Yesterday, Sam had a friend over, and once they had finished the light saber fight that's in the play date rule book for 6-to-8-year-old-boys, their rising boredom threatened to thwart the afternoon. "What if we make brownies?" I asked brightly.
"I'd rather just skip right to eating them," Sam's friend replied.
With that, I jumped on my laptop, googled "easy brownies," and was soon melting butter and cocoa powder in a pot on the stove. The kids took turns measuring out the sugar and vanilla and beating the eggs. We were all into it, PLUS, we were going to be rewarded for our labors--handsomely, I thought. I poured the eggs into the pot . . . and realized that I had made a mistake. A big one, unless you happen to be a fan of chocolate scrambled eggs, which I am not.
The old me would have thrown out the curdled-looking molten chocolate and started over. But the old me did not have three young children watching expectantly. And the me standing over the stove had just used up the last grain of sugar and the only two eggs in the house.
The new me shoved the pan away from the heat, stirred vigorously, and poured the lumpen mixture into the 9 x 9 pan. After all, Julia Child once exhorted her TV audience: "Remember, you are alone in the kitchen and nobody can see you." Well, at least the kids were too short to see what had happened.
Thirty-five minutes later, I pulled the not-quite-cooked brownies out of the oven, cut them while they were still hot, put them on plates, and served with a glass of milk and a smile. And you know, even I didn't really notice the eggy bits.
But it made me wonder, not for the first time: is the key to motherhood--and life, generally--faking it? Is this what Hemingway meant by "grace under pressure?"
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