My little breakfast club
honest thoughts on comfort and change and pancakes
This morning, I wiggled myself out of a temptingly lazy morning by putting on a workout video before doing anything else. I also meditated. I'm not sure if it was a combination of these things or just the energy of the day that catapulted me into the kitchen to clear up, make french toast, and caramelize apples.
Usually, when I make breakfast, the assumption is that I'm making it for everybody. Everybody being my parents. Especially when it's pancakes. And also if it's scrambled eggs with sauteed mushrooms and grilled tomatoes.
My dad is the second to wake up. He saunters into the kitchen in the middle of my breakfast creating endeavour. I have come to expect two questions at this point: 1. are you making something? (hopeful) and 2. for everybody? (sheepish)
This morning, I got both questions rolled into one. Are you making something for all of us?
My dad's morning foray into the kitchen includes an instinctive setting of water to boil for tea, and the readying of 2 slices of bread for toast. These days, he asks if he should put 3 cups instead of 2 on the off-chance that I don't want coffee. When I'm making breakfast, he skips the toast.
Mum wakes up a little later. Sometimes a lot later. And sometimes before any of us as if it is something she always does. It really depends. She is very appreciative of my pancakes. Sometimes, she will mash the bananas for me.
The cats are definitely very much awake when I am. Minny and Mogli express their respective versions of good morning through their body language, Fuzzy does the same in his expectation of 5ml of milk in his saucer, and Jimmy with either a smelly surprise on the courtyard stairs or wide-eyed desperation for some company (and food). I try to avoid getting lost in the needs of the cats before tending to my own, but sometimes I switch it up.
It's a neat, functioning ecosystem. Sometimes, not very neat at all, and we find ourselves going crazy. We blame the cats for this. Either way, there is this sense of functioning as a unit.
I have often imagined myself leaving this unit, this peaceful grounded existence, sometimes sent spiralling under uncontrollable vet bills. Not having siblings means that I've always lived with a sense of only having these guys, my parents, who are also my friends, who are also my siblings, who are also my therapists, my teachers, my talk-into-sensers, my collective compass for right and wrong without ever giving me black and white answers.
Approaching 25, after having resisted so many of the conventional paths that could have been mine, I do wonder, what next? A career path with flailing direction, a rejection of any and all rishtas that enter my sensory radius, have I just been so comfortable and cared for that I cannot imagine a different existence?
You know, it seems silly to strive so hard to leave a comfortable and cared-for existence. But then does it also seem silly not to leave a comfortable existence because it's all you've ever known?
The path ahead is unclear. As an only child with only the compass she has developed from her still discovering, still stumbling parents who almost always let her do what she wanted (except buy a Blackberry), the path is even less clear. Actually, I don't think it's clear for anyone. Can you even see a way forward if you're busy making your french toast and caramelizing your apples?
Sometimes, it all just feels so contradictory and hard.
But sharing breakfast is easy.
