culinary school diaries: why I enrolled
This is a long story about becoming a wife and a mom. The last 13 years often feels like a series of wonderful, meaningful, crucial, beautiful and selfless choices. That includes becoming a stay-at-home mom, moving to the suburbs, losing/finding/losing jobs, trying to find my own space.
For most of my life, that space was writing. I wrote throughout high school, college, young adulthood. It was where I was me. In marriage and motherhood, I lost that thread. I didn’t have the time, the solitude, the stimulation. Instead, I gradually migrated to the kitchen.
It started as a place to own solace when I couldn’t be alone (early motherhood) and became a place I sought when there was nowhere else to go (the pandemic). It became a place where I continuously found myself. I turned to cooking when I wanted to get back into my own head, do my own work, earn my own cred.
The idea of culinary school presented itself after a two-week course I took with one of the ICE chefs. which provided me the opportunity to get out of the house and out of my role there. It was a glorious two weeks—learning, cooking, meeting new people, staying overnight in Brooklyn at the apartment of a friend and regaining some semblance of life as it used to be.
While a full-time culinary arts program is not nearly as luxe as that recreational course — in fact it’s much more strenuous and stressful than I ever expected — it allows me to take time off from home to do the thing that feels most like me these days. It’s a chance to reenter the world, to be in the city, to find my own ground, to reintroduce myself, and to then return to my family with the experience in my back pocket.
Will I become a chef? Everyone asks. Probably not. Will I become an amazing cook? Probably not. But it will lead somewhere else, somewhere new that has flecks of me in the wallpaper. Somewhere other than home, which ironically, will hopefully lead me back to myself.
