What’s That Smell in the Kitchen?
Marge Piercy said it better than I ever could...
All over America women are burning dinners.
It’s lambchops in Peoria; it’s haddock in Providence; it’s steak in Chicago;
tofu delight in Big Sur; red
rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning
food they’re supposed to bring with calico
Smile on platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined
But spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it’s
her husband spitted over a slow fire.
If she wants to serve him anything
It’s a dead rat with a bomb in its belly
ticking like the heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested,
nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
On your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.
I’m giving the start of this Mother’s Day post to Marge Piercy, who sums up in this 1982 poem something many women struggle to convey about the contemporary state of affairs: the expectation to meet political, social, and cultural marginalization and persecution with a calico smile. Every day I am reminded of how privileged I am to have a small corner of the world that gives professional credence to my interest in food, to be supported by a feminist partner and a progressive, humane (state/local) government that secures my right to be a mother on my own terms. And every day I am reminded of how increasingly rare such a corner is, especially in the United States in the twenty-first century.
What is post-Roe motherhood to Mother’s Day? What does it mean to reify motherhood in a society that provides no material support or cultural regard for the work that women do—historically and presently—to raise children? Other writers have tackled this topic much better than I ever will, in particular Megan Pillow in her guest essay for the Men Yell at Me substack. In it she writes both about her own relationship to motherhood and her experience of the holiday—a single day in which the fuss everyone was making over mothers felt “perfunctory, like an obligation, and one that would soon be forgotten in the grind of daily life—just like me.” Pillow writes about the political origins of the holiday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, fought for by women like Anna Jarvis, who intended it to create a space in the American calendar to honor women’s work towards “pacifism, progress, [and] community care.” (As Pillow notes, Jarvis eventually “grew so disenchanted with its growing commercialization that she wanted it rescinded.”)
Women—and mothers, in particular—have been the leaders of political action and change all across the United States, and yet their presence in political life has been continually marginalized. Despite the fact that raising a child forces one to confront the existential threats of climate collapse, mass death due to unregulated handguns, widespread wealth disparity, persistent racial and religious persecution, and pervasive mass voter disenfranchisement, women politicians are expected to speak first and foremost to “women’s issues”…as though women’s issues weren’t also human issues, but rather a cute, pink subset of legitimate political action. If Mother’s Day was actually treated as a day to honor and engage with a mother’s needs and priorities, I doubt very much that chocolate and flowers would do the trick. As Pillow writes, “I’m not saying abandon your breakfasts in bed or your baubles. I’m saying all the baubles and breakfasts in bed in the world aren’t enough to compensate for what we’ve lost.” A real Mother’s Day would find a way back to the radical compassion that Jarvis envisioned, and would be rooted in advocacy rather than flattery. Instead of brunch spots being booked and florists being on call, politicians would be booked with nonstop meetings with mothers and visits to reproductive health centers and mobile resources. Instead of flowers, there would be respect, recognition, and action. Jarvis’ aim would finally be heard.
I am proudly and profoundly happy to be a mother, and I had a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend with my 3yo daughter. I bore witness to her spontaneous summersaults, her first taste of soup dumplings, her ability to send herself into eye-watering peals of laughter with (what else) a good poop joke. On Saturday I watched her race down the pebbled path of a wild garden, a few yards beyond where I could easily spot her, and for a moment I was frozen with fear that she would be lost. Then we turned a corner and there she was, sitting on a bench, with the wide-eyed grin that can only come from a toddler’s burgeoning sense of independence. If or when she becomes a mother, I hope she lives in a world with more freedom than the one we’re living in. And if not, I hope she burns dinner on the regular.
If you want to get me something for Mother’s Day, here’s a few places where you can send a valuable donation:
https://momsdemandaction.org/
https://www.carolinaabortionfund.org/
https://www.mothersoutfront.org/
https://www.mothersagainstpolicebrutality.org/
Recommendation: On a particularly low Saturday night, I picked up Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume, a book I hadn’t read as a teenager but now desperately wish I had. So many good things have been written about Blume, about this book, about the recent movie adaptation that I assumed there wouldn’t be much new in my read, but I was startled at how brilliant a book it was, in particular it’s construction of a somewhat wallflower-ish narrator who doesn’t exactly shout her feelings to everyone around her. The portrayal of teenage angst and insecurity (not only on matters of periods, bras, and boys, but in particularly on the subject of religious identity) is written in a manner that isn’t whiny or rude, but totally sincere. Blume is one of the rare artists that takes teenagers seriously as protagonists, and for that millions of women and girls are better off. (If you’ve never read it, buy a copy now—it’ll take an hour to read, and you’ll relish every page.)
The Perfect Bite: While running errands this weekend, I ducked into a new-to-me international grocery store, Baza Gourmet Foods & Spirits, and felt like I’d found a portal to a Brighton Beach-esque wonderland. This massive Eastern European grocery store was astonishing, and I had to restrain myself from taking home whole blocks of kashkaval cheese and gallons of pickles and sour cherries. But I did make sure to grab plenty of thinly sliced basturma, smoked salmon ends, and slightly sweet cakes made from farmer’s cheese on my way out. (I will definitely be back, especially to sample the charcuterie section.)
Cooked & Consumed: Our plans shifted a bit on Friday night when we found ourselves hosting dinner for some vegetarian friends, something we didn’t plan for when marinated chicken for the grill. So I turned to my default “vegetarians are coming over” recipe: tomato-pepper chickpeas. I threw the last scoops of a jar of garlic confit into a saucepan set over medium heat, stirred up with a big spoonful of tomato paste and some julienned roasted red peppers, and topped with two drained cans of chickpeas. While letting those items get blistered all over together in the garlic oil, I added generous shakes of paprika, cumin, coriander, and ground ginger to the pan, then added a final glug of half-and-half (or coconut milk for vegans) to the pan just before everything had dried out. Recipes like this remind me that we don’t celebrate pantry staples nearly enough, especially for their versatility in feeding something genuinely delicious to whomever’s at the table.