For the Kibbeh
1 pound ground lamb
½ small onion, finely chopped
1 cup cooked bulgur wheat
1 tablespoon Yemeni Spice (recipe follows)
3 tablespoons chopped fresh mint
1 teaspoon salt
For the Mint-Yogurt-Cucumber Sauce
1 6-ounce container plain yogurt
Pinch of salt
2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 cucumber, peeled, seeded, and chopped
To make the kibbeh: Preheat the outdoor grill.
In a large mixing bowl, use your hands to combine the lamb, onion, bulgur, Yemeni Spice, mint, and salt. Shape the lamb mixture into 8 flattened football shapes.
Grill the lamb for about 5 minutes on each side. Alternatively, you can fry the lamb in a large skillet over medium-high heat for the same amount of time.
While the kibbeh is cooking, in a small bowl, mix together the yogurt, salt, mint, lemon juice, and cucumber.
Serve with the kibbeh.
Yemeni Spice
This was available in virtually every market on Atlantic Avenue–or, at least, the ones run by guys from Yemen. But I realize that’s not typical, so here’s a quick recipe if you are making your own. Makes approximately 1/3 cup Total time: 5 minutes
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon ground coriander
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
1/3 teaspoon ground cardamom
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons turmeric
1 tablespoon pepper
In a small bowl, mix together all of the above spices.
Photograph by Jennifer Livingston
Part 2 • 2002–2006
New Parenthood
and the family dinner vow
Slowly, my kitchen—and my life—became overtaken by little people. This is a makeshift dollhouse I made for the girls using magazine photos and masking tape.
Part 2 • 2002–2006
Starting in the summer of 2000 until spring of the following year, I was preoccupied with two goals.
Goal 1: Finding a New Job. I was working for a start-up magazine and what I really wanted was to work at a bigger magazine—maybe at a women’s magazine or a food magazine.
Goal 2: Getting Pregnant. I remember thinking that if I got pregnant before I found a job, then I would put off the hunt for a few months, maybe even put off the career for a while. Wasn’t it a little irresponsible to start a job knowing that I was planning to be on leave a few months later?
Both goals had one thing in common: They proved highly elusive. I went on a thousand interviews with intimidating people wearing intimidating shoes and, it seemed, went through as many failed pregnancy tests. Month after month I’d check for the two pink lines across the window, crossing out and circling days on my year-at-a-glance calendars, which were shoved inside my diary. (Not my dinner diary!) I’d read and reread the section “How to Tell if You’re Pregnant” in my Mayo Clinic Guide to Pregnancy and dream of the day that I could use the other eight zillion pages of the book, which I bought in a bout of supreme hubris the year before, when it was a foregone conclusion that I would be able to get pregnant 1-2-3, and be on my merry way toward growing a family in Brooklyn.
It almost became a race to see which one would happen first: the new job or the new baby. And I felt oddly disconnected from the competition—like I was just leaning back watching, with no idea how dramatically the result of the contest would affect the next decade of my life. Because I didn’t have any idea how dramatically it was going to affect the next decade of my life.
The job won. I was hired as a senior editor at Real Simple (tag line: “Making Time for What Matters”), which was only in its second year of existence and had just been taken over by a new editor, Carrie. Carrie had two teenage daughters and had started out as a “cub reporter,” as she always called it, at Life twenty-five years earlier, in the same building, the storied Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue and Fifty-first Street.
Carrie told me she hired me because I had never worked at a women’s magazine. She needed fresh ideas, new people with new ways of thinking who hadn’t written and rewritten the same “How to Lose Weight” pieces for six other magazines. She loved that I had been at a start-up like Biography, where I got my hands involved in everything—book reviews, lots of profile writing, a little recipe editing. She especially liked this last credential. She needed someone to help out in the food department. We shook hands on my suddenly doubled salary and I started two weeks later. I was thrilled—but also a total wreck, terrified that I was going to screw up or, worse, be discovered as a fraud who was wholly undeserving of this opportunity.
My Mayo Clinic told me that a stressful environment is not conducive to getting pregnant. I got pregnant a month after I started the job.
If I hadn’t been so stressed out, I would have found this hilarious. Instead, I was consumed by the Conversation I was going to have to have with the boss. The conversation in which I was going to tell Carrie I was pregnant and presumably in which she would respond with outrage over my lack of commitment. (And by that I meant my three months “off” for maternity leave. It never even crossed my mind that I wasn’t going to return to work after maternity leave, reporting from nine to five, five days a week as always.) When I finally got in to see Carrie—the night before September 11—she seemed to know my news already. This didn’t stop me from blurting out, “I’m pregnant,” and then, in the same breath, “but I fully plan on coming back after a really short maternity leave I promise!” She laughed a laugh that carried the distinct tone of wisdom, then officially became the first person to say to me: “Don’t say that. You have no idea how you’ll feel once you have the baby.”
I was shocked by this statement.
“No, no, no,” I told her. “I love my job here too much to not come back.” It was true. By this point, Carrie had put me in charge of managing the food team and had given me free rein to assign first-person essays to my favorite writers—like Ellen Gilchrist, who actually said yes. My direct boss, a guy named Tom, had taught me more in those first five months than I had learned in the ten years leading up to it. I was no longer nervous about my work—just stunned by my good fortune. I couldn’t believe that I had a job that seemed designed expressly for me.
Carrie had always been a full-time working mother—she was one of those moms who was on the phone with the office while she was in labor—but did her best to impress upon me how serious and how personal the work-vs.-stay-at-home decision was. She also warned me not to be disappointed or shocked if I felt different about my job specifically—or about my career generally—once I became a mother.
I nodded with a very serious expression on my face, but I was thinking something like, Yeah, whatever. So many women work and have kids. How hard could it be? Isn’t that what this magazine is about? Making Time for What Matters? Mastering the Juggle? Figuring Out the Balance? I went back to editing my Ellen Gilchrist essay and brainstorming eight different dinners you could make with the same eight ingredients. Since the magazine was still pretty young, we had some late nights finishing up the big issues—Carrie was a demanding boss and knew exactly what she wanted, albeit sometimes letting us all know exactly what she wanted on the day before an issue was shipped to the printer. Although it did occur to me that this might become inconvenient with a baby around, it didn’t hold me back. I felt like I was hitting my professional stride, culminating one night on my way out when Carrie, coming out of Tom’s office held up a story outline I had just proposed, then shouted down the hall, “Brilliant, Jenny!”
I would subsequently call up this moment hundreds of times in the next few years—compliments from bosses are few and far between in my experience—but I replayed the scene like crazy on maternity leave. Because when Phoebe was born on a February Sunday in 2002—more details on that in a few pages—I wasn’t necessarily
shocked by how much love and happiness she brought me. I was shocked by how this little six-pound nine-ounce thing could be the source of so much guilt. I’d be in a rocking chair with Phoebe in her sunny nursery and wonder how on earth I was going to ever leave her for eight straight hours every day with someone I didn’t even know. What was I thinking? How could I do this? And then I’d think of the Brilliant, Jenny! moment.
Ten years and many not-necessarily-brilliant professional moments later, it seems like such a ridiculous memory—one I’m sure Carrie has no recollection of—but it was my first taste of real professional pride and the first sign that I had not just a job to come back to but a career to look forward to. I am embarrassed to admit how much that moment made me want to work harder and get more praise and feel more proud. And I was embarrassed that this feeling, this drive to excel, didn’t evaporate when I was staring at my newborn daughter.
After a four-month maternity leave, I went back to work. (My first dinner as a working mother on June 17, 2002: Turkey Chili.) The memory of the first few weeks is painful. Not only the leaving Phoebe part, which in eight years never got easy, but also because I became a walking working-mother cliché. These were the golden years of the working-mom manifesto and I read every one of them— quoting my hero Kate Reddy, the scatterbrained but brilliant financial analyst/mother of two from I Don’t Know How She Does It, to anyone who would listen. I photocopied Caitlin Flanagan’s Atlantic article about how working mothers oppress their nannies in the name of their careers and handed it out to all the mothers on staff. I dragged my co-workers to a Peggy Orenstein event to discuss Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids, and Life in a Half-Changed World. I remember one of them coming by my office to talk about it. (That was the other thing I realized quickly—working mothers loved nothing more than talking about being working mothers.) In the course of the conversation, it came up that she had made a promise to herself when she became a mother: She would always be home in time to say good night to her son. She was one of the hardest-working people on staff—one of the editors I repected the most—and my heart sank a little when she told me this. I wondered, Am I going to have to stay that late and work that hard and miss that many dinners if I want to keep climbing up the ladder? Do I want to keep climbing up the ladder after all? Phoebe was probably only about six months old, and when I went home that night and fed her dinner (breast milk) I made a promise to her and Andy: If I couldn’t regularly be home in time for dinner, I wasn’t going to stay on that particular career path. I was just going to have to figure out some other way to be Brilliant Jenny.
In order to stick to the plan, I became an obsessive checklister, identifying three realistic tasks to complete every day by 5:50 p.m. At that hour, no matter what I was doing, no matter what I was in the middle of, I was going to stop and walk out the door. If there were certain tasks that had to be completed because other people’s days and nights and workloads were depending on my completing them, then I would make sure those tasks had first priority. I figured it would be a lot easier to walk out the door with conviction knowing I wasn’t leaving someone hanging. Of course, this 5:50 “conviction” often manifested itself in poking my head out of my office, checking to make sure the hallway was clear of bosses, sprinting to the elevator bank with my bag and my day’s supply of breastmilk clunking behind me, then pressing the Down button a million times as though somehow this would make the elevator come faster, preferably before anyone walked by and saw me leaving before 6:00. Which was still a full hour earlier than most staffers went home for the day.
It would have been helpful if there was a Mayo Clinic chapter that addressed the topic of “leaving.” Man, I would have read that chapter over and over—leaving your wailing baby in the morning without wanting to slit your wrists; leaving your desk even though you are only a half hour away from completing something that would feel so good to wrap up; leaving the building so no one notices that you are actually leaving. I was much more interested in honing that skill than learning how to puree apples and carrots to freeze in ice-cube trays (not that I ever did that either). As long as I was a full-time working mother with a clock to punch or a train to catch—as I would be for eight more years—I never figured out how to leave with grace or with so-called conviction.
But I did it anyway. And as scattered and stressed as I felt doing it, it somehow didn’t come across that way to my co-workers. Within the next two years, more than a half-dozen babies would be born to women in my office. Besides the obvious camaraderie this brought to my workdays—more people to talk about Kate Reddy with—it brought a certain degree of drama-squelching perspective, too. I wasn’t the first person in the history of the world to have a baby and a job at the same time, and I wasn’t going to be the last. It also made me feel better about my decision: In those two baby boom years at the office, a few of the new moms made a point to come up to me and say that they were going to do what I had done—get the hell out of the office at a decent hour no matter what was on their desks. One of the moms, Pilar, who’d become a close friend and whom I’d go on to work with at Cookie said, “I was nervous about having a baby until I saw you do it. I didn’t think it was possible to still be good at your job after you had a family.”
It goes without saying that this joined the Brilliant, Jenny! moment on my loop of “Nice Things People Said to Me That I Will Draw upon for the Rest of My Life.”
Bolting from the office was the hardest part of the equation during these early days of parenting—the phase the next section addresses. Once I was home, it was relatively easy to stick to the dinner vow because we ate in shifts. Phoebe and her sister, Abby, who came along twenty months later and whom you will meet a little further on in this part of the book—were obviously way too little to sit still for a proper dinner with us. So we’d come home, scour the fridge for bits and pieces of chicken and strawberries and broccoli, open a jar of Earth’s Best sweet potatoes and dinner would be on the table in ten minutes. Our own dinner, usually something quick, too, but at least involving a fresh herb or two, wouldn’t get going until an hour later, when the kids were asleep. We weren’t even close to feeling the pressure to all be eating the same thing at the same time—that expectation was years away. But even so, we wanted to sit with them while they ate. As often as possible, we wanted to avoid outsourcing that part of the nightly routine to our full-time babysitter, Devika. And once they were done eating, we wanted to, you know, spend time with them, too.
So what ended up happening was this: The girls’ bedtimes got pushed later and later to accommodate their selfish working parents. Even though The Seven O’Clock Bedtime was a huge best seller at the time, our kids were eating dinner when most of those seven o’clock babies were winding down, and our kids were not going to sleep until about eight thirty. I know parents who say their kids are too hungry to wait that long, too exhausted to stay up that late. I’m sure sleep experts will say this kind of routine would adversely affect their brain development (surely reversed by all those brain-enriching conversations we’d someday have at the table!). But right from the beginning Devika made sure they were eating healthy, hefty snacks later in the afternoon so they wouldn’t be starving by the time we got home. In retrospect, this was laying down the groundwork for our nightly ritual. Every now and then, we would attempt an all-parties present family dinner, but that was the exception rather than the norm until Abby turned three (“the norm,” of course being very broadly defined, since for a while, especially during the frantic period after Abby was born, no two nights ever looked the same).
This was the way we did it. I do not mean to infer that everyone’s schedules should proceed as outlined above. I’ve heard from a lot of parents—especially those home with their babies all day—that they are less concerned about squeezing in some eleventh-hour family time around the table than they are about wrapping their hands around a cold martini and snagging an hour or two of scream-free chill time before they collapse into the bed they look at with lo
nging all day. I also know that after putting in a full day at the office, then coming home and shepherding the baby through her dinner-bath-and-bedtime paces, probably the last thing you may be thinking is, Hey, honey, now that the baby is asleep, let’s take this opportunity to expand our skillet meal repertoire. What I’d like to come through in the following section is that no matter how different and harried family dinner looked during this new baby phase of our lives, it still served its main purpose: It was our day’s deadline. Even when we were in a house in the suburbs with two kids under two and the evening hours between six o’clock and eight thirty felt like we were trapped in a high-speed game of playground dodge-ball, even when the girls got a little older and we’d try and fail and try and fail to get them to eat the same dinner as us at the same time, even though each of us would have our share of late nights at the office, and even though we’d regress to our frozen veggie burger nights more often than I care to admit, the ritual of sitting down together at the end of the day remained our default mode, our time to be together. And a decade later, dinner has happened regularly enough for me to feel I’ve stayed true to my vow.
February 2002
Nesting and Expecting
My contractions with Phoebe started in the middle of a Sunday night, two weeks before her due date. By six in the morning—a brutally cold, slate-gray-winter-sky kind of morning—we were in a Town Car barreling over the Brooklyn Bridge and up the FDR Drive on our way to the hospital. To distract myself from the contractions, I finally decided to read that “How to Breast-feed” section in What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which I had been putting off all winter. When that stopped working, I dug my fingernails into Andy’s arm while he called our parents. His mother said she was so excited she felt like she was going to pass out. Eight hours, one epidural, one spinal, and one emergency C-section later, we were parents. Andy snapped a picture, just after surgery, of all four grandparents leaning over my bed while I held Phoebe. In the photo my mother is weeping.
Dinner: A Love Story Page 8
