Solo Mother

Some thoughts about food, comfort, ritual and the single mother

by christina on February 4th, 2008

The King of Everything and I had tunamac for dinner tonight. You know tunamac? You get a box of mac n cheese, cook it up like he box tells you to, and then add canned tuna and hot peas to the mix. It’s one of our favorite comfort foods. I can even remember the ex eating most of the pot back in the day when we still were speaking to each other. It hits all those spots, even the ones you didn’t know needed hitting. Mac n cheese, in all its variations, is one of those Good Mood foods.

I find myself stifling an urge to give the King food when he is hurt, or bored, or tired, or… whatever. I manage not to deal with things by making him eat… but I think that, because I used to be a professional cook, and because I love to feed people, I equate food with comfort, with love, with caring. I take great pains to make balanced meals with organic foodstuffs and plenty of vegetables, fruits, fiber and vitamins. I fret if he doesn’t eat it, or doesn’t eat enough, or whatever is on whichever side of what I think is ‘right’.

But as I move through this cold season, with blood oranges on the way and watermelon just a distant smile on the future horizon, I find myself thinking about how folks used to eat. It helps me stop obsessing over the details and just relax. Let’s face it: single moms have to be more creative, more flexible, and more crazy than your average bear. Mom. Whatever. It’s a one woman show, folks, and each of us is playing all the parts.

How about apple pie for breakfast?

Seriously. When I was a kid, and my mom had made an apple pie (want to know a secret? Use more apples than the recipe calls for and saute them on the stove before you fill your pie— the densest, packed-est apple pie you ever did see without an air gap between the apples and the crust! and another hint: lime zest and a little juice…)

Sorry. I got carried away. As I was saying, whenever my mom made apple pie (oh she makes a great pie!) you could bet that one morning before the pie was all gone, there’d be a big bowl at the breakfast table, filled with apple pie in a pool of milk. Mmmmm. And it made the whole day so much … brighter. Happier. I mean, I could bet I was the only kid at school that morning who had eaten apple pie for breakfast!

I don’t know how many times I’ve written about breakfast for dinner. Pancakes at night are twice as delicious as pancakes at 7AM. Take my word for it.

There were also those weird, summer days where we’d just sit and fill our happy bellies with whatever was hot in from the fields that day. My grandfolks kept a little garden some years, mostly tomatoes, and I can remember days where we’d sit with a big plate of sliced tomatoes, some salt and pepper, and a cold glass of well water. We’d eat tomatoes, hot and dripping with sunshine, for lunch; often it was just tomatoes, with nothing else, though occasionally someone would pull themselves away from the picnic table long enough to get a piece of cheese to go with it. Grandpa would always take one of his razor sharp knives, slice himself off a piece, and smile. “Mmmmm. That’s good cheese,” he’d say, and peel off another slice to hand to you, thumb pressed safe up against the knife blade, a sliver of yellow-orange goodness pointing towards you.

Some days it would be corn on the cob, done up right and buttered with a piece of bread, and again with the salt and pepper. Or canteloupe. Or watermelon. I never thought there was anything strange about it. Sitting in the country, some farmer’s bounty piled up in front of us, it didn’t seem we needed a pyramid, or whatever shape it was before it was a pyramid. There were no calorie counts or charts or graphs or guilt about how to eat. There was real joy in eating.

I can’t wait til we can go pick our own strawberries this spring. The KoE will love that, and he’ll have a memory to tell his children when they are the same age he is now. Bout how we went to the strawberry patch one day, and all we ate for lunch was strawberries right off the vine.

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