Have Mother, Will Travel

by Claire Fontaine

  “Well, yeah . . . When you were growing up, I just wanted to get it on the table, not give lessons. It’s not like you ever really expressed any interest in cooking.”

  “I also never expressed interest in piano or Kumon math, but you had me take lessons. Here”—she hands me the plate of basil—“what’s next?”

  “Do the same with the mint.”

  I hand her the bushy mint plant on our windowsill.

  “I never wanted you to focus on the domestic. I wanted you to focus on a career, to be out slaying dragons and seeing the world. I still do. You have plenty of time to learn cooking.”

  She laughs as she plucks mint. “Sounds like you’re describing yourself. Mom, it’s totally fine if you don’t want to teach me to cook this summer.”

  “It is? You won’t be bothered or hurt?”

  “Of course not. I don’t want to stay indoors while we’re here either. Let’s just eat simply and buy more ready-made stuff.” She pauses. “But, you know, it would be nice to have some cooked dinners. I mean we’re in France, Mom.”

  “I agree. But I’m not doing them by myself. You have to be the kitchen elf, no convenient absences like you do.”

  “Pas de problème.”

  “Great. Now, strip a stalk of rosemary and chop it fine, and I’ll do the tomatoes.”

  I’m thrilled. I don’t have to think about feeding two, and when we do cook, we get to keep doing what’s always worked: I give orders and the kitchen elf obeys. Nobody walks on eggshells, no arguments, no teaching. Which is definitely not typical. If you want a ringside seat to a mother and her adult daughter’s relationship, watch them cook together when there’s pressure on, like guests coming in an hour.

  For most moms and daughters, it usually remains one place the old rules and roles don’t change. Elise thinks the sun rises and sets behind her mother, who is a remarkable woman; they have a wonderful relationship. Because she’s always mining her mom for old family recipes and the blog includes both of her parents, I assumed all three did the cooking.

  “Oh, no,” she corrected me, “it’s just me and Dad. I never cook with my mom. She tells me what to do.”

  When it comes to mothers and daughters, there is the issue of weight—a subject often fraught with hurt and anxiety—and then there is food, perhaps one of the most important ways in which we bond. It is, quite literally, our first bond; we come into being nourished in and by their bodies, and they then spend the next eighteen years feeding us.

  Food is its own language. During the times when my mom and I couldn’t go two minutes without yelling or crying, it was how we said I may not like you very much right now, but I still love you.

  And my mom’s a great person to be in a culinary conversation with. Lamb tagine with apricots and almonds, chicken with preserved lemons and paprika, chocolate bread pudding with brandy-soaked cherries—living at home was like bunking at Chez Panisse.

  My version of cooking involves combining cereal, milk, and sliced bananas or strawberries if I’m feeling ambitious. Her failing to teach me wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; patience in the kitchen isn’t my mom’s forte, and if she’d taught me everything she knew, one of us wouldn’t have made it out alive.

  I remember listening with a combination of shock and awe to our friend Kelly talk about her mother teaching her to cook. Kelly Sterling, a talented chef who’s worked for the likes of the Border Girls and Matsuhisa Nobu, is extremely gentle and soft-spoken. That she’s spent her days among swearing and tattooed men is a testament to her love of food and cooking, which she credits her mother for.

  Growing up, Kelly and her four siblings had their own plots in the vegetable garden, where they grew their own Halloween pumpkins and watched zucchinis turn from floral blooms to vegetables. Her mom taught her to make dough from scratch and cook a roast. She was patient and kind with her kids in the kitchen, gathering them around the oven to watch as the bread turned a golden brown.

  This floored me. The only thing I ever saw turn golden brown in the oven was my stuffed animal Little Ann after my mom read an article about how heat kills dust mites. To my mom, being loving and patient in the kitchen meant ignoring me rather than telling me to scram. But that was always because I thought she enjoyed cooking. Come to find out she only enjoyed it part of the time, and, more recently, not at all.

  It’s been interesting to notice my mom as she gains and loses interest in things. Watching her evaluate everything in her life from the minutia to the big picture makes me aware that I’ve avoided thinking about my day-to-day New York life since coming to France, probably because it’s somewhat embarrassing. I’ve always thought of myself as very active: volunteering, learning languages, sculpting, taking photos, playing soccer. What an outdated perception! I haven’t consistently done any of those things since college. If anything, I’ve become rather lazy and have a painfully predictable schedule.

  My late teens and very early twenties were some of the most exciting times in my life. I was finally free after two years of being locked away, and instead of destroying myself and avoiding life, I was eager to live as fully as possible. I sampled all sorts of activities. I had no idea I could sculpt, for example, until I randomly enrolled in a class. I loved everything about it, molding the dense, cold clay, re-creating the beauty of the human form.

  I didn’t realize how much it bothered me that I hadn’t enrolled in an art class since moving to New York, or never researched mentoring programs, since I love working with teens. Sure, I meant to take up sculpting, dancing, reading more books, and volunteering—I was always about to start something. What I actually did, however, was fall into a rut of working at an easy-enough job with steady pay and good benefits but that I wasn’t really happy at, going to the gym after work, and then, depending on how much energy I had left, going to a friend’s party or plunking down on the couch with my roommates to watch reality TV shows that I’m too embarrassed to name here.

  Because I wasn’t doing anything different from most of my friends, I didn’t see this as a problem. How could anyone think I wasn’t doing well? I graduated from college and wrote a book! So what if I do nothing with my free time? I have a great job title and apartment, I have successful friends!

  But if I was doing so well I wouldn’t have been subtly disappointed in myself; I wouldn’t have had to talk myself out of feeling guilty for (again) reaching for junk food and the remote. My life wouldn’t have started feeling repetitive, predictable, and rather uninspiring. I wanted more, which is why I’d start feeling restless, and, like a lot of people I know, thinking about moving or changing jobs. Sometimes I wonder if we make big moves because we underestimate the importance of smaller ones. Years are just an accumulation of thousands of hours, and what we choose to do with each of them matters.

  Maybe this is part of life’s learning curve, learning how to structure your time and which people and activities to fill it with. I’m part of a generation whose schedules were usually structured and determined for us. When they were children, my parents never had arranged playdates, they weren’t taken to soccer, piano, and art classes; they took off on their bikes and as long as they came home for lunch or dinner they were left to their own devices. I can’t imagine that kind of freedom and control of my time as a kid. Granted, adult supervision is more of a factor in a city as big as L.A., but, nonetheless, I think as a whole my generation is more deficient when it comes to negotiating our time and activities.

  Part of the “quarter-life crisis”—this feeling that our lives have no meaning—probably comes from not participating in the kinds of meaningful activities we were often spoon-fed growing up, and then had at our fingertips in college. Living on our own, many of us seem to have opted for what’s easiest to access: the Internet, parties, the gym, TV, and dating (or, rather, hooking up).

  Alanna, my former roommate and partner in couch-potato crime, put it well when she sai
d early adulthood isn’t just about adjusting to fiscal responsibility but social responsibility as well, establishing the difference between relaxation and having fun and being plain lazy. Free time is just that, activities that make you feel free, as opposed to guilty, lazy, and mildly useless.

  Sometimes lessons I learned in that school as a teen are like time-release medications; I’ll forget all about something I learned until it’s suddenly staring me in the eyes. In this case, the lesson is twofold; one, there’s almost always a discrepancy between how you view yourself and how you actually are, and, two, to stay on track it’s imperative to regularly check in with, and evaluate, yourself—as long as you do it neutrally and without judgment, which is where a lot of us get stuck.

  We’re hard-wired to avoid pain; if you beat yourself up every time you evaluate or examine yourself and your life, it makes you less likely to do it at all, which means you’ll probably keep doing more of the same.

  It’s more crowded than usual today on the bluff and my mom and I squish together into an open space, resting our elbows on the ledge overlooking the plaza below. Her hand touches mine lightly and I look at it. She’s always joked about having old lady hands even as a kid, which I can believe because even though she’s always had very firm, smooth olive skin, the veins have always been extremely prominent. I used to play with them when I was little, pressing on a big blue wiggly one and then watching it puff back up when I let go. Looking at her hands now, she has no age spots, but the smooth olive skin is thinner, with fine wrinkles in places. It seems like her hands and arms are beginning to catch up with her veins. It’s one more thing that makes me realize that I’m not just beginning to see the passage of time on my mother’s body, I’m going to continue to from now on. The days of her looking pretty much the same to me are no more.

  Earlier this week, my mom and I were at Chrystelle’s house for dinner when I saw a photo from Chrystelle’s wedding with my mom in it. She was tan from walking outdoors all summer, her black hair just beginning to grow out of the pixie cut she always wore. She still has that dress, a long black shift with spaghetti straps and embroidered gold accents that looks almost Egyptian. It’s one of the few things I’ve never been able to talk her into giving me.

  I looked up from the photo at my mom and Chrystelle talking in the kitchen, and was startled by the difference. She hasn’t looked as she did in that photo for several years now, but for some reason I still picture her that way. When I hear the word “mother,” what first comes to mind is an energetic woman with short hair, a mostly black wardrobe, and signature red lipstick. I don’t picture my mom as she is today, calmer, more self-possessed, a softened facial expression, and shoulder-length hair that’s jet-black except for two thick gray stripes at her forehead she’s let grow in because she got sick of touching up the roots every few days. “I never thought I’d end up looking like Cruella De Vil,” she lamented. She looks young for her age but (and she’ll probably kill me for saying this) the skin under her neck is softer.

  What startled me even more, though, was that as I looked at her I was suddenly able to picture how she’ll look when she’s old. I saw her with her hair fully gray, her eyes a tapestry of wrinkles, her hands freckled with age spots. Knowing in a back-of-your-mind sort of way that your mother isn’t so young anymore is quite different from knowing in a way that hits you in your gut that she’s actually aging.

  And right there, with music playing, and Antoine laughing, and my mother and Chrystelle talking in the kitchen, tears welled up because I suddenly knew how I’d feel when she’s gone. I understood that when she goes my world will never be the same. Because even if I have ten children, even if I’m wildly in love with my husband and surrounded by friends, there will never be someone who understands or loves me quite like my mother, or that I love like her.

  Something changed for me after that. I’ve been nicer to her, and more patient. I’ve wanted to be physically near her, rest my head on her shoulder or hold her hand. I feel more love toward her, and I wish it hadn’t taken imagining my life without her to coax that from me.

  The small town of Apt is home to a candy shop called La Bonbonnière, and this morning my mom and I rented a car for the express purpose of buying one particular candy sold strictly there: la Gourmandize, a glowing orange half-dome consisting of a candied clementine, marzipan, honey, and dark chocolate.

  We park and, without consulting the position of the sun, the direction of the wind, the side of the tree moss grows on, or any other of her famed orienteering skills, my mom beelines toward Mecca. We stock up on les Gourmandizes, and then buy some gelato to enjoy now.

  “I did this exact same thing with Jordana my first time here,” my mom says contentedly, remembering a trip she took with a girlfriend some years back. “We bought those same orange candies, sat on this same bench, and I had the same flavor of gelato.”

  “Chestnut?”

  “Yes. Here,” she says, scooping some onto a spoon and handing it to me. “What does that taste like to you?”

  “Why do you always say things like that? I just want to enjoy it, not rack my brain for adjectives!”

  “That’s the whole point, you’re not supposed to rack your brain! Your best metaphors come from feelings, not thoughts. Don’t think in terms of sweet or bitter—what do you see and feel when you put it in your mouth? To me, chestnuts are like clouds and honey.”

  It’s a good description, light, sweet, fluffy. But who thinks of metaphors in the middle of eating ice cream? This drives me crazy sometimes, but it’s what makes her her. I love the writing process, I enjoy crafting prose and researching and editing. But it’s something I do. Being a writer is who she is.

  And I like that she’s sharing it with me. It’s small, mentioning her first trip here or telling me what chestnut reminds her of, but it’s the kind of thought she usually keeps to herself. Yesterday while we were at the bus stop she said out of the blue that she always loved the song “Bus Stop” by the Hollies because that’s what she thought love would be like when she was a young teen. I knew the song, it’s about a man who covers a woman with his umbrella after seeing her in the rain at a bus stop. They met at the bus stop each day after that, and by the end of the summer they were together.

  I smiled, picturing her with naïve notions of love, with naïve notions of anything for that matter. She’s always been drawn toward darker and more complex characters and stories, and it was such a sweet, simple image.

  I’ve tended to view myself as the ever-changing variable, and my mother as the more stable constant, perhaps because there are few women we make as many assumptions about than our mothers. But she’s continually surprising me now, from once-naïve romantic notions to almost becoming a doctor to having a conversation with a man, in German (which I had no idea she spoke), to a possible singing career.

  A remix of Joan Baez’s “The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti” started playing at Bar les Célestins the other day, and my mom asked if I recognized it, because she used to sing it to me as a lullaby. I didn’t, but it prompted me to ask her if she ever took singing lessons, because she has an operatic voice. As it turns out, she did, from the man who sometimes coached Barbra Streisand, no less—and who wanted her to pursue it professionally.

  “And you said no?! Why? People would kill for that opportunity, Mom.”

  “I thought about it, but I was so shy back then,” she answered, shrugging. “And I certainly wasn’t cut out for the lifestyle. I’m usually asleep by the time most performances begin.”

  “How come you never told me this before?” I asked. “I love hearing about this!”

  “I don’t know, the subject never came up, and it’s not something I really ever think about—it was so long ago. Besides, you never ask, why would I think you’d want to know?”

  Well, I do want to know, and told her so. Even as she’s increasingly forthcoming, however, things remain uns
poken, and I still often stop myself from asking her what she’s thinking. Yesterday she stopped suddenly outside of a knit shop and lightly smacked herself on the forehead.

  “Mia, we missed it—the knitting festival was last weekend. How could I let myself forget that?” she added, almost more to herself than to me.

  It was written all over her face how disappointed and angry she was with herself. I felt terrible. She loves anything to do with yarn or knitting, because it makes her feel close with Bubbie; I know how much she misses her. She thinks I don’t notice but there are times she’ll stop midsentence because she knows if she keeps talking she’ll start crying.

  “I’m sorry, Mom, maybe we can—” I started to tell her.

  “Oh, look at those shoes!” she interrupted me brightly, and marched into a store with a big soldes (sale) sign on the window. I felt exasperated that she just completely changed subjects but maybe that had nothing to do with a level of trust between us and more to do with her having a good day and not wanting to think about something that made her sad.

  I’ve always felt bad about my mother and grandmother’s rocky relationship, especially because Bubbie and I have always gotten along. She’s whip-smart, loves desserts and sweets as much as I do, and has a wicked sense of humor. Bub can also be feisty and tends toward blunt honesty—something I find amusing and endearing. I dislike emotional guesswork, and you’d have to be blind, deaf, or dumb not to know how Bubbie feels about something. My mom finds this aspect of her mother’s personality far less amusing; it’s been a source of much tension between them.

  Conversely, Bubbie finds elements of my mother’s personality nerve-wracking, like the fact that she’s always on the go, and looking for ways to change or improve herself. I have a little bit of both of them in me. I love to travel and hike alongside my mom, and I like that she often pushes me. I also love sitting with my grandmother, eating her poppy-seed pastries while playing Chinese checkers, watching TV, or talking about what’s wrong with the government. None of which my mom could sit through for ten minutes.