TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL
The other day I overheard our (now adult) children lamenting their lack of fine motor skills. This from accomplished guitarists, artists, and hand-eye sport athletes. What were they on about? Turns out they were discussing their inability to hold a fork properly.
They are not wrong - they hold their forks like their opposable thumbs are new acquisitions. [They are otherwise perfectly perfect in every way, of course]. Now that they want to go out to nice restaurants they are suddenly aware that their Edward Scissor Hands tendencies pretty much limit them to dinner at Medieval Times. After decades of shaking my head incredulously at their lack of dining dexterity, it occurs to me that cutlery skills was probably something their parents were supposed to teach them. How had we dropped the ball/fork?
It was partly the result of a deficit in my skill-teaching skills. Case in point: Faced with the shame of my failure to teach them how to hold a fork, I decided to address another glaring hole in their hand-y repertoire: card shuffling. Our one daughter still shuffles cards “swirling pond” style, like she is a toddler playing Go Fish. This technique might be acceptable for a multi-generational game of UNO but is not going to win her much cred in a game of high stakes Poker, or a Seniors Centre Bridge match. Determined, I jump on the opportunity to right at least this wrong... only to realize why we are in this predicament in the first place. Half the deck cupped lightly in my left hand, I slo-mo demonstrate how to gently lace the other half of the cards in with my right. “Nothin’ to it! Easy-Peasy!” My understudy takes the deck and gives it a try. While her left hand is positioned correctly, it looks weird and awkward - like she is a Madame Tussaud wax figure. As she attempts to shuffle the cards, it is like she put the deck into a Jack-in-a-Box. Cards are going in everywhere…except into her deck hand. I ponder what to do next. Demonstrating again feels like rubbing her failure in her face(card). I have no other ideas. End of lesson.
This is exactly the order of events we navigated when trying to teach Fork Holding 101: demonstrate, fail, then give up. In my defence, I assumed they would just figure these things out on their own. I, after all, can do a passable shuffle, bridge, back cut, fan combo. And I have no recollection of being actively taught. But as I write this, I am starting to question whether I hold my fork properly myself. Do I scoop my spoon delicately from the front to the back of the bowl? Heck, no. I don’t know my tines up from my tines down protocol. I don’t know what utensils criss-crossed pointing up denotes. Perhaps I have been sending chefs the cutlery equivalent of hate mail with my finished plate. Certainly, I had zero table skills when I was a kid. My memories of childhood eating involve smashing my Kraft dinner into a giant macaroni pie and eating it pizza style. (To be fair, this seemed up to par for a box-meal that came accompanied by a piece of fried baloney.)
Fortunately, as with math, swimming and learning to drive, I recognized my table manner weaknesses and offloaded teaching duties to a “professional”. If ever there was a perfect parent-substitute to take on the formal instruction of cutlery skills it was my mother-in-law. She was the only one among us who cared (and cared a lot) about these things. Unfortunately, as is often the case when you go too hard, too soon - her efforts backfired. The Emily Post training began at birth. Even when the kids were babies specializing in projectiles and Food-as-Art, she would insist they use proper china dishes and cloth napkins. The bar was so clearly not going to be reached. The kids recognized they were being set up for failure, and cleverly distracted their Nana from their fork holding fiascos with the grammatically incorrect use of the word “like”.
But the main obstacle to teaching the girls the finer aspects of dining, was that we had bigger mealtime fish to fry. There was no mental space to worry about niceties like fork positioning – the main objective was containment. One of our kids was the world’s messiest eater. She could coat her entire face, neck, arms and torso in goo - as though she had been dipped headfirst in a vat of oatmeal - from a single arrowroot cookie. For years she not only ate with her hands, but would only consume food in pea size pieces. It was like sharing the dinner table with a gigantic squirrel. Our tutoring efforts consisted primarilly of begging her not to “gerbil” her food. Not to be outdone, our youngest made the dining room table the equivalent of Marineland’s Splash Zone. Sitting a good meter from the table, any food that successfully got onto her fork had little likelihood of making it across the great divide and into her mouth successfully. Her Pièce de Résistance was pouring herself a drink. She would, without fail, pour directly over the back side of her glass, and/or stop pouring twenty seconds too late (in liquid terms: approximately half a milk carton).
The finer aspects of utensil usage? We were miles from that masterclass.
Our kids did eventually outgrow eating like animals and now aspired to follow their Nana’s directive to “eat like you are sitting with the Queen”. Ironically, just as they embark on their My Fair Lady journey to proper dining etiquette, the Michelin star crowd is turning its nose up at utensils. According to an article I recently read, What We Gain by Eating With Our Hands, “without cutlery as mediator, we feel everything. The nerve endings in our fingers are triggered; our senses expand. We taste more.”
So, maybe the kids had it right all along.
Along with every grease-covered tourist eating a jumbo turkey leg at Disney World.
