An hour in her kitchen where she is the one who knows. Why old skills and old stories outlast newer memory, and why it matters that she gets to be the expert.
Not for her. With her. And badly, on purpose.
Somewhere in your mother’s house there’s a recipe she made for thirty years that nobody has written down. Sunday gravy. The stuffed peppers. Whatever came out of that kitchen every October when the weather turned. She could do it without looking. You’ve never made it once.
So show up on a Saturday with a bag of groceries and tell her you’ve been trying to make it and it keeps coming out wrong.
Watch what happens to her.
For an hour she’s not a person being managed. She’s the one who knows. She’s correcting you, telling you it’s too much, telling you her mother did it different, telling you about a kitchen in Keansburg in 1958 that you’ve never heard about in your life. You’re taking notes on the back of the shopping list.
That’s the whole point. Most of what we hand seniors is help. Very little of it is standing. The chance to be the expert in the room is worth more than most of what’s on the care plan.
It works even when a lot of other things have stopped working. Old skills and old stories hang around long after short term memory gets slippery. A woman who can’t tell you what she had for lunch can often walk you through a recipe step by step.
Write it down while you’re there. Get her handwriting on it if you can. That piece of paper will be one of the things you keep.
And if your Saturdays don’t have an hour in them right now, that’s the honest situation for a lot of families this time of year. Someone else can be in that kitchen with her. It still counts.
Fall is the right season for it. Pick the recipe this week. Seniors Helping Seniors® Jersey Shore North Home care, respite, personal care, and transportation in Monmouth, Middlesex, and Ocean Counties, NJ. www.JSNorthSHS.com | info@JSNorthSHS.com | 732-385-8805