A Milestone between mom and me
Today is Friday, January 11, 2019, and it is a day that my mother finally had to let it go. She is 84 going on 85. Fiercely independent and self-reliant and a fabulous cook. She’s a health fanatic when it comes to cooking and eating too. She is almost obsessive about eating right. She pays attention to every detail about the ingredient she uses and how they are prepared. She’s been like this all of her life, but especially for the last twenty years since having retired, she was able to do everything herself from the beginning to the end.
That sadly ended today. It ended because she had to accept that at 85 she cannot do everything from beginning to the end anymore. She’s had to let me help her. She had to stand in the kitchen and tell me what to do about what to use, how to cut and slice them. For breakfast and dinner.
This process started a while back. A few months, even a few years. She has been feeling pain in her right fingers, hand and forearm. At times, it would go into paralysis where she couldn’t feel them or couldn’t control the movement of her fingers. After a while the feeling and movement would come back and she would carry one. Lately it’s become more frequent and more paralyzing.
And earlier this week she said she could not use her hand. It just wouldn’t move the way she wanted to. She tried to compensate by using the left hand which she doesn’t normally use. After a while, she was feeling that the left hand is feeling sensitive too. So she had to accept that she has to let it go.
Of course, I’ve been helping her throughout our lives but she’s been reluctant to let go of control. She is a great cook and she has to do everything in order that everything tasted right. I know this might strange but the food just doesn’t taste as good unless she does it from the beginning to the end.
She’s quite upset by this. She mentioned she has to move into a home since she can’t do everything. Which I just took as a complaint. I fried the shrimps for breakfast, following her method. She told me how to do it step by step but often she would jump in and stir, cut or squeeze without realizing. I know it’s very frustrating for her.
For dinner, mom and I had sashimi with lots of vegetables. It involved slicing garlic, radish and green onions very finely. And of course delicately slicing the frozen salmon. This is the movement that is hardest on sore joints and muscles on fingers and the hand. She stood by me and gave me very precise and detailed instruction. Slicing the radish against the right grain is important. Same with the fish. There is a lot involved in all of this.
At breakfast, she showed me how to cut the back of shrimps to not bend in a semi-circle when they are fried. This is how the tempura shrimps at a Japanese restaurant come out straight and not at western restaurants. In all these years of eating them at home and at restaurants, I had no idea this is how you do it.
Even with the seaweed soup. She showed me how to soak them in the water, after you take strands of them out of the plastic bag that they come in. Once they’ve been soaked for a while, you have to squeeze them hard repeatedly to get the ocean bubbles out of them. There is a lot more that my mom does in cooking our traditional breakfasts that I need to learn and take over from her
No doubt this is sad for her, but for me, this is a start of learning how to cook like she does as much as possible to cook the food that she wants to eat for her when she cannot. It will never be as good as hers. She knows that, and I know that. This is what makes her sad. It makes me sad too. But we both also know that we are lucky that we are together, and we can collaborate as much as we can in the as best way we can.
