I wrote this essay seven and a half years ago, several months after moving my son to a residential school an hour and a half from home. Reading it today, I’m surprised at its lighthearted tone, when my heart had so recently broken. I understand now my need to fend off a loss so deep I couldn’t fully acknowledge it all at once. Nevertheless, I like this piece, which reflects my feelings around the changes in our family at that time. I hope you’ll enjoy it, too. —Kristen
By the time I learned to cook it was too late. And by learning to cook I mean finding the right cookbook, brimming with simple but enticing recipes for the culinarily unimaginative, no trip to Foodstuffs required. After years recycling the same six or seven meals week after ho-hum week, “Weeknight Meals for Busy Moms” seemed like a godsend.
Except I’m not really a mom anymore, not in the sense that has defined me for so long. My son no longer lives with me, and my daughter has one foot out the door, leaving for college in less than six months. My husband’s schedule is erratic, bringing him home some evenings as late at 9 p.m.
Which leaves me alone in the kitchen, a slate of brand new family recipes on tap, my family no longer at the table.
“Wait! Wait!” I want to cry. “I’ve got it together now! June Cleaver is in the house!”
But time waits for no mom. I recognize the irony of finally mastering the art of the family meal just as my family scatters to the winds, symbolic of the loss I feel around the changes of the last three months, and those that are yet to come.
It wasn’t as if I didn’t try. But the vaguely held images of well-balanced meals prepared with unhurried competence, then shared at a cozy table by my serene and typical family, never fully (or even partially, actually) materialized in real life. More often I recall slapping together meals of rotini with a side of orange slices, or scrambled eggs and toast, if I hadn’t forgotten to buy bread.
And my family isn’t all that easy to please, either. As a boy, my son displayed disdain for most every food offering (even those in my famous Top Five) only satisfying my frenetic attempts to nourish him with an occasional cup of lo-cal lemon yogurt. During adolescence, when his growing appetite placed him in the “clean your plate and then some” club, my daughter’s willingness to eat virtually anything with calories diminished to the alarming but typical proportions of a teenage girl.
My husband, meanwhile, eats nothing containing butter, sour cream, cream cheese, cheese sauce, mayonnaise, hollandaise, béarnaise or any other coating, while alternately clamoring for more steamed vegetables and asking why I didn’t buy cookies at Costco.
So many of my half-formed ideas of what “family” means have reluctantly shifted since I had a family of my own. The demands of parenting a truly atypical child were greater than I could have dreamed possible, and what I’d considered “normal” and “healthy” and “secure” flew out the window in the face of my son’s disability.
Mealtimes were just one of a slew of ordinary experiences impeded by his unique needs. Eating in restaurants, family vacations, doctor visits, attending a movie or strolling the zoo; Sunday school, music recitals, a walk in the neighborhood, buying an ice cream cone – each formative and familial experience I had envisioned for my children took on new and often forbidding overtones in the world of autism.
My son’s move almost three months ago to a residential school for developmentally disabled children should have brought a welcome normalcy to our home, an easing of the uncertainly his volatility lent our lives. And perhaps this will come. For now, though, his absence is a loss impossible to imagine healing with time.
I still reach for his evening medications when I glance at the clock at 7:45, and feel the stab of emptiness as I pass his room on my way to bed. The constant struggle of those last grueling months isn’t so vivid right now; instead, I recall the tenderness of his hand against my face as we read the same books, night after night, as the day wound down.
I long now to recapture something as it slips away and changes shape again. That normal family around the dinner table could be mine, I tell myself, if I just had another chance. I’d do it right this time. Yet I recognize that I’m holding onto to an ideal that is merely that, a fantasy painfully relinquished as I did what was necessary to keep my family whole, however unconventionally that evolved. The home front I forged as mother is not the one I intended, but it is ours and ours alone.
Today I remember the conversations my daughter and I shared over another round of “Chicken with Bread Crumbs” or “Pasta Salad with Italian Dressing,” watching her grow from hesitant girl to confident young woman in the process.
Or my joy at the sound of my son’s voice last fall, clear and decisive, asking for a second helping of one of my dinnertime masterpieces.
“Pancake!” he cried cheerfully. “Pancake!”
Pancakes it is.