Undoing

What will you do with yourself?

I don’t know if she had asked the question I was trying to answer, but I found myself drilling down into some complicated feelings about the space left over once my youngest child goes off to college. 

My mother-in-law is a sharp lady; she knows this would be a question for me and not her son. But I feel sharp, too. In all the wrong ways, perhaps. All edges and elbows. 

She shared her experiences and gave a tidbit of good advice: ” Reclaim something you had to give up.“ 

I hate how it sounds when it tumbles out of my mouth; how everything always sounds whenever I try to bend words into a shape that fits me: “I don’t feel like I sacrificed anything for my children.” 

As if I fear, by definition I won’t ever be able to fit into anything else. 

I try again: I never gave up anything that I truly loved. If anything, I found more and more things to do as the children grew into adolescents.

Even the word - adolescents - feels like a time when adults are supposed to step a few paces back. 

All of it felt like a surprise, or just a thing I learned about myself by giving new things a whirl. I learned new skills, made new friends, decided running was fun, and then started to volunteer.

She smiled, drew a breath and wondered if the transition would be easier for me since I could already fill my time with work, hobbies, and friends. 

Perhaps it’s the thousands of little tasks that mothers don’t exactly take for granted. We labor over them, as if they were entirely new life forms to cajole and nurture into recognizable shapes. 

Parenthood was just one part of the puzzlement. 

If anything, I gained so much more from navigating the ups and downs. The friction that comes from doing or delegating the work. 

It wasn’t always a joy, but it hardly felt like a burden either. Not that it was glamorous: There is always something that needs doing: the mountains of laundry, the piles of dishes, the “omg, how long has the cat vomit been steaming over there on the carpet?”

There will still be laundry, and dinners I clean up (because I don’t cook them), and pet messes that, while deeply unpleasant, won’t make me feel the physical urge to add to the upset. 

Which is to say, there will still be a husband … THE husband. A man who might need to be disabused of the notion that he, in any way, sacrificed me to the children. Or that I sacrificed him. Realizing instead that we are still on the same path, despite how it meanders and winds through time.

If there is a new frontier, I suppose it will have many familiar hills and valleys. It won’t be exotic or remote. We will come to realize it never really “left off” anywhere to pick up again. It’s just a journey we have been on together, marveling at all of the scenery changes. 

Supply Chains

 This place is a maze. 

I feel overwhelmed. 

All around me are giant metal racks containing pallets of merchandise. The shelves above are wrapped in layers of shrink, with their contents still visible if I squint.  The skids at eye level are fully accessible; the clinging plastic peeled away to reveal super-sized versions of things our grocery store sells, but for a price we assume is a significant savings. I notice the pallets of things overhead don’t match anything offered nearby.

This alone makes my head swim.

I can’t quite figure out the system that makes this place hum, but I suppose it includes market research and feasibility studies that prove even a cynic, such as myself, will travel a hundred miles or more outside our domestic domains - just to spend copious amounts of cash in this consumer-land amusement park.  

I’m not sure if we need any of it, but it’s something to do on vacation that feels both extravagant and frugal. So I follow my husband, who is driving the extra-wide cart. 

He shows delight at each turn. His face lit up at seeing reams of colorful sticky-note pads in sizes that fit the curve of his beefy hand when it’s gripping a pen. He chortles as he flings two of them into the cart. So far, he’s collected a few office supplies, a dozen razor blades, a pair of shorts, and a pillow-sized bag of dried fruit as we crest the first turn.  

I don’t seem to have the same luck as I try to focus on a list of supplies our college students desire: a water-filter pitcher, a mattress topper, and an inexpensive vacuum. 

It’s here somewhere, I presume, just in the wrong sizes and price points once located.

For those things, I resign to go elsewhere. Here I will settle on multi-packages of consumables like toothpaste, shave creams, soaps, tonics, sodas, and D vitamins.

I know these are things I can add to the cart without triggering my husband’s left eyebrow to lift a full inch higher than his right. More durable items require more dialogue and the potential for old wounds to resurface. 

Thanks in part to my taking a chance on a $25 name-branded toaster that has since decided unknowably and seemingly on its own whether both sides of the bread would be toasted or whether one side would be scorched and the other left raw.  

“It wasn't the purchase,” He argues quite correctly. “It was you getting rid of the ugly old serviceable toaster that worked just fine.” 

The truth is, I hate it here.

Paying for the privilege of copping here. 

This place, its business model, the whole, proverbial, timeline. It feels like a more accurate Everest. 

Some outsized escapade that requires no small amount of training beforehand and a whole different kind of stamina to get through the judgments that abound at every turn: from the entry, to the aisles, and the checkout lines, and the reading of receipts. Because trust and bargains do not coexist. I always do some deep soul searching afterward, the whole path, like Everest, littered with excesses and detritus all along the way. 

A literal price hike that might cost us our souls. 

Nourishment for the soul

In the grocery store … near the baking aisle … are shelves filled with sauce packets. In essence, they are dry ingredients that when mixed with ordinary tap water and stirred until incorporated will leap-frog a roux and land you a sauce.

My parents — who were not chefs but never burned or broke the flour and butter base that will become a rich and flavorful gravy  — I am sure, would have given me a heaping measure of side-eye, not to mention curled-lip for tossing two packets of the stuff into my cart.

It goes against the grain.

Of all the things one should know, I can conjure my mother saying mid-lecture, is the simple act of making the thickening agent for a gravy from scratch. She (and my father, thanks to her practiced instruction) could do it in their sleep.

First they’d melt an amount of butter in a saucepan before adding an equal amount of flour, then whisking until the color they desired majestically appeared. Depending on what the savory sauce would be ladled over my mother could match white, beige or caramel brown as if she were cooking in a Pantone chart. They’d add a liquid … water, milk or broth and whisk constantly to prevent lumps. The heat would be medium or low, and they wouldn’t take their eyes off the task until the finished product was velvety and the exact consistency they intended.

I always thought there was something miraculous in that marinade. Divine intervention, however, it wasn’t. As I recall, my mother, a nurse by training, was ready and able to doctor the sauce if any accident, such as a burner’s heat being set too high, happened to occur. She could diagnose the problem and its treatment – adding water here or a sprinkle of thickener there – by intuition.

Similarly, my father, her sous chef,  could make the toughest piece of leftover meat melt in our mouths just by how he angled his knife. Unlike me, he could tell in the dimmest light, which way the grain was heading. No hesitation.

There was an economy to the procedure just as much as there was an economy to the product they plated up and set out on the kitchen table.

Those meals came vividly to life as I watched an episode of the FX show "The Bear" where chef Sydney Adamu doctors up a box of Hamburger Helper. As the episode progresses, we watch “Syd” balance the inexperience in other areas of her life with her surety and skills she possesses in the kitchen. As she connects with her young cousin and talks through the angst of living, I watch a recipe that brings nourishment of the soul and convenience come together in real time. A box of pasta. A packet of spices. A cup of water.  A squeeze of tomato paste. A smattering of toasted panko. A fresh nest of shredded cheddar cheese sprinkled over the top.

When Syd ladles two servings of her doctored Hamburger Helper into bowls and hands one to her young charge, I can almost feel the steam of that familiar comfort on my face.

Something about that scene reminded me of one of my favorite meals my mom used to make: fried rice using a box of Rice-a-Roni, leftover chicken or pork, and a scrambled egg. 

With just a dash of soy sauce, it was nourishment for the soul.