Life From Scratch (34 page)

Her tears now revealed the truth I needed to see: My pain was her pain. Everything that hurt me, hurt her.

It really was that simple.

While Mom was gone, the doctor administered my epidural. I insisted on not being completely numb for the birth, so they gave me a walking dose. The relief was instant and complete. Keith and I were playing Boggle when Mom returned with two Styrofoam cups.

“How are you holding up?” she asked, sizing up my relaxed countenance with surprise.

“I got an epidural. I’m going through a huge contraction now,” I said, “Do you see it?”

She pointed to the top of the digital mountain on the screen, “This? I suppose these gadgets are kind of neat after all, aren’t they?”

We clunked our foam champagne glasses with a dull thud.

By midday, real labor began. Keith was at my side, Mom a few feet away by the window. I hadn’t planned to invite her to stay, but after I saw her struggle through my contraction, I knew she belonged at my side.

I was ten days overdue, but the labor went quickly. Four strong pushes later, my child greeted the world with a mighty wail.

“It’s a girl,” Keith grinned.

We named her Ava Marie. She floated in my arms, her soft skin warm and redolent. In the first instant I held her, my heart cracked open. I would do whatever I could for my child, this soft, sweet stranger of my heart’s creation. I knew I would never abandon her; like Mom, I’d give her the life I knew she deserved. I would protect her with my
everything
.

Mom stayed another week to help me and fawn over Ava, but then had to get back to work. She’d recently taken a job as the business manager at a local seminary in Boston. After I dropped her off at the airport, I found a chubby-cheeked baby doll in the crib next to my old teddy bear. I recognized the blue eyes and yellow knit cap instantly: It had been Michael’s. Unbeknownst to me, Mom had kept it all these years, and now she’d left it for Ava.

For the next several months I cradled, nursed, rocked, and read to my daughter. She learned to hold her head up, roll over, sit up, cuddle Michael’s baby doll. I cheered her on like a crazed soccer mom. For the first time since I’d become an adult, I saw the world through a child’s eyes: I understood that it was an incredible place, but also a place of surrender. She could do nothing but trust me and her surroundings.

Nursing her was the ultimate reminder of this: I was literally Ava’s food. The responsibility was humbling. I called Mom eight times a day with questions. When the all-night sessions wore me down, Grace, who’d successfully nursed two babies, talked me off the ledge, reminding me to drink plenty of water and to eat right. Our calls always ended with, “I wish you weren’t half a country away.”

While Keith was at work, Ava and I were left to figure each other out as best we could.

There is terror in every happy ending: terror that it’s not real, terror that it cannot be sustained. Though I’d settled into mine when I was pregnant, it was a naive sort of complacency. Phoenix’s sudden email had dredged up the tough reality that no joy is impervious to misfortune. This was on my mind as I floundered through my first months as a mother.

Sure, I now had the American dream: a husband, a baby, a house, two cats, two cars. Friends and family regularly affirmed I was doing everything right. “Motherhood suits you,” Keith whispered one night, while I cradled her. “It’s like—you’re all lit up.”

And yet the intensity of my love for this child overwhelmed me. When I considered the future, I saw a deeply rooted probability that I would somehow fail as a mother and wife.

By Thanksgiving, I was crumbling at the corners. Now that I had forged a family of my own, the cracked foundation of my own childhood had finally caught up with me, incapable of withstanding the pressure I put on it: my fantasy of what a home should be. I found myself waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I put my nervous energy into watching reruns on the Food Network, scanning through cookbooks, and surfing the Internet for kitchenware. I fixated on a set of “French square” spice jars listed on a wholesale website; I must have looked at them 50 times. I imagined that my dusty spices would glow anew within the glass, their rightful color restored: the warm goldenrod of turmeric, the deep plum of sumac, the royal green of dill, the moss of oregano.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when Keith got me the jars for Christmas. He said he couldn’t watch me ogle them one more time. He could tell I was at loose ends and gently suggested that some old-fashioned “home cookin’ ” might be a good distraction from my anxiety as a new mother.

The box of spice jars sat on the Formica counter for a month before I got a chance to move them into the drawers beside the stove. There they stayed until one sleepless, snowy night in February.

It must have been midnight when I padded from my warm bedroom to that dark kitchen. I could almost hear the walls around me creak, brittle against the press of cold air. By now the snow was done falling. I couldn’t see five feet into the yard, and yet a universe away the stars shone clearly. The shrouded planet felt at once enormous and much, much too small.

I stood barefoot on the kitchen tiles, thinking about why my kitchen had fallen into disuse. Sure, Keith was picky, and at seven months old, Ava was barely eating solid food. But there was something more. I pulled open the spice drawer and held one of the empty jars to the dim light. In it, I saw my childhood—Mom’s improvisation, Patricia’s determination, and the 12 countries that fed me: France, world famous for pastries, tarragon sauce, and lacy lavender; Greece, known for thick yogurt topped with golden pools of honey; Tunisia, where the markets burst with baskets of spices so heady the scent lingered on my clothes for days.

Marcel Proust, the 20th-century novelist, knew how easy it is to bring the past to life: When he bit into a tea-soaked madeleine, the shadows of his childhood took on color, snapping into full dimension. If I put the right ingredients in my spice jars, I realized, they’d be portals to that bygone era.

My thoughts turned to all the countries I hadn’t been to yet, to all the exotic foods I had yet to experience. What would it be like if I could fit this uncharted world in those jars, if I could use them to season my future? Perhaps I could bypass Proust and enjoy a madeleine of my own making.

Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. I ran to the bedroom and shook Keith’s shoulder.

“I’m going to cook the world!” I exclaimed.

“What time is it?” he said, lifting his head from the pillow and squinting.

“Recipes from every single country!” I gushed, “One per week—I’ll start a blog!”

While he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, I explained that I wanted to help him learn to love new foods, become less picky—that, together, we could raise our daughter with an appreciation of other cultures. I could wake this kitchen up and hopefully quell some of my wanderlust. And then there was the reason I could not yet give voice to: I could begin the next chapter of my life afresh.

Little did I know that it would be nearly impossible to separate my history from the future I wanted to create.

PART FIVE

True Sp
i
ce

“Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid. Doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
—Joseph Campbell

CHAPTER 22

Afghanistan or B
u
st

I
CAN COUNT ON ONE HAND
the number of times I’ve used a shopping list since Keith and I got married. I always get the same things: frozen fish, macaroni and cheese, canned beans, Pink Lady apples, and if I’m feeling particularly naughty, a half-gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream. But not today: Today I am on an entirely different mission.

Today, I will cook Afghanistan. Thanks to the alphabet, this mountainous country in south-central Asia is the first of the 195 countries awaiting me on our family’s journey to eat our way around the world. When I’m done, I’ll share my recipe adaptations on my new blog, Global Table Adventure. There’s something comforting about knowing that for the next four years, this will be my quest: one meal per country, one country per week. Straightforward. Structured. A check-it-off-the-list-for-immediate-satisfaction kind of adventure: the yin to the yang that is motherhood.

But none of my cookbooks have Afghan recipes. I expand my search and find a blog by an Afghan man living stateside, who says that community is the heart of Afghanistan’s nomadic culture. Nowhere is this more apparent than at mealtime. Families gather together on dusty floors and eat with their hands out of communal platters, and anyone who comes into the home is treated with the respect afforded a close relative.

There’s an old saying: “The first day we meet, we are friends. The next day we meet, we are brothers.” I choose recipes to reflect this Afghan hospitality:
burani bonjon
, a braised eggplant dip;
sabse borani
, a spinach yogurt dip;
firnee
, a sweet saffron and rosewater custard; and
kabeli palau
, a seasoned rice dish with raisins, carrots, and chicken. Because the food is traditionally scooped up with bread, I’ll also make a batch of
noni Afghani
, this country’s version of naan. I find a recipe to adapt for the cumin seed–topped flat bread from
The Best International Recipe
by Christopher Kimball, a book I buy that very afternoon. For after dinner, I decide on a few dried apricots.

I call Mom to tell her my plan.

“Are you going to make German Tree Cake?”

“Well, I’m starting with Afghanistan,” I say, repeating myself. “I’m trying to expand my horizons.” I add, silently,
this is about the future
, not the past.

“What’s wrong with your heritage?” Mom reminds me that leathery coins of dried apricot are loved beyond Afghanistan. “Grandpa ate one a day for years,” she says, “And apricot jam is the best part of the German Tree Cake.”