulated. I swear, the woman could preen. And cook. She could definitely cook.

So could I, once, and while I can still make the most basic of dishes there's not the joy I used to have. No dancing while I try remember what else goes on a peanut butter and jelly. But cleaning up? I can dance then, though 5 or 10 or 20 minutes will create some unbearable pain because my body is twisted, though not in appearance, only where it counts. Still, dancing for any length of time is worth it. The pain will come, but it will go, just like stepfathers, when only the last one counts.

Monique
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