Yes, but she can cook...

When the N was in the 1st grade one of their big projects was to make a book about their family. Each page was a boiler plate of a question. The child wrote their answer to the question (such as "My dad is special because....") and illustrated the page. These books were bound and then presented to the whole class and their parents during their "author's tea" towards the end of the school year. Each child along with their parent(s) took turns up front. The child would read their book to their parent...and to the rest of the class. Awesome project. It was the first grade tradition at that school. It's a book we'll always treasure.

The N wrote about his dad playing catch with him. He wrote about playing hide and seek with his brothers. He wrote about how I make his favorite enchiladas.

Every year there is some sort of project where the boys write about their family. Apparently I don't leave the kitchen much. Besides snuggles, my contribution to the family and the world is that I "cook good food" for them.

While I do like to experiment and try new things while cooking. some of which work and some of which don't, I don't really consider cooking my "thing", the "thing" I do. It's certainly not memorable and it's not something that makes me feel competent.

When I worked I felt competent. I was a troubleshooter. I was a builder. For most of my career I wrote software for a very large image processing system that was used by various people to check on various things(it was classified, though now a small portion, a image analyst work station is on display at the Smithsonian by Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C.). I saw my code work to command hardware devices move data around until it reached the analyst's workstation for them to view. No one cared whether I could cook, wash clothes, or put a bandaid on a skinned knee. I didn't care either until I felt burned out and I told my boss all I wanted to do was go somewhere else to live my life and bake pies. Within a couple of years that's about what I chose to do, that and change diapers, push stollers, play rounds of mini-golf, and read I'll Love You Forever and crying before I could get to the middle of the book. Somewhere in there I did start cooking more...after all eating out with kids is a very different experience. I decided I preferred to stay home. So more emphasis was placed on cooking.

Over the years I've kept busy; busy with the organizations that serve my kids. And since it's been so long since I've actually worked in my field, I've become obsolete. Everything has changed. I feel it. I think that is why being identified as "a good cook" has such an impact on me. I"m an okay cook, who sometimes makes something quite yummy. But really I'm just okay. That's not how I want to be remembered. By anyone. I somehow need to define myself with things that I'm good at, things that challenge me.

I have a lot to learn. I've studied how to write the code for a web page, how to use tools to do the same thing. I like getting my keystrokes into the real code, though. Since I need to get myself in the position of earning a living in the near future I've tried to combine my learning with my volunteer work. Instead of using an excel spreadsheet to track yearbook orders (which is a simple solution to a simple problem) I've been building an order management system with order entry via web pages and storing the orders in a database. It's overkill for the task, by far, but I've felt vibrant. I have had to figure things out and solve problems. The kind of problems it's easy to tell if you've actually solved them. I've felt competent. I did something that I never did before and I can see the results right away.

It's not all about work. Certainly the best measure of me as a person will be me as a parent and me as a wife. Who I am for my kids, is to a large degree who I am. But it hasn't been enough. I need to be a person my kids can watch walking out the door at times, walking or running, to do my "thing". The things I do. Because I'm me. The J can ask the N, "Where's mom?". N would say "out doing her thing". Then the M could say,"She's doing her thing now, but she'll be home soon. And maybe she'll make a fabulous dinner."