It doesn’t matter what the book is but I like that they talk about food in a food-porn way cause I love that. I like the cultural references and stuff.

The part that keeps knocking on my brain are the parts talking about spiritual searching and change.

The author describes a friend she has made lamenting her obsession with a past love-especially unproductive considering she is somewhere trying to work on herself and busying her mind with other people is counter productive at best.

The thing that is just outside of our reach is usually the most interesting and when the author cries that she might have met her soulmate the friend tells her how great that is. How powerful it can be when (I am paraphrasing..) someone shows you your real self-your essence reflected in a mirror and show you everything that is holding you back. They antagonize us, knock us down so we have to pick ourselves up and look around to get our bearings again. It would be too painful to be with a soulmate forever, to love them forever because that type of scrutiny is a burden and too heavy to carry through out a lifetime.

As I come to the middle of my life (gawd I hope its the fucking middle. shit. now I am really depressed) I want o know what those people mean?

I thought I would know who I was by now.

Luckily I can still remember holding her the moment she came out, nursing like a champ right away, being naked against my chest for hours after she was born and pooping all over everything. Her first three sneezes as she took her first deep breaths in the world. Watching her brother rub his lips across her face and telling me “Mama! Her so soft!”.

Parenting can be like a holding pattern and landing delay while you are on a 28 hour flight to somewhere magical and you are exhausted and smell badly, your skin is dry and you are totally freaked your luggage won’t arrive and you will have nothing to wear and you desperately need a shower and to change your socks and underwear.

I am just flying around, in a figure 8 pattern, cutting little lines, in the ice trying not to fall down on my ass.

I ate a lot of Stouffers frozen dinners and Lean Cuisine. Occasionally Jeanne would make Steak and Gravy, Fried Fish, Shrimp Bisque or Tuna Noodle casserole. My mom liked to read and that is the most amazing gift she gave to me. But the woman would read at the table. While eating. Then smoking and reading and pretty much ignoring me. I loved Wednesday nights at my grandparents because we ate dinner, talked, argued, laughed, ate dessert then a game either all together or just me and my Poppy.

I found food in the fridge one day. Chicken breasts, rice and green beans. I didn’t know how to turn the oven on but I was well versed in the toaster oven. I lined the small pan with foil and put butter, pepper, salt, paprika, garlic powder and oregano. I cut up the green beans and put them in a pot with water in the steamer. I boiled water in another pan for the boil-n-bag rice. It was ready when Jeanne got home and she was shocked that I cooked. She loathed cooking although she was pretty good at it. I am not sure if eating was a favorite thing of hers. My mother spent much of her young life shunning amazingly yummy food because it would make her sick. She was allergic to all fruits but apples, all grains but rice, all veggies except dark green veg and beans, all milk, chocolate and everything pretty that grew outside and all animals. She ate rice crispies in apple juice for breakfast, couldn’t eat bread or pasta and only got white chocolate in her easter baskets. I understood why food was not something she really felt connected to as it use to try to kill her.

My ulterior motive for cooking was to make her stop reading and talk me to for christs sake.

It worked.

She was worried about fire and injury so she discouraged me from cooking when she wasn’t home but allowed me to step in that next christmas when she couldn’t get her shit together to cook everyone’s breakfast. Shortorder cook she was not. But at 12 I learned I could totally do that. Like Rainman looking at a bunch of toothpicks on the ground and counting them I coud look at the stove and just cook it all and assemble it easily. I don’t consider something that you don’t work at a talent-its just something I could do.

Babysitting at age 14 I caught my cooking break. I was “watching” this family’s kid while they had a party for work at their house catered by their up and coming friends company. A husband and wife duo in the kitchen making yummy food. I felt funny just socializing with the guests and had nothing to do since their kid never woke up I started weaseling my way into the kitchen. They asked me if I had ever worked in a kitchen before. I said no. I was only in middle school and the only job I had had so far was shampoo girl at  the salon where i got my haircut. Which was the coolest fucking job ever-being surrounded by girls wearing awesome clothes, tons of make up and giant hair smoking and reading fashion magazines talking about how people looked while people gave me dollar bills for washing their hair.

Cooking seemed cooler-more challenging. I had to get a work permit to work for them. I could only work 4 hours a day after school and 8 hours on the weekends. I washed a lot of pots. Peeled a lot of shrimp. Sliced a million baguette. Crushed a ton of garlic. Cut melon and cheese into tiny uniform triangles and washed a trillion heads of lettuce. They tried to get me to use the slicer but I wasn’t legally allowed which pissed them off but the slicer fucking scared the shit out of me. The only thing that has saved my stupid ass many times was being completely terrified of shit that could seriously hurt me. The slicer still scares the shit out of me. I don’t even like touching it when it’s turned off and unplugged. I thinks its insane they make and sell them for home use. Shit.

Regrouping. Shit. Okay.

But eventually Jerry started to show me how to make pate a choux. How to poach a giant salmon. How to trim a giant piece of beef to get the tenderloin out. How to debone a chicken. How to make every sauce that tastes good. The difference between minced and sliced garlic and why the flavor is more intense the smaller it is. How to cook just about everything. Also how to make everything look amazing. I made tomato roses, birds out of apples, baskets out of watermelons and flowers out of veggies with scallion stems on skewers. I worked my way up to fill the front case to make to order sandwiches, to-go dinner stuff and had  a cult following for my egg salad-all while in 9th grade.

I worked for this cater for about 4 years until my senior year of high school and just couldn’t take his crazy chef like abuse any longer. Frequently I was the only chick in the kitchen besides his wife and the chain smoking grandmother who made and decorated all his cakes. I learned about every sexual persuasion, position, curse word and insult you could possibly imagine. I learned what good food, good wine and good time was.

I wore tuxedo shirts and bow ties, meticulously cleaned and reorganized people’s kitchens when we did house parties. I found their vacuum and moped their floor. I cleaned their fridge and found Tupperware for leftovers and organized them with labels.

If my mother asked me to do these things at home I would convulse and appear as though she were asking me the square root of 7,865 while making me lick raw liver naked. I was getting paid at work and did not receive an allowance from her but at the time I don’t know if I had a good reason for being so unreasonable-as teenagers are about stuff at home.

I liked to cook. I made a whole french meal from Julia Childs cook book and invited 3 friends over for dinner in 10th grade. My chocolate mouse was amazing but I didn’t realize that it would feed 20 people. I bought saffron for the first time. I learned that poulet was french for chicken. I made stock.

Once when my mom was out-of-town I had a boyfriend sleep over ( I was a complete slut and for that will be terribly punished by Karma) and I suggested I make dinner. We went to the grocery store and I got food to make chicken stir fry. I was 16 and said slutty boyfriend was 19 or 20. He kept laughing at me picking out food and asking me what I was going to do with it all. I even bought fortune cookies and fresh ginger. Stupid fucker was completely unappreciative.

I continued to tell people I could cook well and occasionally tried to win over boys/men with food. It rarely worked. Once ensconced with current husband of 20 years this June I would cook for his guy friends. I would tell them things like “Hey, I will make waffles tomorrow before you leave. And bacon and honey butter…” Stoned, they would eat like starving Sudanese shoveling food into their pieholes without much comment except for thanks and the occasional well after-the-fact remarks like “holyshitColemakeshomemadewaffelsandcrepesandshit”.

I love to cook. Truly. I love food. I love the science of it. I love the camaraderie of it. I love the idea of feeding people with good food they have never had before. Or had at someones house.

I don’t know why I know how to cook, I don’t know why I can cook and I certainly can’t explain why I don’t cook for a living anymore but if you come over, I promise I will make you something good.

That phrase “you were raised by wolves” would be a relief if applied to my parents. Wolves have tight communities, set hierarchy’s, loyalty to one another, a community set on protection and providing for the offspring. Wolves would be nice. They have rituals of greeting, eating, sleeping and communication. It’s an ordered society living with wolves-you know where you stand even though they look ferocious and snarl and bark and howl-they are a tight band knit together against all others who are either dinner or an enemy.

Bunny’s on the other hand-totally different story. They make an adorable nest out of fluffy downy fur plucked from their very own bellies, have their tiny helpless mostly hairless babies and for 25 days they spend about 2 minutes each day with them feeding them and then they are on their own. Forever. They move on and have other babies and the cycle starts all over again. No ties to them as they raise their own families. Nothing.

They build a nest in another hollow log, underneath a grass pile behind the shed or under a bush.

Some parents are cute fuzzy bunny’s.

We are having a party tomorrow and I am getting really excited about all the yummy food I am making and the delicious cocktails I am planning to make. Its going to be super fun. And I have a really slutty dress to wear with black ruffled rumba panties underneath thanks to my amazing girlfriend who knows I covet a particular pair of black rumba panties which are my facebook picture more often than not.

Well, she didn’t buy me these panties but arent’ they perfect? Le sigh. Le pant. Le, I digress.

I feel as I get older I need less and less to survive and that is a good feeling. We don’t accumulate debt the way some people do so we can just work a little bit and we are all fine. We have two fairly manageable children and while we would both like a bigger family our age, the responsiblity and cost of another baby just outweigh the benefits and we own the stuff we have like our car and house (small mortgage on the house, very small).

My list rotates as to which is at the top. Sleep is at the top after several 13-14 hour shifts at the hospital and as I am getting money for that -that desire is fulfilled. When I don’t work I like to have a glass of wine and eat food at my leisure. My life is pretty great.

Subsets of desire also contain sex, laughing and showering.

I thought my life would get more and more complicated the older I got-at least that is how it seemed to me when I was little and watched my mom and dad spin out their lives. Maybe its more simple because I have managed to stay hitched to the same wonderful/annoying/silly/talented/frustrating man for 20 goddamned years this June. 20 fucking years. HOLYSHIT. I am hyperventilating with how long that is and how old that makes me. Its giving me the vapors.

Fringe benefits I enjoy that have come from this amazing life are listening to my children talk to each other and listening to their stories, smelling their heads (why do they still smell so delicious to me?), squeezing them and kissing their necks, watching them do amazing things and catching them being compassionate and polite. All of that makes me happy. So happy that I clap my hands a lot. YAYAYAY.

I have amazing friends who hold my hand, tell me to just stop it already, kiss me, tell me I am pretty, listen to my crazy shit and help me be okay-you know, in this grown up world that is so narrow and finite.

When I was little I thought that the world just got bigger and bigger as you got older and older and I find my world narrowing to a few basic things-lucky for me.

For some reason this original car trip has set the tone for most drives back and forth to the Cape as long as they have involved children. Prior to children I could smoke and drive and listen to loud music and drive as fast as I wanted to stopping only if and when I felt like it. No biggie. Long but no biggie.

Conversely now I dread it like I dread the dentist. I know I have to, I actually kind of want to because its good for me and the family and aren’t we lucky to have health care coverage-I mean relatives who live in such a lovely place? I am exhausted upon arrival but we have mastered that. We are up at 3am and arrive by noonish. No traffic, plenty of time to do stuff, take a nap and eat good food with family that same travel day.

Driving home can not be mastered. I am driving home from the Cape’s bitch. It’s impossible to get up that early while actually on some kind of vacation-it just seems wrong. The family wants to see us off. We always, well I always think that it won’t be so bad. I will craft some type of magic route that shaves off 100 miles from the trip and POOF! we will be home in no time.  It’s about 500 miles. Through NJ, NY and CT. All of which suck for various reasons and at varying times. The trip “should” take about 9 hours and we can usually make it 9 hours if we leave at 3am.

We left Boston at 1130 in the afternoon and did not arrive home until 11pmish. My threshold for losing my shit in the car and just stopping and sleeping somewhere was 1130pm. It was also torrentially raining through most of the worst traffic in NY and NJ along with crawling cars across 4 lanes to get to the Tapanzee bridge. It took us 75 minutes to go about 15 miles. We did that stopping thing about 3 times along our drive. I seriously don’t know how my husband who drove the whole way did not just kill one of us for breathing. I wanted to kill one of the children if they asked me for anything other that a cloth to staunch the flow of blood or water to extinguish flames.

I was so tired I could have easily murdered a kitten if it meant I could sell my soul to get the fuck out of the car. I told the children if they did not stop talking full stop I would do something undisclosed and horrible to them that would incur lasting consequences related to pain and crying and burning of remaining presents that we did not transport to the Cape with us.

And my husband snored the whole time, every night and I couldn’t sleep.

I only pooped once in 4 days and drank and ate so much I still feel ill.

The bright side was the town was deserted, it flurried briefly while at the Stop and Shop which is always the A&P in my mind. There were no cars driving down Commercial street and the kids and dog and spouse and I walked where ever we wanted. Spawn and I went for  a walk to take the dog to poop (lucky bastard) and we sang loud carols the whole way and wound up at my family’s bar and my father in law poured me  a drink and then we walked back home again. I hugged and kissed my great-grandfather in law who is such a curmudgeon I think they invented the word for him-because they knew he would be born. We were taken to the BIG CITY in Boston for an amazing night of Peter Pan with the 360* theater company and stayed at the oldest hotel in the country which was very swank. I felt like Paris Hilton walking my tiny fluffy stinky dog out of the elevator and through the revolving door. My in-laws treated us to an amazing holiday and we are so grateful for such fun memories and I am ridiculously thankful (like WHEW!) that my in-laws like our kids and want to be around them. They did all the dishes, fed us like kings, paid for our stupid dog to stay at the swank hotel and then stood outside freezing when the kids begged to go ice skating at the Frog Pond on the Common.

The drive home ruins all of those happy memories and because I know it will be horrible I dread it like crazy.

I think I can heal, if the children just don’t talk to me for a couple of days. I am actually glad to go back to work three days in a row to get the fuck away from them and their raging case of the GIMMES and CANIHAVES.

Vacation is over. No one is watching now. I can do whatever I want because I am the grown up. So there. (zerbert).

My heart is so full, complete and lucky it might break as it swells large enough to reach out to you. Envelope you and crush you tighter against me to keep it all from falling apart.

Bad christmas music played with earnest concentration with small hands, my white christmas tree filled with birds, the soft cheek of my children pressed against mine, the cold cloud filled sky bright with hidden sunshine, bare trees illuminated with moonlight, stars in a midnight blue sky, my dear’s warm hand on my back-all these magical things are mine.

As a new year approaches I feel the fast forward button pressed and I am lucky to have made it through another year by the skin of my teeth.

Yesterday was the anniversary of my mother’s death and tomorrow is the anniversary of my grandmothers death. Or its the other way around. I can’t keep it straight and I envision myself in older age actually going to their gravesites to confirm the date-bending creakily down to peer at the stones  and writing it down in pencil on some random piece of paper I will most likely loose or my great-grandchildren will find in a box of crap and toss it wondering what those dates could have meant.

For some reason I don’t feel more sad on the day she died. I don’t miss her more or think about her more on the anniversary of her death because that day was so ugly and my mother was not ugly. On that warm December day, when I rushed as fast as I could from 500 miles away on the Cape to her bedside to watch all of her bodily fluids leak out of her skin, her face and arms bloat with fluid, her scared eyes behind the giant intubation tube, the tears that flowed down her face and mine as I kissed her smelling like medicine and urine. Watching helplessly as timed ticked away and knowing that it was just a matter of time before she was dead, gone, forever. Whatever moments I had with her had passed and this was the last moment I would ever have with her living-sort of. Like in that poem by WH Auden “ Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. “

There was a definite ending to what my mother’s life had become. She was there and then hocus pocus she was not. There was a gradual letting go, slipping away  and turning her back on me that she needed I am sure to really be able to let go. She knew she was going to die. Maybe not that day she did but she knew it was coming, coming too soon and so she made her bed to lie in it.

I don’t like to remember that day because it’s the day I became an orphan really. It’s the day that began a whole series of shitty things I had to do that kept reminding me my mother was dead and about her life-some of which I was not a part. Having to talk to so many people who “knew her” and what an “angel” she was now looking down on us all. How charitable she was, how generous. What a loving person.

I say yes to all those things but to remember or see only the perfect things in someone when they die is to cheat them out of a life. A life is messy, you make bad choices as well as good ones. You love the best you can and even sometimes you screw it up. You say hateful things. You make lasting mistakes. You forget somethings you should have remembered. It all goes together in a life that you live.

The day that I remember my mother the most is my birthday. I had a big one this year in March-my 40th. For my mothers 40th birthday her friends threw her a funeral. Coffin, eulogy, her mother dressed in black-the whole bit only also filled with lots of tequila and coccaine. Her friends are and were a scream. It was funny and big and a spectacle and she deserved a big party that was silly and fun because she was very silly and fun. I miss her telling me she loves me, “Best of everyone”.

I also miss my mother on her birthday because I was so glad she was born. I was, despite all our bickering and fighting, completely in love with her as all children are with their mothers. She was just hard to love all the time-but aren’t we all?

Isn’t that the point of living a life-having people love you even when you are an asshole, comforting you during stupid trivial upsets, holding your hand when you want to push them away in fright, laughing with you after something stupid?

I don’t miss her more on the day she died and I try to forget about that day as much as I can. I prefer to think of her living and not leaving me here with this amazing life that I can’t share with her anymore.

“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”