On making cookies

Saturday’s success!

As my facebook friends know, this past weekend I made cookies for the first time since my injury. These are my “secret” recipe ones (IYKYK) that many of you have enjoyed in the past as feminist or assessment cookies; this time I suppose we could call them wheelchair cookies, since I was sitting with the question of “How do you see things differently from wheels?” (thanks Kirk!) as we made them. Pretty quickly, I realized that the “from wheels” part was way more complicated/complex than I was prepared for (side note: I should have been prepared, if I’d ever read any of my own writings!). Here’s some of what I observed/experienced:

My first experience was through my hands. My spinal cord injury is high enough (C5/6) that it’s not just my legs but also my hands and arms that are affected (this is also why I’m technically a quadriplegic, not a paraplegic). I couldn’t open the cookie wrapper on my own, and the dough felt different in my hands than before. Everything goes more slowly and takes more intention, which in a way is a gift because it meant I noticed the color, the texture, even the shine from the dough, in ways that I probably overlooked before - it felt like a new experience, anyhow. The physical limits/changes in general seem to make me (or invite me to be) more aware of materiality, and more aware of my touchpoints of interaction with other materialties. It’s pretty cool, even as it is also frustrating or ponderous (btw, that’s an interesting word!).

Next up was the experience of collaboration, or support I suppose. I’ve almost always made this particular cookie “recipe” alone, or at least without assistance. This time, I was making it with someone else, sometimes in a “with” relationship (we were both putting cookie dough on the baking sheet) and sometimes in a “for” one (she got out the baking sheet, started the oven, etc.). I wasn’t “in charge” of it and we weren’t on equal footing (ha!) as we worked; the pieces I was contributing were the exception, in a way, as she was doing all the steps except for the parts I wanted/asked/asserted that I would do. This was new, and was a strange and still unfamiliar/awkward sort of collaboration/caregiving where we are in such different roles and contributions.

A third facet I was aware of was a more mundane sort of novelty. I hadn’t made these cookies for over two years. I hadn’t baked in this oven before. The cookie sheets were new, as was the spatula (even as the baking racks and other utensils were old). It wasn’t as if I had forgotten the cookie recipe, but I’d lost my knack for pulling them out so they would stay soft - I used to know by smell, but not this time, perhaps in part because even the smell of the baking was mixed with the odor of different oven in a different space. It was a new experience, even as it also felt familiar.

And the wheels? I couldn’t figure out how to get near enough to the oven to safely get the cookie sheet in or out, and I couldn’t get quite close enough to the counter to reach the back rows when putting the dough on the sheet. And at the same time I also recognized the privilege of sitting down the whole time, of being eye level with the oven, even of seeing the cookies from beneath the cooling rack instead of just from above. It was another new, but one that I barely minded (beyond wanting to figure out oven safety on wheels!).

One final facet that I’m naming for myself more often these days (which I guess was one of the themes of my YOLT post too) is the impact of trauma on all this. I almost died; now I’m making cookies. I had a stomach tube for a while, I lived on institutional food for most of the last two years, and now I’m making cookies. People have been taking care of me without much reciprocation on my part; now I’m making cookies for other people to enjoy. I am overwhelmingly aware of these differences, and of the gift of being and doing where I am today.

I went to the mall yesterday. At the Five Below store I found an expandable ball; it looks like this, first scrunched up and then opened wide:

That’s how I’m feeling as I write this. Wheelchair experience? Little ball. All these different parts? Big ball. And then it’s really just me making cookies; little ball again. It’s been easy in the midst of pain and isolation and institutional life to feel small, but it’s fun to remember/re-experience how I like expanding and condensing things this way! How about you?