MY MOTHER AND THE CHINESE MAN-SPOON

I recently started cooking a lot, not because I am domestic but because I like food. My favourite utensil is this wooden spoon with a Chinese chef on it; he is a little delightful man with a smile on his face and his body is the spoon. My mother was obsessed with the thing. Before we moved to our current home we lived in a much smaller cramped house and my mother complained about it all the time. She whined about the kitchen size and the size of her bedroom and whined about how the wardrobe could only fit my father’s clothes. My father ignored her because anyone who knows my mother knows that she may complain a lot but she can live through anything; even a house with no space for her to flourish. The house we now live in was built in about eight months but even before it had a roof my mother had started shopping for her new kitchen. All she had seen was the plan but she was filled with intense hope and excitement for her new kitchen. Everything she did evolved around her ‘new kitchen’. Silverware, non-stick pans and skewers, bamboo chopping boards, dinner plates and serving dishes were purchased and stored away and whenever she bought them you could see her already in her ‘new kitchen’. The wooden spoon with the Chinese man was stored away too and was out of bounds until my mother cooked for her husband in her new kitchen.

The pastor said something about hope and faith, faith is the evidence of things hoped for and not seen, so it can be said that hope is the driver of faith. My mother had both in overdose. Three weeks ago an aunt of mine said that hope deferred makes the heart sick. That’s exactly what you can say happened to my mother. We moved into the new house and the kitchen was a blank slate waiting for my mother to mold it into whatever she wanted it to be. But before she could my father fell ill and in under two weeks he died. So here she was, in the exact place she had been hoping to be in but not in the exact situation. Things came to a halt in my mother’s world and growth happened. Growth is scary because nobody is ever ready for it but it demands to happen, whether your heart is sick or not. So time passed and slowly I began to see her come together.

When the ‘new kitchen’ was 50% done my mother demanded us, her slaving minions to bring the boxes of stuff she had spent ages collecting and piece by piece she threw away the old stuff and replaced it with new stuff. Among the old stuff where things older than me, things my dad owned before he married my mother, things my mother owned in her single lady home. They held such great memories and told stories and were sentimental but piece by piece they each got thrown into a sack to be disposed of or given out. My mother was fierce about her new beginning and she was going to get it whether it hurt or not. Finally the Chinese man took his place in the new kitchen symbolizing a new page and new times. When everything was in its place I could see that my mother had more excitement hoping than she had when her hopes came to pass. She didn’t care where the new stuff was anymore, the wooden Chinese man lost an eyebrow and she hasn’t even noticed because she honestly doesn’t care. Now the kitchen is done-ish because come on, this isn’t the movies, things get broken every day and idiot toddlers draw on perfectly painted walls any day but it’s my mother’s kitchen and sometimes when it’s clean I can see her looking at her handy work and mentally patting her own back. And she is now a project junkie, moving from one achievement to another. Sometimes she wakes me up at odd hours or interrupts my TV time with long tales of what is on her mind or what she is planning and in those moments I see that she is alive, through all the nonsense she has received from life, she still hopes and perseveres. From her losses she learned that winning is possible and from her setbacks she learned comebacks.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick but it also makes the heart stronger and teaches the heart to persevere beyond the pain. In the end everything is okay, and if it is not okay then it is not the end.