Sometimes, in the hurry of putting a meal on the table, I forget that it is possible to glide. To move around our tiny kitchen and make it feel intentional, choreographed.
When the timings of a meal fall into place, like the drop of a spoonful of peas onto a plate. When the plates go down on the table in the closing moments of the post-homework TV programme.
Somehow, it seems right to call it the dance. Because it doesn’t happen that often that our plans all lines up the way we want.
Add in cooking a meal under time pressure, when everyone is tired, and when you are still expected to field requests on how sheep grow wool and why is a tiny bead stuck inside a larger bead, and Can You Fix It, Mummy?, and you begin to see the rarity of the dance.
Writers on education call it flow. It’s the place where we are in the moment, when our bodies obey us, when one movement flows into the next. We tend to find it in something we find appealing or interesting, something that often comes naturally to us.
Cooking has been a place of flow for me before. Whether it’s late night jam or pickle making, or a series of progressions towards a favoured dish, it can be rewarding to see a meal come together.
But that kind of flow tends to happen more when I am cooking ‘after hours’. When it’s just me, and just the cooking. Those times don’t happen as much now, and they have to fight their corner against the other evening need to dos.
But sometimes, even in the midst of the Express Train to Tea Time, it works. I am not chasing down the platform after the train, nor shovelling coals into the furnace (or even potatoes into the pan).
Motherhood is full of moments of time that vary considerably. The hour of a sports class that can stretch at least to two, in maternal memory. The long dark afternoons when neither you nor the small child is quite sure how you will make it through the next five minutes, but you do.
The dance takes short moments – the five minutes in which you perform multiple heroic tasks simultaneously – and stretches them, makes them flow.
Found items are sometimes ones where we see them, perceive their value and seize them, claiming them ever after as our own. But more often, they are the ones we cannot possess, but which can turn a tired evening around when they appear.
The others about to eat the meal do not necessarily notice the achievement. But in that split second of calm before the eating begins, I do.