Saturday Pancakes and the Talks That Happen Over Them

The smell of a slow morning

There is a sound I love on a Saturday morning. It is the little hiss when batter hits a hot pan. Then the smell starts to fill the kitchen, and pretty soon I hear footsteps coming down the hall. My son does not need an alarm when pancakes are on.

I am not a great cook. My pancakes are not round. Some are a little too brown on one side. I usually forget to warm the syrup. None of that matters. What matters is that for about forty minutes, nobody is in a hurry. Nobody has to be anywhere. We just stand around the stove and talk.

The talks you cannot schedule

Here is something I have learned as a dad. You cannot schedule a real talk. If I sit my son down and say, so, how are things going, I get one word answers. Fine. Good. Nothing. He is not being rude. Nobody likes being interviewed.

But put a spatula in his hand and ask him to flip the next one, and something changes. We are side by side instead of face to face. Our hands are busy. The pressure is off. And that is when the good stuff comes out.

Over pancakes I have heard about a friend who was going through a hard time. I have heard about a teacher he really likes and why. I have heard about something he was worried about that he had not told anyone. I did not ask for any of it. It just showed up somewhere between the first batch and the last.

I think kids, and honestly grown ups too, open up when they feel like there is no agenda. A slow breakfast tells them, I am not going anywhere. I have time for you. That message is louder than anything I could say on purpose.

What I try to do and not do

I have made plenty of mistakes in these moments, so here is what I try to keep in mind now.

I try to listen more than I talk. When he brings something up, my first job is not to fix it. My first job is to hear it. If I jump straight to advice, the door closes fast.

I try not to look shocked. If he tells me something hard, I keep flipping pancakes. I keep my voice calm. He needs to know he can bring me anything without me blowing up.

I try to share a little of my own stuff too. Not a lecture. Just, yeah, I felt that way once, here is what happened. It reminds him that his dad is a real person who has struggled too.

And I try to leave the phone on the counter, face down. The second I check it, the moment is gone.

Your own Saturday pancakes

It does not have to be pancakes. Maybe it is a drive to get tacos. Maybe it is shooting hoops in the driveway. Maybe it is folding laundry together or walking the dog. The point is to have a regular, easy thing you do side by side, with nothing else going on.

Do it often enough that it becomes normal. That is the secret. A once a year big talk will not do much. A once a week slow breakfast will do a lot, because over time your kid learns that this is the place where it is safe to talk.

Some Saturdays, nothing deep happens. We just eat too much and laugh about the ugly pancakes. That is fine too. Those mornings count. They build the trust that makes the deeper mornings possible.

I do not know how many Saturday breakfasts I have left with my son living under my roof. Fewer than I want, probably. So I am going to keep making them, lopsided and a little burnt, for as long as he keeps coming down the hall.

Make the pancakes. The real talk shows up when the batter does.