For when you make a mistake

It’s my job to make my parents their “breakfast” at midnight.

It is the middle of the pandemic, and my grandmother has just had a stroke, so everyone’s chipping in while she recovers. By 10:30 p.m., I’d already watched around 12 Gordon Ramsay tutorials for beginners and proceeded to the kitchen—door locked, and music waiting to play. I start by gathering my ingredients: three potatoes, one onion, some bacon and eggs, butter, someone else’s vegetable oil, and a grater I had no idea how to use. I pick it up and stare at the stainless steel, testing the bumps through my fingers, with some of its edges showing signs of rusting; I may not know which way is up with this thing, but I know it’s supposed to make the potatoes look like shredded cheese on top of spaghetti. Not an easy feat for a grater, but I decided that the edges are sharp enough … Probably… Maybe…

It takes me 15 minutes to peel the skin of the first one, and another 30 minutes of using my entire body to support my hand as I keep pushing the potato into the grater and the grater into the potato. That’s 45 minutes longer than all of my movement in the past month, combined. God must’ve really wanted me to exercise. But I try to outsmart God with a different approach, using new stances, new angles, new motions.

I start simple: a slow, but forceful, back-and-forth scrub of the potato 45 degrees against the grater, standard Ramsay technique. It kind of works, I reluctantly mutter, but I also question if my arm is supposed to be hurting every 30 seconds. I keep this up for a couple more minutes, switching between arms when the other goes numb—until they both do at the same time. Okay … so, it doesn’t work. I try laying the grater flat on the counter, pressing the potato on top of it that way, but now the shavings are all mashed together. Still doesn’t work. Maybe I just don’t have enough force, so I shift my entire weight onto my right arm holding the potato. But now even my neck and legs are starting to feel strained, so I reshift, and then I reshift again, again, and again. Nothing. Is. Working. I try moving the potato faster against the grater. Slower. I try not moving at all.

I catch my breath and notice the sweat forming in my armpits with a bit of the back of my T-shirt already soaked. This regularly happens but for a different reason. I usually dance when I cook to drown out the thoughts of who I’m cooking for, who’s on the hospital bed in the living room, and what they’ve all done to me. I start to hear the music playing and finally remember that I pressed play on my phone before I went into the kitchen. I realize that I can’t dance when the dish is more complicated than toast and omelets, so the thoughts start to sizzle.

Wanting a break, I flip the grater to set the clean side down. My eyes widen. I gasp. I cover my mouth. The bumps are the knives! I was using the wrong side.

I start laughing at myself, laughing and laughing at this mistake I made. Alone, in the kitchen, at around midnight, on the last day of May.

Within the next five minutes, I finish grating all three potatoes and one onion. While frying and mixing and cooking and stirring, I think of that one exam I missed in high school. And the days I was late. How I was made to think that failing one class would mean that I’m not smart, not worthy, less of a good daughter, granddaughter, less of a human. That it would mean unemployment, then poverty, an uneventful life, and eventually death, just because of failing one class. I think of saying all the wrong things with a good heart, of losing friends and losing games. I remember competing at a press conference, winning, and still going home to a disappointed mom—the mom who requested this lunch. I think of this very house—where my grandmother kicked me out, and when I dropped out of college. The same person who caught me recording a cover for YouTube when I was 14 and laughed, so I just … never did it again. The same person on the hospital bed, in the living room.

And how in all those moments, I was absolutely sure I would fail and wouldn’t recover. I didn’t even want to wait around to see for myself.

But I am not in school. And culinary is not my career. I used the wrong side of the grater and the only consequences are a sore arm, and parents who’d have to wait a few extra minutes for their meal.

I didn’t know it yet, but almost four years later, I would go back to this night every single time. When I fail my first exam, and when I fail at other things—making new friends, keeping old ones, or playing the wrong notes. In a few months, I’ll be graduating and it will be a whole new, scary, unfamiliar world. But I have solace in the tested and proven fact that I’ll always be okay. What a joy it is to have the luxury of making mistakes—eventually, you’re still going to be fine and eat breakfast food at all the wrong times.

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Pamela C. Diaz, 22, is a graduating political science student at UP Diliman. She spends most of her time writing—papers, songs, journal entries—and playing with her dog, Dani.