What We Learn . . .

I've been thinking a lot lately about when I learned how to do certain things. For me, a lot of it revolves around cooking since the kitchen was the hub of my childhood home. I remember I learned how to shell peas from my great aunt Florence while sitting next to her and her husband on their front porch. I learned how to kill and prepare chickens for butchering from one of my grandmothers (okay, not one of my favorite memories and probably a good reason for why I haven't eaten chicken in almost 20 years). My other grandmother taught me how to make her banana breeze pie, a sort of no-bake cheesecake lined and topped with bananas. I can still see my aunt bent over her kitchen table carefully placing decorations on each of her Christmas cookies.
But there are other things I do as I prepare meals for my family - peel potatoes or slice tomatoes, mix meatloaf or boil corn on the cob - probably all lessons gleaned from my mother but when and where, I don't know. And baking... I chuckle to myself whenever I hear one of the chefs on t.v. mention that you have to be very careful to measure everything exactly when you bake. But, for those of us who still remember our grandmothers baking the old way, by feel, by texture, by taste, we know well that baking is an art to learn, not a recipe to follow.
And through all this, I am reminded, that only a very small part of what we learn is about sitting in a classroom or in another formal setting meant for a lesson to be taught. Most of what we learn is by watching the people around us, be it about cooking or cleaning, or even making beds (I learned how to make hospital corners from my uncle who was in the merchant marines). But even more so than that, we also learn how to approach life, and situations that may be thrown at us, by those that share those moments with us.
That's one of the biggest responsibilities that those of us who are parents face. And no, that doesn't mean making everything into a sit-down-and-take-notes moment. It means showing our children how to handle life and its curve balls, how to accept responsibility for their actions, how to learn to put rules in place, how to accept that you don't always have all the answers. It's a little overwhelming when you think about it, that every moment someone is watching and learning from how you live. But for me, when I put it in that perspective, it serves as a tremendous reminder that I must live what I say so that my children see the lessons I try to put into words also put into action - how to love, to be compassionate, to be patient (I'm still working on that one).
And if one day I'm at one of my grown son's homes and I watch them set the table or carve a ham, I'll know not only where they learned that from, but I'll hope that they also learned some of the other things that that I tried to teach them along the way.