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Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Real Moms Dont Cook

A  shortened version of a great article in sunday's new york times by Jessica Soffer.

Wow , I hope my kids feel this way!

Real Moms Dont Cook

My mother is a great believer in takeout. She has her reasons.

She is a pragmatist. For her, it’s about the destination — not the journey. Five minutes devouring something scrumptious does not justify, in her opinion, hours and hours of shopping and chopping.
Perhaps most important, she’s not a big eater. She could survive on a steady diet of grapes and books. When smoothies became the fad, she jumped right on the bandwagon. Not for their health benefits, but because they freed her from the pretense of a traditional meal.
Food in a cup. Call it done. Call it dinner. 

It’s not that she never cooked. She had her go-to recipes  but even had she not, I wouldn’t have minded. Growing up, I pined for nothing in the mother department. My mother is the stuff that dreams are made of, minus the meatloaf and marble cake. The fact that she preferred talking to me while paging through the Times’ Book Review than while stirring a caldron of Bolognese did not mean that she loved me less, was any less motherly. 

And yet it seems that everywhere — in commercials, films, books — I find the conflation of parental love and cooking. Somehow, we’ve come to believe that mothering can be smeared onto a sandwich, nurturing tucked between the wings of a garlicky roasted chicken. 

 But my impulse is to defend her — as if telling the truth would be revealing a dark family secret, my mother’s shortcomings, and worse.
  As if I have to justify it. As if she didn’t feed me. As if she didn’t love me. As if she wasn’t quite simply the best, which she was. Is. 

But cooking accounts for only one part. Whenever I visit my mother for dinner there is all the love a person can handle in the tidy form of endless sashimi, shumai and Stella Artois. Love is evident in takeout, too.
When Hurricane Sandy hit last fall, my boyfriend and I headed north from our apartment in Lower Manhattan to my mother’s place, on higher ground, where there was electricity, running water and cellphone service. After the storm, more than one person said how nice that must have been: a home-cooked meal.
But no. Yes, it was nice. But the nice part was her: being with her, ordering Indian for dinner, watching the news and eating apples on the couch, reading as she tucked my feet into a blanket.
The nice part was being in my mother’s hands, whether those hands held a spatula or not — then, now or ever. 

Jessica Soffer is the author of the novel “Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.”


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