Not my mother’s daughter

If you’ve ever met my mother, seen pictures of her, or probably even heard of her, then you know that we look pretty much identical. All of my life I was bombarded with comments of, “You look just like your mother!” All I could do was just smile and accept the comment hoping that it was a good thing. Unfortunately, despite having an incredibly similar face, body structure and attitude (how could we forget that one?) to my mother, there are some things that I did not obtain from her gene pool.

My mother is like Martha Stewart. She can cook food to die for, sew a quilt in the matter of days, and create gifts that would put half those people who sell stuff at craft bazaars to shame. She’s quite the little homemaker. Me? Not so much.

I was making dough for Christmas cookies yesterday, when it struck me: I am completely incompetent in the kitchen. There was flour everywhere, dough splattering out of my mixing bowl, and my beaters in my electric mixer were not very nice to me. It took me 40 minutes to complete what was to be a 10 minutes recipe. I’ve always known that I’m a little slow in the cooking area. My mother points out my lack of capabilities whenever she catches me near a cooking utensil. She still likes to tell people about how I was making a salad one time and I couldn’t even cut a cucumber. Sadly, I’ll admit it’s true. I should have a gash in the palm of my hand from the way I was holding that cucumber and knife.

I do try to cook and bake more though. Half of my problem in the kitchen now is that I’m so insecure about how stupid I am when it comes to cooking. Peter could probably vouch for this one. I’m constantly asking how much of this? What do I do with that? How long? Where should I put this? Etc, etc.

Also, I mentioned that my mother is quite the sewer. Well, I’m pretty sure my mother wouldn’t approve of my current hem on the bottom of my pants. The hem was falling down, so I stapled all around the bottom of the pant leg to keep the hem up (This is a little trick I learned in Catholic School…we wore the same skirts every day-of course the hem was bound to fall down at school eventually!). My mother has her old sewing machine in the basement of her house waiting for me. She says she's going to give it to me when I buy a house. I laughed when she told me this. Somehow me with a fast moving, sharp needle does not seem like a good idea. Maybe I'll tell her to buy me an industrial strength stapler instead.

I could blame all of my shortcomings on my mother, but I suppose I should take some responsibility for them as well. She may have been the one who lacked the patience to show me how to make a pie crust, but I was the annoying one who would whine about getting my hands sticky from kneading the dough.