Today’s book: Keith Dixon’s Cooking for Gracie. A surprising choice
for me. Why? Allow me to tell you before getting to the book itself.
Since even before Raphaël’s
birth, people have been giving us a lot of stuff. A lot. Most of the gifts were
predictable, but very welcome: clothes, toys, gift certificates, more clothes.
Others were pleasant surprises: a baby food maker, a soothing noise-maker
(which doesn’t really put the baby to sleep, but is still really cool). I’m
grateful for it all. But there is one type of gift which I specifically asked
people not to give me (and fortunately, most of them complied): parenting
books.
My dislike of parenting books
(and most self-help books, really, but let’s stick to this particular genre
today) stems from way before I ever became a parent myself: it started during
my teen years. I was a fairly typical teenager, undergoing all the angst,
drama, and emotional rollercoaster those years often entail. But around that
time, my mother started developing the annoying habit of attributing anything I
did that rubbed her the wrong way to my age. “I know teenagers are unkempt /
rude to their parents / selfish, but I will not have you wear your hair like that
/ speak to me that way / behave in this manner.” It was as if I had been
labelled practically overnight, and anything I did would inevitably be traced
back to that label. Granted, not all her criticisms were undeserved: my hair
was indeed a mess most of the time, and I wasn’t always the most thoughtful
daughter. But I could have been the best-groomed, most polite, most altruistic
teen, and my mother probably would have found something else to blame on
teenagehood. Because I was no longer a child, and that, apparently, was the
greatest sin of all.
And one day, while browsing
through one of our many bookshelves, I found The Book.
