02. The Things We Learn Without Being Taught

I don’t remember my mother ever sitting me down and teaching me how to cook. Somehow, I learned anyway.

Not in the way you learn something from a recipe or a set of instructions. I learned by watching. By standing nearby while she made dinner. By seeing which pan she reached for. How much olive oil she poured without measuring. How she knew when something was done without looking at a clock.

At the time, none of it felt important. It was just what she did. That is the strange thing about growing up around traditions. You rarely recognize them while they are happening. They are too ordinary. The food that always appears on the same holiday. The way someone sets the table. The phrase your mother says every time you leave the house. The recipe nobody has ever actually written down because everyone simply knows how to make it. You don’t think of those things as something being passed to you. Until one day, you catch yourself doing them.

I notice it most in the kitchen. Sometimes I’ll be making something and realize I’m holding a spoon the way my mother does. Or adding an ingredient in the same order. Or making something entirely by feel because I’ve watched it happen so many times that somewhere along the way, my hands remembered. There is something almost funny about realizing how much we learn from people who never formally tried to teach us.

And now that I’m a mother, I think about it differently. I wonder what Sebastian is picking up simply by being around me. Not the things I intentionally try to teach him. The other things. The music playing while I cook. The smell of coffee in the morning. The way people gather in the kitchen even when there are perfectly good chairs somewhere else. The way food somehow becomes part of every celebration, every visit, every ordinary Sunday. Maybe those are the things that stay. The things repeated so often that they quietly become familiar.

I think that is why I care more about traditions now than I used to. When you are young, you assume the people who do these things will always be there to do them. Someone else will make the sauce. Someone else will remember how much flour goes in. Someone else will know what comes next. And then, slowly, you realize that one day you might be the person everyone is watching.

There is something beautiful about that. And a little intimidating.

Because suddenly the ordinary things don’t feel quite so ordinary anymore. They feel worth remembering. Worth asking about. Worth writing down. Worth doing again. Maybe that is how traditions survive. Not because someone announces that they are important.

But because we watched closely enough that, eventually, they became part of us.

There’s more to tell.

— Stefania