Where Are You Coming From?

Just finished my October MasterClass. It was Alice Waters Teaches Home Cooking. It was interesting in places but not really my favorite. And not always applicable to my home. For instance the last meal she made she prepared in her kitchen fireplace.

So yeah...

No.

I mean it would be nice to go out to my  backyard pick fresh lemons from my tree and herbs from my garden and prepare them in my kitchen fireplace but that's not going to happen.

And I say that would be nice, but honestly even if I did have that I probably wouldn't do it. Pretending I would be a great cook if I only had a better kitchen is kind of my thing.  But as the cool kitchen remodel showed I don't like cooking any more in a nice kitchen than I did in a mediocre one. I like the idea of cooking much more than I do the actual cooking.

But I do keep trying. Because I am a good cook. I make better things than probably half of the places we eat out at. I also can have more control over what and how much we eat by cooking at home. And I can add green chile to all of the things. So I watch cooking shows, and take cooking MasterClasses, and buy cook books, and read cooking blogs. And I try.

But no matter how much I try I am not going to wake up tomorrow and have a large garden and a kitchen fireplace for grilling. Those are things that are completely not in my control.

So much of life is like that. What can you control? What can't you? And are you aware of it all? Where are you coming from?

I grew up poor. For a good portion of my life our house had wheels on it. But we had a house. I also went to private school for a few years. How my parents afforded that is partly a mystery and partly not to me. But that's their story. But they did it, and I went because they thought it would be best for me to be in a different situation.

I'm not sure when I made the connection between what they were dealing with at the time with my sister and their decision to put me in private school but it could have been as I was writing those last two paragraphs. Seriously. I had never thought about it together before.

We had lived in an apartment in the heights (a part of town in Albuquerque) when my sister started high school. It was a really good high school, probably the best public school in town at the time. My brother went there and was set to graduate early. I was in the feeder elementary for the district. Then we had to move. Because my sister had been expelled and there was only one school in town willing to take her on. So we had to move away from that neighborhood and to a new one.

Half of third grade and then fourth grade at the new elementary as my sister fell farther into her issues. So at the end of the school year when Mrs. Romero told Mom and Dad that her suggestion was they double pass me or I was just going to get bored (more bored) and start causing trouble (more trouble) they pulled me from public school and put me in private. I had always thought it was just an educational choice, but looking at it today and tying it to what they were dealing with with their other daughter I see to them it was a choice that had to be made to try and head off any future problems for me.

That's amazing to think about.

And probably did keep me out of a lot of trouble.

The group of kids from elementary school split in middle school. Instead of everyone playing with everyone and all of us hanging out together by the time high school started and I was back in the mix they had split. Jocks and preps on one side, freaks (our term for stoners) on the other. And as I was not a jock and the people I was closest with went freak odds are I would have as well.

Most of my life I've believed that the reason I didn't end up with a drug problem was because I saw what it did to my sister and I swore I would never touch any of it. But looking at it now, right now, I see that yes, that was part of it. It gave me the resolve sure, but it's also due to what my parents did. The choice they made. The one I had absolutely no control over.

Life is like that. There are things we can control and things we can't. There are things that we think we've done all by ourselves that when we look at them again we realize we didn't. I will not wake up tomorrow with a kitchen fireplace. But I did buy stuff to make a green chile chicken pot pie for dinner tonight. I did decide not to become a freak when I lived through the effects of someone else's use, but I was also protected in place by my parents.

Before you decide to judge a decision that someone else is making ask yourself why you make the ones you make. Before you judge where someone else is in their life ask how you got to where you are. Really how you got there. Was it all just you or were there forces in place that you weren't paying attention to? Before you get smug and want to talk about how you did it all, all by yourself, make sure you did.

And odds are, you didn't.