Today we’re bringing you an essay from our Community Voices – authentic stories relating to families and food. Taylor Hobbs shares a story about her daughter’s request for a real knife as a birthday present when she’s still a toddler, and how that reflects the bigger values their family shares of connecting and nurturing each other through food. Follow her on IG @taylorhobbsauthor
Small Bites:
📚 Pick up Taylor’s novels on Bookshop.org: Sonder Village and Cloaked. If you like Taylor’s writing as much as we do, we know you’ll love these books
🔪 From The Birthday Knife story: Opinel Le Petit Chef Complete 3 Piece Kitchen Set (it comes in 3 colors!)
🔪 *SPECIAL* for our One Potato family: FREE Knife Skills for Kids video from our friends at Kids Cook Real Food!
👨🍳 Purchase the Kids Cook Real Food eCourse so your kids can learn how to cook and not simply follow a recipe – give them the life skills to not only survive, but thrive
Pen Parentis, a national nonprofit that helps writers stay on creative track after having kids, is proud to sponsor Community Voices X Pen Parentis. Check out their annual Writing Fellowship for New Parents, free monthly Literary Salons, and Cycle of Support that includes membership, mentorship and accountability meetups. More info at writerparentannex.com
You don’t have to be a member of Pen Parentis to share your story – send us a DM or email hello @ onepotato.com if you’re interested in sharing 🥔
Want to share a Tiny Food Story under 100 words? If submitting a full-length Community Voices Special feels intimidating, we’re collecting Tiny Food Stories from the One Potato Community on a rolling basis. These are reader-submitted stories about the love of food and family, 100 words or less. Click the button below to submit.
The Birthday Knife
By Taylor Hobbs
Just before she turned three, I asked my daughter what she wanted for her birthday.
“A knife,” she demanded, with a cheeky gleam in her eye.
Fervently hoping this was not a response to her baby brother’s recent arrival, I kept my tone neutral and asked, “Oh really? A knife?”
“Yes, a real one. Not a Play-Doh one.”
“A metal one.” Am I going to have to sleep with one eye open?
“Yeah. One like Daddy’s.” Her earnest little face peered up at me. “I want to help cook.”
Back when my daughter was born, my husband declared that since I was exclusively breastfeeding the baby, it was now his job to feed me. Apparently, we needed a more cohesive plan than me shoving granola bars in my face at 11pm and finding the leftovers for a surprise mid-morning snack the next day.
He took his new job as seriously as his current one as an active-duty military officer, becoming the executive meal planner, shopper, prepper, and chef of our family. I handed the entirety of the mental load regarding food over to him, and never took it back.
I was too focused on the 1,800 hours of breastfeeding (so the experts estimate) of a baby’s first year. 1,800 hours of parenting and connecting with my child that my partner did not get to directly experience. All those sleepless nights with a sweet—screaming—child at my breast, with my sanity barely holding on, but deepening the bond between us just the same.
This is a connection and sacrifice that would not have been possible for me to sustain without, “Did you eat yet?” and “I got your favorite!” and “There’s five dinners prepped in the fridge for when I’m in the field.” To this day, my husband’s love language is a well-stocked freezer.
For the breastfeeding parent, it seems as though the scale is skewed those early years. My husband decided to level it out in the kitchen, tipping it further in his favor when our daughter became his sous chef. With her little diapered butt perched on the galley counter (we lived on a sailboat at the time, but that’s another story), she watched everything he cooked and offered her expertise as a professional mixer/taste-tester.
My husband loved the YouTube cooking channel, “Binging with Babish” and the toddler quickly hopped onboard. Soon she was ‘scoring’ her Play-Doh bread and ‘dicing’ up her snacks. After adding ‘cumin’ and ‘garlic powder’ to her mud pies on the river, I should have expected she would want to level up her cooking with her birthday request.
Her little fingers gripped my arm as she waited to hear my answer to her pleas for a real knife. The same tiny fingers that used to pinch and slap my boobs not too long ago, that now wanted to control an actual weapon. Juggling a new baby in my other hand, I wondered about my sleep-deprived reflexes and decided on the most diplomatic answer, “Let me talk to Daddy and we’ll see.”
We mutually agreed that three was too young for what she was asking, but surely by four we would be much better prepared. All year, my daughter told people that when she turned four, she would get a real knife. Chopping celery and carrots was the dream, because that meant time working side by side just with Daddy.
The Opinel Petit Chef knife came engraved with her name and, thankfully, a finger guard. A grown-up gift with a grown-up purpose. I think it was the milestone that hit me harder than weaning, potty training, or flipping her car seat around ever did.
Now at almost seven, she even takes her own cart around the tiny (and safe) commissary grocery store, darting off to get ingredients she wrote down on her own list while my husband shops with our son, who just turned four. And yes, of course he received his own knife this year. He is so proud and runs to get it out every time he hears the clang of metal mixing bowls being brought out of the cupboard.
I like to sit and watch on the other side of the counter, my two babies standing on stools next my husband while they all prep dinner. Their deft fingers, no longer the chunky fists I remember, confidently chop away while they chat at their dad. They don’t remember those 1,800 hours spent with me, but they will remember this.
About:
Taylor Hobbs lives in the PNW with her husband and two small children. Two of her novels—Cloaked (2018) and Sonder Village (2019)—were published by The Wild Rose Press, and her first short story, Contingency Daughter, won her the 2024 Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship. She is now represented by Michaela Whatnall of Dystel, Goderich & Bourret Literary Agency. You can reach out at taylorhobbsauthor.com or via Instagram @taylorhobbsauthor
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