Still Mixing After All These Years

Thirty-six years ago this month, my parents were married on a rainy-sunshiny day in central Illinois. They were barely old enough to drink at their own wedding and didn't have two pennies to rub together; my mom always said that in those early years, they were living on love.

One of the wedding gifts that they received was an avocado green hand mixer, a historically popular color for kitchen utensils and appliances in the years before Reagan. Life was good if you had a fridge and stove in matching avocado green; a hand mixer was another accessory for a well-coordinated kitchen.

My mom loves to bake, so that hand mixer occupies a solid place in my memory. My childhood recollections waver between crystal clear and fuzzy around the edges and completely opaque, but always, the avocado hand mixer is there, sitting on the kitchen counter in the four houses that I remember well.

It was the kitchen utensil that I learned to use because hand mixers, as far as cooking tools go, are relatively harmless. I remember learning important lessons about putting the mixer in the batter first before turning it on, and not the other way around. I learned how to mix while scraping the sides of the bowl to catch all the flour. I learned that being offered a beater after the cookie dough was mixed is one of life's greatest treats (salmonella risk aside).

When I moved into my first apartment, my mom gave me the mixer. At first, I didn't use it much. In college and then directly after, I didn't cook so much as assemble sandwiches and put waffles in the toaster. But I began to experiment with baking and learned that it calms me. There is something so lovely about the precise art of baking, and something so satisfying about modifying that precise recipe into something even better.

I have had that mixer for almost 15 years. In my apartments and houses, it has made cookies, brownies, pie fillings, whipped cream, and a hundred other things. In the last year or so, my kids have started to prop a stool against the counter and watch semi-patiently for the avocado mixer to stop so they could commandeer a beater.

After 36 years of use, that mixer still works and shows no signs of dying on me. I bought another one years ago, one that was new and white and had sleek-looking beaters. I think I have used it twice. I much prefer to use the one that was gifted to a young couple, starting life with not much else than each other and some things for their house. I don't have the avocado green appliances to match, but that great old mixer is nothing but at home in its second-generation family of bakers.

Are You Ready for Us, Baby?

Dear Baby,

Today, I forgot to pick up your sister from school, and then I cried. On the surface, this does not bode well for you: you will be born to a mother who leaves her child stranded at school and is an emotional wreck.

You may as well know now that I am not perfect. From your warm and cozy little home, it may seem unbelievable that you could be born into a world and a family that are chaotic and flawed. Your entry into this life will certainly be a shock, and you will not be happy about it at first.

But when you arrive, and you hear my voice in the outside world, you will not care that I am not perfect. You will not care that I have eaten approximately my weight in ice cream in the last month. You will not care that I sometimes make my kids watch "Harry Potter" movies when I am too tired to play and too irritated to watch any more cartoons. You will not care that every once in a while I am "that mom" who forgets school-picture day or lets your brothers go to bed with dirty knees.

Someday you might care that I am not Donna Reed, so I think it is only fair to warn you now about what you can expect out of me as a mom. At least then I can throw this back at you in fourteen years when you wish, silently or not, that I was like the other kids' moms.

I will kill spiders, bees and centipedes in your room, but if I see a mouse, you are on your own. I love my job, so you will always be in daycare. Sometimes I just want to hang out with your dad, with no kids. I do not do crafts, but we can make as many pies as you want. I will yell at you, probably more often than I should. Our house will not always be clean, but I promise we will never end up on "Hoarders." You will try Brussels sprouts, venison, and blue cheese and all kinds of other crazy foods, when all you want to eat are chicken nuggets. We will unintentionally hurt each other's feelings, but we will also intentionally lift each other up.

Do not be afraid to join us in our imperfect world. Because what you will see in your first moments of life will be the people who love you most. It will be evident to you, every day of your life, that you are loved and wanted. Despite all of my flaws and un-Carol Brady behavior, and the grief that we will cause each other, all of that will be easily overshadowed by the wonder you will see in life and the wonder I will see in you.

If all this sounds reasonable to you, then feel free to join us at any time. We cannot promise a perfect life, but we can promise love and warm jammies and a full tummy. Come and see us when you are ready, Baby. We are ready for you to complete our wonderful, chaotic family.

The Moms That Keep on Giving

A few years ago, I saw a news piece about the children of the Great Depression, and an older gentleman was talking about always being hungry. He said that he rarely saw his mother eat, and that he could not imagine how much she gave up to make sure that he was fed. He barely got the words out, and I still tear up when I think about both his mother's selflessness and his adult realization of her silent sacrifices.

As children, we do not always have a clear sense of the small and big sacrifices that our mothers make for us. Even as adults, when we start to understand the degree to which our lives shaped our parents' lives, we can never quite grasp the hundreds of ways our mothers put themselves second. Whether it is always taking the burnt piece of toast, or starving so we might eat, our moms give, and they give whether we are grateful or not.

I have been reading a lot of mommy blogs lately, for reassurance and solidarity, because I have learned that as a mom, second-guessing becomes second nature. We do not hesitate to sacrifice but we always wonder if we are doing enough. As a mom, looking at my growing circus of children, I would say that I am not doing enough to ensure that my kids are well-rounded, well-mannered, well-adjusted individuals. I obsess about the manners, knowledge, instruments, sports, languages, arts and community engagement that my kids probably will not master because I don't have the time to indulge them, and tend to forget that I am not Superwoman.

But as a daughter, looking back at my childhood and adolescence, I would say that my mother's sacrifices, both the ones I saw and the ones I did not, were not lacking. And since the best people to reassure mothers of their fine mommying are kids themselves (no matter how many times other people might say it, I always believe it more when my five-year-old identifies my good mommy skills), I want to tell my mom that all she invested is appreciated.

Sorry you had to attend so many two-hour torture sessions known as junior high band concerts.

Making me learn how to do laundry at 10 years old was really smart. I totally get it now.

I know now why I couldn't have a veil for my First Communion, and I'm sorry I was so sullen about it.

I understand now how exhausting it was for you when Dad was traveling.

You didn't fulfill your dream of Australia until this year because, among other things, you were spending precious travel money on family trips planned around my academic competitions.

Thanks for listening to me ramble on about whatever latest obsession, even though there was probably some show that you really wanted to watch instead.

You probably took the burnt piece of toast, the piece of cake with less frosting, and the butt of the loaf of bread.

I know that your heart broke every time I treated you poorly and every time I was hurting. I never quite appreciated that until my three-year-old said he didn't like me.

I don't know if you feel like a success or a failure, or if you still second-guess yourself. I don't know if you remember all the things you gave. I can't remember all of them, either, but you should know that I will take the burnt toast, go to the torturous band concerts, and listen patiently, and in that lies your success as a mother. I will do anything I can for the hearts living outside of my body, as you did for the heart living outside of yours.

It's the Real Thing, Baby

First blueberry pie. Almost certainly not the last. 

Whenever I am in the kitchen, there are four little words I love and dread hearing: "Mommy, can I help?"

I love that my kids want to help. I know that someday, it is possible that no bribe or threat I can dream up will get them within twenty feet of the kitchen, so I enjoy their enthusiasm now. Truthfully, however, there are times that their "help" adds an hour, an egg on the floor, and flour in crevices that will never come clean, and I just want to do it myself.

It is a constant pas-de-deux of cooking and trying to prevent salmonella when they climb up on their little stools and, faster than the speed of light, rub their little hands on raw meat. Powdery white substances are irresistible, both for eating by the handful and for smearing onto hair and eyes and siblings.

Despite this, I almost always let them help. I want them to have memories of being welcomed in the kitchen. My mother tells a story about baking cookies as a child for a 4-H competition and burning the first batch. Her mother helped her start over, remix and re-bake, and under my grandma's guidance, the second batch was perfect. This memory means a great deal to my mom; as one of seven children, she did not always have much individual time with her own mother. I am sure it meant a great deal to my grandma, who lost her mother before she was five and probably spent little time with her in the kitchen.

Besides the benefit of time -- which is precious with two working parents and three, soon to be four, children -- learning to cook is a lesson in self-sufficiency and persistence. And in our house, that lesson is built upon a foundation of do-it-yourself. We still buy boxed macaroni and cheese (because it is delicious), but otherwise, we cook, and we teach, from scratch.

I have not bought a box of pancake mix in almost two years. Through much satisfying and frustrating trial and error, I found a recipe and modified it until it was perfect. I have learned to be comfortable making slow-cooking oatmeal and slow-cooking grits. I take great pride in my pie crusts, which my mother showed me how to make. Sometimes they are still too sticky and shaped like footballs, but I persist, and every once in a while, they are flaky and light and beautiful and I want to send pictures of them to my mom.

This is what I want my kids to learn when they "help": it is not okay to eat raw eggs, and if you measure and mix all the ingredients yourself, it will take longer and taste better. We live in a post-Betty Crocker world where you can buy just about anything pre-made, and I am not going to lie, sometimes I would love to cook nothing but things that require me to add water or press "bake" on the oven. Sometimes a Stouffer's lasagna is the best-tasting thing on Earth.

But so much is lost in the instant-ness. A muffin mix doesn't allow a three-year-old to build a brown-sugar sandcastle. When my daughter made her first little pie, it was all she could do to not march around the house, hoisting the ramekin above her head like a trophy. I showed pictures of her pie to my mom, and felt the do-it-yourself implant in a fourth generation.

As long as they want to help, and as long as I can summon the patience, my kids will be allowed to "help" in the kitchen. Someday, when they are living in early-twenties poverty, they will buy ramen and instant oatmeal, but they will have memories of learning to saute garlic, roast squash, and bake homemade pies. They will remember that flour and baking powder just feels better than a pre-mix, and somewhere down the line, I will see pictures of their kids' baked goods: proud smiles alongside accidentally dropped eggs and sugar in their hair.

Growing Life and Combating Stupidity

 The hardest part of being a Kitchen Widow is missing my husband. The second hardest part is parenting my children alone for much of the week. Some days, a long day at my job and the 200th evening viewing of "Despicable Me" and breaking up inane fights over one wooden block that someone wants and someone else threw at my head are more than I can handle.

Yet, we are having another baby. I think some people, privately and not-so-privately, cannot imagine why we would have a fourth child when having three stretches us mentally, physically and financially. It is not easy; that much is absolutely true. And having multiple kids is not for everyone. And sometimes I complain about it.

Pregnancy #1, Summer 2007

But the truth is that we are happy and excited to bring another life into the world. We love being parents and are mostly good at it. I like being pregnant and mostly enjoy it. And most people are supportive and wonderful. I have been discouraged lately, however, by a barrage of comments on my pregnancy and our full household. I have never encountered, throughout any of our pregnancies, such a menu of ridiculous, mean and inconsiderate statements, and I think it is time to stand up for pregnant women and mommies (especially those of big families).

Things Never to Say to a Pregnant Woman (and these are all real comments made to me this year):
"You are so big!"
"Are you having twins?"
"You sure you're not due sooner?"
"You look miserable."

Things Never to Say to a Soon-to-be Mother of Four (again, all real):
"You are crazy/insane/a glutton for punishment!"
"Isn't two enough?"
"You'd think you would have learned your lesson."
And my personal favorite: "Don't you know how to stop?"

Pregnancy #2, Winter 2009

I guess people are trying to be friendly or funny, but let me set the record straight. Being pregnant is hard work, whether you are working outside the home or not, whether you have other children or not. And as pregnant women, we have the amazing privilege of growing life, while balancing changes to our emotional, mental and physical states. We know what we look like, but unlike observers, we also know what we feel like. And some days we feel beautiful, other days we feel wretched. In the end, we are doing an important job that is not easy. You would not tell an overweight person that they are looking pretty fat, so do not tell me I look big and miserable.

Pregnancy #3, Spring 2011

Being a mother of three small children on my way to four is also not easy. But it is our choice. We are fortunate that getting pregnant and delivering healthy children has been relatively easy for us. I know couples who have struggled with this and my heart breaks when I think about those who cannot have or have lost the children they want. We have always felt that it is a gift that we can have kids and, to be perfectly cliche, we are not looking a gift horse in the mouth. A big family has been our dream all along, just as some people dream of one child or two or none at all. In the end, it is nobody's business.

Pregnancy #4, Spring 2013

So in answer to that last comment, I guess we don't know how to stop. We see the three beautiful children in our home that sometimes drive us crazy but always bring us joy, and I feel the baby elbowing around inside me, and it is all a blessing. Even if you feel it is nonsense to have more than one child or more than two, or if you are a perfect stranger who feels close enough to me to touch my stomach, just back off. We all make choices, and we are happy with ours, so my new choice is to have you zip it and just tell me that I look great and you are happy for our growing family.

I mean really, do you actually want to piss off a huge, miserable pregnant woman who is insane and ignorant? I didn't think so.

A Note to That Guy I Live With

In 1846, poet Elizabeth Barrett wrote to Robert Browning, her future husband: "Was ever any in the world, in any possible world, so perfectly good and dear to another as you are to me!" It was just one line from one of more than 500 letters exchanged over 20 months' time, chronicling the friendship and courtship of two great British writers.

The letters are unique in their volume and passion. Separated by her health and a possessive father, they mourn the time spent apart in language that shows, so sincerely, how desperate they were to be together. Thankfully, the world has their correspondence. Another great love story was not lost to oblivion.

We are not recording our love stories in the same way. We do not write letters in the 21st century, and based on what we see in the media and from celebrities, I think a lot of us are cynical about love. Although we may see flashes of love stories in feature articles or two-minute spots, evidence like the Browning letters is rare. Will we have a great love story of our age? Yes, but it won't be recorded "in the moment," and that, I think, is a tremendous loss.

I feel a bit of solidarity with the Brownings and their desperation to be together. I do live in the same house with my husband, which is fortunate, but sometimes all I see of him is a sleepy two minutes in the morning before I leave and a sleepy two minutes at night when he gets home. Most days, I can barely stand to be away from him. He knows that, but I never write it down.

Somehow I feel that our letters detailing daily life would be decidedly less romantic and more functional than the eloquent Browning letters, but maybe, in the interest of history and spreading love to a world that needs it, I should try.

"Dearest -- We have a laundry situation again. I fear that the load in the washer has been there for three days, and the children are all starting to look like they dressed themselves. I hope you were not attached to that Ming Tsai cookbook, as it is now in 30 pieces, some of which are thoughtfully decorated with crayons. I have come to accept that we must abandon the "couch is not a jungle gym" argument. No amount of time-outs have been effective, and to be truthful, I wish a little bit that I could jump on the couch, too. I missed you today, partly because I had to retrieve the thrown macaroni and cheese from under the table all by myself, and partly because I just miss your steady presence and your slightly inappropriate jokes. The baby is kicking as I write this; perhaps he or she misses you already, too. I feel lonely when you are gone, and look forward, all week, to those four hours together as a family on Monday evenings."

Chef Matt and I do not do date nights but once every three months or so, and a weekend away is about as likely as you would expect. We do spend 20 minutes alone together on Friday mornings, eating muffins in my work cafe, catching up on the week before he has to be at the restaurant. And that is what has come to work for us; a sliver of a day that always leaves me feeling happy but a little sad to see him walk away.

The Brownings did what they had to do to maintain contact during a painful separation, and the world is better off for their hundreds of pages of declared love. We also do what we have to do, and that has developed into a Friday-morning reconnect that is neither especially private or especially romantic. But that 20 minutes is as important to us as a weekend trip or weekly dinner out might be to another couple: this is the way that we keep in touch.

I do not know that ours is one of the "great love stories," and maybe people today do not have the patience or interest to read pages of letters that I could write, lamenting our separation, but I want our children to know that their parents wanted to be together, though they rarely see us so. Maybe a note here and there would not be a bad idea. Even if no one ever sees them but our family, I would feel better knowing that our story would have been recorded at one time, even when we have long passed from this Earth.

"But to the end, the very end .. I am yours." Robert Browning, 1846. 

And Financial Complications Arise

While waiting tables at a gourmet pizza place a number of years ago, a customer told me that her pizza better be solid gold for what we were charging. I smiled politely, replied with an explanation of our fresh, high-quality ingredients, all the while wanting to tell her to shove it and go to Domino's.

If you want an example of how your high-school economics class matters in the real world, eat or work at a restaurant. After 15 years of waiting tables and six years as a chef's wife, I am well aware that going out to eat is not a simple matter of order food, make food, eat food, pay for food. It is far more complicated than that. And at the moment, there is a potential situation in my home state that will have even more complicated effects on the restaurant industry.

The Minnesota Legislature is seeking to pass a bill raising the minimum wage. In one version, the rate would go up over three dollars in the next few years. For Minnesotans making the current minimum wage, this will be an economic relief. It is hard to make ends meet making non-tipped minimum wage, and I am, of course, in favor of helping the lowest-wage earners keep up with the rapidly rising cost of living.

But then I consider the situation of some restaurants, and it gives me pause. Since Chef Matt has been an executive chef, I have learned more than I ever wanted to know about food cost and labor cost. Food and labor are both expensive, and every week, Matt crunches numbers, cuts shifts, creatively uses food, and works extra hours himself to keep the restaurant running. The solution could always be to raise meal prices, but then you have the "solid-gold pizza lady" issue making a reputation for your restaurant's value.

For small restaurants, increased labor cost, for tipped employees in particular, is going to create difficulties that could make it hard to keep business running as usual. Matt's restaurant is farm-to-table, but local, high-quality foods are often more expensive, and with higher labor, it could complicate his ability to purchase the produce and meats he wants to. His restaurant has a reputation for unique, interesting dishes that make use of beautiful ingredients, but that, too, can be expensive.

If this bill goes through, and tipped employees are granted a higher minimum wage, he will likely have to sacrifice some of the things that make his small restaurant the place that it is, charge more for dishes, and work more than he already does. The part is that is frustrating for him, too, on a more personal level, is that in his company of restaurants, many of the tipped employees average a higher hourly wage than he does.

I was a server, so I know how hard they work and how essential that paycheck is. As a server in Iowa while in college, I made $2.13 an hour, and my paychecks were essentially negative. That is not okay. But when the executive chef of a restaurant, whose job it is to balance food cost, labor cost, customer prices, perceived value, food responsibility, and the creative art of cooking in a 55-hour week makes less money than a tipped employee, it is a little hard for me to swallow.

I am aware that this makes me sound insensitive to the thousands of hard-working, deserving tipped employees in the state. But there is always another side to the story. Many restaurants are not huge money-makers, especially the small independent ones. And what I see is what my husband lives each day and how this might effect our family. He is not the big evil business, desperate to cheat workers in order to increase our profit. He wants to do right by his employees, and stresses and sweats to make all things as fair as possible.

But I fear that if this bill passes, and in the next couple of years the minimum wage rises two to three dollars, some of the restaurants that this community loves will need to compromise quality, raise food prices to a difficult level, or close altogether. And to me, that means loss of integrity, loss of business, and loss of jobs. I do not know what the answer is, but there must be a compromise at hand, so the hard workers of Minnesota can continue to be employed at the restaurants that they, and their customers, and their chefs, love.