Only 29 More coffees Until My Kid Leaves Home
So it‘s been a sensational weekend thus far, and here I am slicing the onions in half moons for the goulash. It will sit and simmer for 6 hours and just like my wandering mind and noisy memories; sweet paprika will merge and coagulate with strong sharp flavours and that delicious aroma will take people back to meals from yonder years. It’s one of those dishes I can cook on auto-pilot, which is pretty handy actually, because for some bizarre reason it had to be today. Brought on in part by the tear-jerking quality of this type of onion, veg chemicals meld with that familiar thud reality makes when it sinks in. And the waterworks arrive.
Any moment now one of the kids will wake up. The onion fumes will be the cheap excuse for my tears, but they’ll know. When my moving-out-next-month-kid wakes up and says it’s a coffee morning (which is most days these days), then there will be just 28 more before he moves to London.
Everyone thinks it’s just normal.
“…Of course it’s hard, but it’s as expected.” Kids are totally and utterly dependent on you once upon a time. And of course at some point they need you a little less. And then naturally, one day in the inevitable and foreseeable future they move on to another chapter in their lives. But there’s a lot of prep work in between. A dash of attitude here and there. Their laugh brings an abrupt end to all dramas at the end of the day.
My favourite retort to any of my teenage kids giving me any attitude is an even stare and
“Oh yea?! Well I taught you how to use a spoon.”
And at the end of the day, 28 coffees from today, the laugh that cheers me up will be the punctuation mark at the end of someone else’s day.
There’s a girl in London, and a Chef job (there’s always a girl, this is true). She is stunning.
The beginning of a dream.
It’s really beautiful watching kids grow up to be young men. Brothers being brothers. They can be so accepting of each other’s decisions.
But today, immersed in red capsicums and paprika; and feeling daunted by a gazillion pages of paperwork in the morning, I find myself not so accepting. But it’s temporary.
Stupid Nature, I say. I read just as many books now as I did 3 decades ago yet my eyes can no longer read font size 6 today (stupid food labelling millennial product managers and makeup manufacturers). I need my eyes just as much as I did then, and have been disciplined as hell with the right light and micro breaks…But they’re fading and bailing on me and I have no say in the matter.
Well the coffee brick label is printed in font size 8, fuck it, this is not going to be an espresso shot, I’m making a cappuccino. I have time on my hands. I can always make time now since I myself made a gargantuan move here, to Barcelona, from London where he is slated to return.
He’s up. That’s two cappuccinos, foamy and fuzzy and drawn out longer with random conversations, a Spotify playlist called “Dylan and Mum Cook”, and just some general rigmarole awesomeness.
Only twenty seven actually, not 28.
