Home/cooking

My youngest cousin, Stephanie, got married this past weekend. My mother and her two siblings had, between them, seven children, and Steph’s was the last wedding of our generation. Rachel and I travelled to Winnipeg —no kids! Three nights in our very own hotel room! But that’s not what this post is about, lovely as our getaway was! — to join the rest of my family for what felt to me like the last hurrah, at least until all the bar and bat mitzvahs begin. In April.

And the wedding was lovely, but I’m not going to write about the wedding right now. Instead, I’m going to write about gathering at my aunt and uncle’s house for Friday-night dinner and for leftovers on the Monday morning after the wedding. And really, I can barely write about that because I can envision only pages and pages and paragraphs and paragraphs of beef brisket and kasha and braised chicken and eggplant salad and chopped liver and grilled vegetables and breaded fish for the kids (and grownups) and challah and carrot pudding and lox and brownies and two different kinds of pie and these strange cookies my mother used to make called kufels.  And Jeanne’s cake, which you have to have grown up with to love.

(My cousin Jill saw me taking a photograph of the cake and said, “Are you going to blog about this?”)

And of course I’m not even writing about food, even though of course it was all divine. What I’m writing about is a certain kind of home. I’m writing about the flavours that have been steeped into me since childhood, but also about gathering around the same table, posing for the same photograph on the stairs, the familiarity of the cutlery (my aunt and my mom had so much of the same tableware, the same glasses, dishes), how I know where everything is in my aunt’s kitchen. I mentioned in passing that our Bodum had broken, and it was as though saying it made it so — the 1980s Dansk French press that had been sitting on the top shelf of a cupboard in my aunt’s kitchen found its way into my carry-on bag, along with matching cups.

Rachel and I exclaimed over the pie crust, and of course that led to a discussion of the fact that there are, obviously, a dozen or so pies in my aunt’s freezer — you see where you get this from now, don’t you? — and then of course you knew there was a pie in my bag as well for the flight home, along with a Ziploc baggie full of brisket. Anything else? Anything else?

This is how I learned to cook. More precisely, this is how I learned the philosophy of cooking I have today: big meals, planned weeks in advance, made ahead and frozen and fussed over. And by cooking, I mean life, obviously. The dishes themselves change slightly over the years; the menus evolve. But the flavours are the same.

“You don’t”/ “I don’t  … get this very much anymore,” my Auntie Sheila, my mom’s sister, and I said to each other at the door, our words overlapping, no need to define this. We know. We both know.

Blogger of the Month

 

Confession: I’ve never been an Employee of the Month. This may be because, with the exception of an 18-month stint working for an abusive boss at a health-policy research think tank, I’ve never really been an employee. This, of course, doesn’t count my stints in retail during high school and university: my very first job outside of babysitting was as a folder at Benetton. Remember Benetton? It still exists, although for me it’s forever locked in the 80s, those rugby shirts one of the status symbols I strove to attain. At Benetton, I was paid four dollars an hour to fold and re-fold sweaters in uniform rows. I would fold for hours, and then some customer would come along and unfold all my sweaters (and not buy a single one), and then I would grit my teeth and fold them all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat. In retrospect, this was great training for being a parent, except that at Benetton at least I got paid four dollars an hour for my efforts.

Yes, I have a point. The point is that, while I have never been an Employee of the Month, all that sweater folding and re-folding and musing about parenthood may have finally paid off. This month, I am Today’s Parent magazine’s Blogger of the Month — yes, that’s me right there on page 14 of the July issue, wonky hair and all.

I’ve been blogging for a few months now at Today’s Parent as “The Other Mother” — here's my latest, on one of big payoffs of having Rob in our lives. It’s a lovely gig, one that forces me to stretch my blogging and writing chops (is it possible to stretch one’s chops, or did I just mix a metaphor there? Don’t answer that.) and think more critically about parenting, and writing, and about writing about parenting.

But between writing here, there, and here, I sometimes feel pulled in different bloggerly directions, trying to remember which one of my very similar but slightly different blog hats I’m wearing that day. Not that I’m complaining. I love my job(s), or lack thereof, just like I love my kids. Even if there are days in both realms where, every so often, it would be lovely to simply fold sweaters all day long. Sweaters in nice neat rows, no one to mess them up at all.

Mama has a brand-new book

HINI enough for you? Sorry, couldn’t resist.

We’ve all had our plague over at this end: Rowan came home from a class trip to the play farm exhausted and lethargic and put himself to bed for two days. Rachel coughed approximately twice. Isaac was feverish and snotty and sleepy for a week. As for me, I developed a sudden-onset hacking cough and low-grade fever right on the tail end of the Great, Never-Ending Sinus Infection of 2009. In a fit of denial, I ushered myself into my GP’s office so that she could “rule out bronchitis.” Because, me? I don’t get the flu. The flu is for mere mortals who ACTUALLY LEAVE THEIR HOUSES. Which I, as a self-employed, home-office–based freelancer, prefer not to do. I was genuinely surprised when my doctor showed up in the examining room decked out in a hazmat suit and took my temperature and blood oxygen levels and then handed me a prescription for Tamiflu and a requisition for a chest x-ray. And a mask. I looked at the little blue piece of paper in my hand.

“You mean, like, a chest x-ray in the next few days? Like if things get bad?”

“No,” she said, looking at me as though the flu had affected my brain. Which maybe it had. “I mean a chest x-ray now. Your lungs don’t sound too good.”

I keep forgetting I have children, I guess. Children who are snotty germ magnets. Children who insist upon drinking from your water bottle and licking your cheek and coughing into your face. Children who are only just becoming adept at handwashing and coughing into their elbows. Children who go to school with other children and pick up all their germs. Before I had children, I rarely got sick. But Rowan’s birth seemed to usher in the Age of the Antibiotic, and Isaac’s arrival did nothing to stop it. Life with children seems to be a series of steppingstones from one prescription to the next: bronchitis, ear infections, pinkeye, strep. It’s a wonder we get anything done around here.

And yet, we do. I’d complain more (okay, maybe that would be difficult, but shut up) about the constant sickness, not to mention the other zillion parental things that take up vast swaths of my time and energy, except for the fact that I can’t argue that the children have somehow made me less productive. In the era BC (Before Children), when I — in theory — had all the time in the world to write, I didn’t seem to. But the Age of the Antibiotic seems to have had the side effect of writerly productivity: the novel pages are adding up, a slow series of essays have been accepted (and more than a few rejected), not to mention this blog, which wouldn’t exist without the kids. (Or, if it did, it would be kind of creepy.)

And neither would this book.

Yes, it’s in (Canadian) stores now, and will be in the US come the spring. And, last weekend, Rachel, Rowan, Isaac and I had sufficiently recovered from our viral invasion to get on a plane and fly to Toronto for the official launch of  And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents and Our Unexpected Families.

I’m so glad we did. You know, I spent a lot of my 20s regularly visiting the Toronto Women’s Bookstore — a must for a downtown-dwelling women’s studies major, really. So it was a singular thrill to see my own anthology launched there. As it was to meet for the first time so many of the contributors to the anthology: Mary Bowers (who drove in all the way from Chicago), Annemarie Shrouder, Carrie Elizabeth Wildman, Shira Spector, Dawn Whitwell, Torsten Bernhardt, Marcie Gibson, Erin Sandilands, Jake Szamosi. And some of their kids. Mary and Annemarie brought the house down with fantastic readings. My doting father took lots of pictures.

 

My coeditor, Chloë Brushwood Rose

And Rachel (who also has an essay in the book, by the way; all you non-bio moms in particular might want to take a look) brought the kids. We were a little concerned that a book launch wasn’t necessarily the best venue for them, but they held their own just fine. Rowan took good advantage of the cookies and juice, capitalizing on the fact that there was little we could do to stop him from availing himself of a sixth Oreo in the middle of someone’s reading. At one point during my reading I looked up, and he had walked down the middle of the aisle to watch me. He stood, smiling, ten feet away, as I told the story of the events and the people leading up to his conception and birth, the complicated and exquisite love that brought him and his brother into the world and that surrounds their lives. He looked at me, smiling, and I looked at him and smiled back as I read, and then, when I looked up again, he had gone, in all likelihood back to the cookie table. 

Me, reading from "Mamas' baby, Papa's maybe"

“Susan's talking now!” he told Rachel. Later, he asked her, “When Susan was talking, was that from the book she made?” he asked Rachel, later. “Yes, she she was,” she told him. And that night, as I put him to bed, he told me, “Congratulations on your book, mom. It’s nice that you made a book about us. I liked the party.”

And then he coughed. Still, it’s also thrilling to know that he’s beginning to get a glimpse into what exactly it is that I do, and how he and his brother are part of it — germs and all.   

 

 

Post-reading hugs from my boys