Identity & Culture
The recipe was a test
I was sixteen the first time my grandmother handed me a recipe and watched me try to follow it. I assumed she wanted to teach me. I now suspect she wanted to see whether I would as...
Read →Point / Counterpoint
Her side
I am protecting her from the worst of it
I made a deal with myself when she was small that she would not inherit the version of me that needed protecting. I have not told her about my mother’s drinking, my own first marriage, the year I lost in my late twenties. I do not regret these omissions. There is a difference between being a fully knowable person and being a load-bearing wall for a child. I chose to be a wall. The wall is the love.
His side
I never asked my father, and I should have
My father was a quiet man who became quieter after my mother died. We sat in adjacent rooms watching different televisions for the better part of three years. I told myself this was a kind of intimacy. He died of a heart attack in 2019 and I am still finding letters in his desk that change what I thought I knew about him. The silences I respected most were the ones I should have walked into. I am writing this because the script we run on our fathers is the same script our mothers run on us, and the cost is the same.
