I did not expect to meet my mother,
six years after her death, in a blog post. I thought I had cremated her, dealt
with the seething, strangled ball of anger, honor and confusion I tried to
unravel as she lay dying eight thousand three hundred and forty-seven miles
away. But there
she was. In my
Facebook feed, my
friends’ conversations, suddenly, everywhere
I looked. The more I read, the bigger thought bubbles my memories blew.
They got larger, threatening to pop all over me, spittle and all, demanding to
be noticed. My childhood had finally come, screaming, swinging in the swiveling
kitchen door, naked, begging to be diapered, powdered, clothed. It was time, I
decided - time to either kiss the wound and send it away happy or put that
disobedient, tear-streaked cheek in the corner, to mete out punishment or take
it upon myself in the name of womanhood.
I knew what she would have done. I
knew only too well.
Cooking was how my mother showed
affection - and the lack of it. Making dinner was her weapon of choice. She
wielded it extremely well. On days she and my dad fought, there would be no
dinner cooked, as if to force my dad to acknowledge that he needed her after
all. On the flip side, she made homemade wine, pickles, party food, pizza,
festive food. Growing up, I didn’t know a single person who intentionally
stayed away from a celebration at our home. I knew no one went home and didn’t
tell whoever he met that he had just gained five pounds and wouldn’t mind
gaining another five if this woman invited him over again for dinner. My
father’s friends were jealous, as were mine.
Except for this one thing.
“Don’t you ever, ever quit your job
after you have kids!” she often warned. “You lose your worth. All you’re ever
good for is cooking and cleaning.” She didn’t teach me to cook, intentionally,
I think, even though some of my fondest childhood memories are puttering around
in the kitchen with my toy pots and pans while she cooked. As they say in
shorthand parlance, my relationship with cooking was complicated, right from
the start.
So I was disconcerted, to say the
least, to be confronted with the same acerbic complaining that still echoes in
my ears thirty years later on the other side of the globe. Cooking is too hard,
it takes too much time and no one appreciates it anyway. There should be
something better I could be doing with my time, something not inside this
house. Why all this focus on the homemade dinner, this onus on the mother? This
restlessness, this unnamed self-pity, the seeming sadness classified as the
woman’s lot, propped by ditties claiming a woman’s work is never done draw me
into darkened corners of my psyche I never wished to visit again, places that I
wanted to leave dimly lit, cobwebby and dank.
“Mommy, can I help?” my daughter
asks me today. She wants to chop vegetables, admire them. She wants to learn to
make aioli. She wants to do dishes, revel in the feel and worth of a kitchen
apron cut just to her size. She wants to learn my imperfect art. And I have to
look at it anew – not through my mother’s eyes but my own.
I have to do what my father wasn’t
willing to do to my mother - shake her out of her dark reverie, her imagination
that didn’t allow her to see the truth. That cooking is work but it isn’t drudgery. That it is a tool, not a weapon. I
have to remind myself, gruffly, if I must, that I actually do like my food, even if I
don’t necessarily like to make it every single day. There are days when I’m
tired, not interested, would rather be reading or soaking in the tub, wine
tasting with my friends, but when I’ve had my fill of the world and all its
delicacies, I would rather just eat something cooked in my own kitchen. It’s
not gourmet and it’s not always fantastic. Yes, it’s work. But like all work,
it is ultimately satisfying and God-glorifying, even when it falls far short of
perfection. I have to remember, especially when it gets hard, that our family
dinner is more than food – it is life lived together – a culmination of all our
individual labors: my husband’s work away from home, my planning and shopping,
the children’s cooperation in the store and assistance in carrying in the
groceries and, finally, my cooking, in which my daughter sometimes joins. This
is not romanticizing our family dinner. This is just looking at it from a point
of view that is not borrowed and stitched together from the rags of feminism.
If I didn’t have a little daughter,
I would remain heartless, I sometimes think. She reminds me, innocently, quite
efficiently even, of what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I am surprised but
ready with an answer when a friend asks me the same question.
“I wanted to be like my mother,” I
say wistfully. Never having known the working mom side of my mother who quit
her job when I was three, I loved the notion that I would be a stay at home mom
when I grew up. I don’t know when it
became a bad thing, when cooking for people who depended on you to nourish and
love them became an insult, when it diminished your worth. I don’t know when I
began believing my mother’s lies. “I wanted to be like my mother. Only happier
with my life,” I say to her. And realized, then, that I am.
