On Onions and Delight
The smell of garlic and onions wafted through the air as the sauce simmered. My eyes stung and watered. I hated onions on their own, but the smell felt like home. My grandmother boiled the pasta water, assembled her mise en place, stirred and tasted her homemade spaghetti sauce while I watched reruns of I Love Lucy or played Solitaire on her living room rug. Occasionally she'd let me dip my tasting spoon or (even my finger!) into the bright red sauce.
"More onions. More Parmesan," she'd conclude without fail. She'd grab another half an onion and begin chopping away while handing me the Kraft Parmesan cheese to sprinkle to my heart's content. I know for anyone with a grandmother who was actually Italian, this must sound horrifying, but this was our secret ingredient and I will defend it until the day I die.
My other special job was to mix and shape the meatballs. After washing my hands, I'd plunge them into the bowl of ground beef and turkey (always a combo for the softest meatballs), breadcrumbs, eggs, and all the seasonings. I loved the squish of the mixture between my fingers and I'd knead and shape until my hands were almost numb with cold. We'd brown the meatballs in a pan first, rotating them one by one, before adding them to the sauce.
She let me add the one lone bay leaf and sometimes I would be lucky enough to find it in my bowl during dinner, like a cracker jack prize.
It was a time consuming process from start to finish. I would only help some of the time, returning to the tv or card games when I got bored. But she made our beloved spaghetti and meatballs for every special occasion in our family: birthdays, Christmas Eve, graduations. We requested it unanimously. And now I miss it furiously.
My grandmother died over a decade ago, but the scent of onions still sends me back to her kitchen. It reminds me of her patience, her love, her desire to delight us all no matter how many hours she had to spend at the stove.
My grandmother didn't just give us meatballs; she gave us her full attention.
She paid attention to what delighted, enthralled, saddened us.
She always had my favorites on hand: blueberry muffins for breakfast after a sleepover, chocolate cherry cordial ice cream for dessert, garlic noodles for a weeknight dinner before gymnastics practice, and spaghetti and meatballs for my birthday.
She listened to every story I told about Justin S. or Brad. L. asking out so-and-so on the bus. She watched me practice my beam routine behind her couch over and over, clapping every time no matter how much I wobbled. She helped with my math homework and read my history essays. She played Rummy with me until our scores were in the upper tens of thousands. She comforted me when Justin S. did not ask me out.
She paid attention to what I paid attention to. And I felt loved.
My mom wrote down my grandmother’s recipe from memory after she died. We've tried many times to replicate the exact blend of cheese and Italian seasoning, adding notes to the index card recipe through trial and error. But it's never quite as good as I remember.
Maybe it never will be.
These days I don't have much time to spend preparing food. I'm ashamed to admit most of the meals I cook for my family are pre-packaged in some way or take less than 10 minutes to make--scrambled eggs, pasta and store bought sauce, frozen chicken nuggets and fries in the air fryer, chicken tikka masala from Costco.
To my surprise and delight, I've found that I don't actually hate onions like I thought I did as a kid. Maybe I never hated them or maybe I just grew into it. Either way, one way I've found to channel my grandmother's flavor profile and intentionality while cooking these days is to add an onion to whatever I'm making. I'll ask my husband to pick up another onion whenever he masks up to go to the store.
"Just to have on hand," I say.
I may not be making her family famous spaghetti and meatballs, but I can quickly chop an onion to add to scrambled eggs, a chicken dish, my tuna salad. And with every crunchy bite and scrunch of my nose while chopping, I can delight in my memory of my grandmother and be reminded to pay attention to the delights of those I love.
***
This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "The Story of a Recipe".
Love on the Other Side
I leaned over the side of the second hand glider and clicked on the sound machine as a rush of rain filled my daughter’s room. I pulled her onto my lap to continue our pre-nap wind-down.
I already helped her pee in the potty and changed her into her bedtime Pull-up. I brushed her crooked teeth and checked the progress on her incoming molars -- three little icebergs protruding through a sea of swollen gums. We read three stories which turned into 5 because, as a fellow bookworm, I have trouble saying no. “Uh-one book?” (Another book) she asked.
As I drew her to my lap, I offered my breast. She opened her mouth wide, latched on and instantly relaxed. She dug her hand inside my other bra cup and started fiddling absentmindedly. Her eyes drifted closed as I began to sing “You are my sunshine.”
I looked across the room at her twelve month photos arranged in a grid on the opposite wall from newborn burrito to opinionated toddler. In the other corner of the room, two globes with butterflies swayed gently to the breeze of the fan, giving the appearance that the butterflies could flutter away.
My daughter is 21 months old. She is still nursing. Before nap, before bed, and when she wakes up in the morning. And, more often than I'd like to admit, when she's throwing a fit because I won't give her the cup without the lid (spoiler alert: she spills it every.dang.time) or sad because brother won't share a toy ("Bubba mean", she'll say), or hurt from running too fast and tripping over a misplaced lego or little people or even nothing at all.
Nursing is still her biggest comfort.
She fiddled in my bra for a while, then even her fidgety hand went limp. Her sucking slowed and I could feel the heat of her skin pressed against mine, dampening my own chest and stomach. My singing turned to humming, then to silence as her breathing steadied. I could hear her brother chatting a made up game of fire rescue from his room. “Weeoow weeoow” his siren echoed.
I don’t always let her sleep in my arms, but lately I’ve been chasing slow. Trying to stop time. To savor these moments with the last baby I will nurse.
When I was certain she was fast asleep, I kissed her forehead and tasted the mac and cheese she had for lunch. But as I stood to transfer her to the Carolina blue hand-me-down crib from her brother, complete with hand-me-down bitemarks, she squinted her eyes and started sucking again; she reached around me in a big bear hug and did not let go.
She was not ready to give up my comforting arms. She was not ready to let go.
I peeled her fingers off my shirt and set her into the crib as she flailed.
“Hug hug,” she pleaded.
I am a sucker for her new words, and this was the first time she said the word “hug.” Not “more milk,” but “hug.”
I picked her up again wondering if I would be there all afternoon. I thought of the dishes piled on the counter and the crusty pot of macaroni left on the stovetop. She dropped her head on my shoulder and the crying stopped.
I swayed with her for a few minutes, humming again.
I leaned over the crib again and she tensed up, clamped her thighs around my waist, making it nearly impossible for me to peel her off of me and into the crib.
“Hug hug,” she said again.
“I can give you more hugs when you wake up. Now it’s time to sleep,” I ventured.
She slowly unclamped her legs and looked at me with her big, brown eyes. I was surprised it worked, but I wasn’t going to miss my window.
“Otay,” she said and let me place her in the bed next to her menagerie of stuffed cats and babies.
“There will be lots more hugs when you wake up,” I promised, as I dimmed the light and backed out of the room.
She just needed to know that there was love waiting for her on the other side of the unknown or uncomfortable. Maybe we all do.
***
This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "Snapshot".
Teaching our Kids that Black Lives Matter: A Start
"Aidan, bubba, can you help me with something? I need your help making a card for someone. His name was George, just like you.”
For some unknown reason, my son has nicknamed himself George for the last six months and when we introduce him to new people, back when we were meeting new people in person, he'd yell, "I’m not Aidan, I'm George!"
“Otay,” he said. Okay.
He climbed up the barstool to the counter, reached for the markers and plain sheets of white paper, and began scrawling out random letters, R-R-P-P-I-T, as I talked.
"Aidan, I want to tell you about a man named George. He is black, like our friend's Jackson and Selina. He has skin that is darker than Dada's. The police hurt him because of his dark skin and he died." I said, probably too nonchalantly, trying to strike a serious tone without terrifying him.
"But how did they kill him?" he asked, turning his face to mine, looking up from his alphabet handiwork.
I cupped his cheeks in my hands, stared into his face and tried to imagine what a stranger would see. With one look at his almond, dark brown eyes, lashes thick like eyeliner, would they automatically peg him as Asian or Filipino? Or just ambiguously “ethnic?” Or would they see his creamy skin and think white only? Would they see both stories at once? Would they know his rich, brown eyes are darker even than his Filipino father's, but his medium brown hair more closely matches that of my very white brother? I see a boy who is handsome beyond measure. God's perfect mix of chromosomes and features. I see a boy who is not white or Filipino, or mixed, I just see Aidan.
Is that how George Floyd's mama felt? Like me, was she unable to see what the world sees, holding only to a mother's love. Or is that a luxury only reserved for mothers of white, or half white children?
Was she forced early on to see her son the way the world would see him in order to protect him? What decisions did she make differently because of his skin color?
Did she grieve the way the world saw him, categorized him, feared him because of God’s perfect mix of chromosomes and features?
I dropped my hands from Aidan’s innocent face and remembered the task I had set out to do.
"Well," I took a breath. "They held their knee down on his neck and he couldn't breathe. Basically, they smooshed him." I said, knowing the word “smooshed” was all wrong and yet felt it was a verb he would understand. He knows what happens when you smoosh play doh or macaroni and cheese between your fingers.
I looked toward the office where my husband was working from home, wondering how the conversation would sound to a fly on the wall. How am I having this conversation with a 3 and a half year old?
"But why did they smoosh him?" he implored again.
"I'm not exactly sure. I think the policeman was very mad or hurt or scared and wanted to hurt him. I don’t know why it happened, but we are very sad about this and we don't think it's okay. Would you like to help me make a card for his family? To tell them that we remember George and that we are sad too?"
"Otay," he said.
"Can I teach you how to spell George?"
"Otay," he said.
I don't know what I expected. If I thought he would cry or lash out, “That's not fair.”
But I carefully wrote out G-E-O-R-G-E across the top of a piece of paper as Aidan watched intently.
"G-E-O-R-G-E, that spells George." I said.
"Why does he have two G's?" Aidan asked.
"He has two G sounds so he needs two Gs," I replied. "Can you write George on the here and we'll put it with the card?" I pointed below my ALL CAPS writing. I still hadn’t formulated my own message to the family.
"Otay," he said again and picked up a highlighter and started making the letters, clutching the pen in his fist like many toddlers do. He wrote out the letters, one by one. They slanted up and then down, then up again, but he spelled out every letter.
“What are you drawing now?” I asked as he picked up a new marker.
“Flowers,” he said.
“I think that is a great idea.”
***
I’m still not sure I did it right. I’m not sure there’s a “right” way to have this conversation. If Aidan is, in fact, too young. If I should have let myself cry. But I know Aidan will grow up hearing about George Floyd; I wanted him to hear it first from me. I want him to know I will not shy away from these conversations, even if I fumble them. He is not too young for empathy. He is not too young to learn that racism exists and that it is not okay. He is not too young to draw some flowers to brighten a stranger’s day.