I’m a good cook, and cooking for people has always been something I enjoy. It’s also something I don’t think much about – cooking, communing around the kitchen, providing all that food implies is important to me, and I’m glad to do it. Parties and Thanksgiving feasts of course are obvious landmarks of providing, but it’s really in the every day that food becomes one of the ways I best take care of people. There is always something to be whipped up, always enough in the freezer, the fridge and the pantry to feed as many friends and colleagues have gathered, as many teenagers as have landed at the kitchen island, and with plenty left over for anyone arriving home late.
A couple of days ago I experienced, for the second time in my life, a confusing pang of regret, annoyance and weariness upon seeing a specific look of pain in the eyes of a man from whom I was separating. The pain, mixed with longing, was induced not by harsh words, but by me offering him a plate of food. Not because the food was unwanted, but because it was in reality and in representation so much of what he’d valued in me, and was now or soon to be no longer his.
I suppose it’s true that I’m a better mother than I am a wife. I’m certainly more comfortable in the role. There’s a problem when the line between wife and mother blur, and I am either such a good mother or such a terrible wife that especially in the last conflicted, wishful, lonely years, most of what has sustained the relationship has been the care taking.
Well that’s not true. Also left has been the demanding, the learned helplessness of a lean-to marriage. In the absence of a full partner I’ve unlearned self-sufficiency. Task dependency serves a purpose, requires participation from those we can’t be emotionally dependent on and substitutes for companionship when face to face in a house together. Internet crashes reduce me to mild panic. When first contemplating the realities of this new split I wondered, as I still do, who will change the smoke detector batteries and install the air conditioners next summer. During my divorce a decade and a half ago I remember sitting on the floor crying because a hall lightbulb had burned out, way up high beyond my reach even on the ladder, while I was failing to successfully assemble a $12 shelf unit I’d bought from the hardware store.
We have to be willing to accept those roles to keep them going so long. My annoyance and disdain for a man willing to assign and accept me as substitute mother is matched by my own dismay and disgust at having somehow agreed to the position. Again.
As I handed him the plate of food and watched the wince of loss I was reminded of the mother in Tampopo who, in a fevered and failing state, musters all her strength to make dinner. Barely upright, she bravely stir fries one last offering of love for her family, then keels over and dies. The father, overcome with grief, demands that his children all gather round the table. “Eat, this is the last meal your mother will ever make for you,” and through tears they all finish off the food.
What if, I’ve always wondered, he’d called a doctor, taken her to the hospital and made the fucking meal himself?