Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  I increasingly look forward to the time when the buzz of the city calms and the streets empty, and my mother and I climb the stairs to the bluff to watch the sunset. Sitting quietly, each of us lost in our own thoughts, feels like the right way to end our chatty days.

  At least it did. Until about a week ago, once the sun had set, we’d leave the bluff and stroll leisurely home to read, head out for a glass of wine, or meet Chrystelle for dinner at her house or in town. When you live somewhere, however, the nights you stay in outnumber those you go out, and I was getting mighty tired of reading every night in the absence of TV, radio, or the Internet. Most shockingly, so was my mom, who offhandedly mentioned missing TV to me last week on the bluff.

  Now, my mom went eight years without even owning a TV (if she hadn’t married Paul, I doubt she ever would have bought one), and they didn’t get cable until my senior year of college.

  “Mia!” she called me one day, “there are channels just for travel or gardening! There’s an entire channel just for military history! And French! And book TV!”

  “Ma, it’s called cable, it’s been around since the eighties.”

  “What about ‘unplugging’?” I tease her now. “What happened to our summer sans Internet, TV, or connection to the world outside of Avignon?”

  What happened was the accidental discovery of a video rental store and a new routine of utter nighttime debauchery. Now, the second the sun sets, we race from the bluff to get to Video Futur before it closes, swing by Marché Plus for avocados and lemon sorbet, scurry home, throw on jammies, mash up avocadoes, garlic, lime, and salt for guacamole (this has become our favorite dinner, which is kind of odd, but my mom, who normally enjoys cooking elaborate meals, seems to be on strike), pour two glasses of white wine, fire up the computer, and arrange everything carefully on the Click-Clack. We’ve gotten this down to twenty minutes, which includes taking turns showering.

  Period pieces are the best rentals; it’s a trip to fall asleep with images from Medieval, Renaissance, or Imperial Europe in our minds, and then eat breakfast the next morning while looking out at a thirteenth-century defensive wall and eighteenth-century townhouses. We quickly advanced from renting movies once a week to three nights a week, but it was The Tudors that did us in.

  My mom had never followed a television show before, yet now we’re up till one in the morning watching back-to-back episodes. The theme song alone is rousing, with trumpets playing over clips of galloping steeds, swinging hatchets, and naked, writhing limbs. She’s as much fun to watch as the show itself—“Look at the embroidery on that codpiece! Wouldn’t you love to have those goblets!” When I tripped on the computer cord last night and the screen went black I thought she was going to stab me with her fork.

  I’ve never indulged so completely with my mom before; every night it’s like two schoolgirls playing hooky. My mom and I are different in many ways and it’s kind of thrilling to discover that, while I obviously love her, I really like her, too. If we’d been little at the same time I bet we would have been friends, and it’s fun to picture us giggling under the covers in pigtails and pajamas. Though we’d probably have drifted apart when I discovered punk rock and started cutting class while she remained an A student, still in the Girl Scouts until the ripe old age of sixteen. And to think she missed the early signs of my drug use.

  “Can you believe this?” she said to me the other night. “We’ve spent the last five hours wandering around a beautiful city, eating tarts, looking at art and a gorgeous sunset and we’re about to eat guacamole, drink some wine, and watch The Tudors. You know, Mia, I could really live like this.”

  “Mom,” I shouted. “We are living like this!”

  Mia thinks I cook well because I love to, but I have a love/hate relationship with the culinary. Oh, I still love to invent tarts and ice creams. Before we left I created a creamy basil pear sorbet I could kick myself for not writing down.

  But getting meals on the table every day? Or even most days? Just the thinking, day in, day out, of what to make, ech. When I was holed up alone in a little cabin writing part of Come Back, I got to cook and eat what, when, and where I wanted. Not having to think about anyone else’s stomach after two decades of doing it daily was incredibly liberating.

  I taught myself to cook in my twenties because I was into nutritious food for Mia and me. After years of making healthy versions of everything, in my forties I got into gourmet. I explored exotic cuisine, sugar and butter were back, and I began to drink espresso and wine for the first time in my life.

  Now that I’m fifty-one, I savor time a lot more than shiso or pink Himalayan salt. If they stopped selling salad in a bag, I’d weep. My pal Leah nailed it: “So I’m standing in this long, slow-moving line yesterday, and I’m looking at my watch, and I just want to yell, ‘Couldja hurry up already, I’m aging!’ ”

  And that’s just the cooking part of my association with kitchens. There’s also the personal history part, which includes great memories: it’s where I bathed Mia in the sink when she was tiny, where we banged pots and pans to songs and made play-dough, where she realized that you could spit peas farther than any other vegetable and that corn was just the right size for an earplug.

  It was also where she tried to stab me with a screwdriver when she was on drugs and Paul wrestled her to the floor. Where he slammed his fist into a cupboard when he learned she’d taken off, again. It was where I was washing dishes when she was missing and I first heard Emmylou Harris’s “My Baby Needs an Angel.” When she sang the line about her baby swimming with the sharks, out where none could save her, I slid to the black-and-white tiles and buried my face in soapy yellow rubber gloves. Took me years before I could cross a black-and-white checker tile floor without a Pavlovian sinking-gut response.

  I was actually relieved that there’s not even an oven here, just a sliver of a kitchen with a stove-top, teeny fridge, and ten inches of counter space. Yet one of the first things I did was start a list of what to stock it with, on autopilot. We assumed our historic roles: I cook, she eats.

  Mia’s always been a sensuous person. She’ll jump in the ocean just to feel the waves in the dead of winter, she’d cuddle every pet she passes if she could, she loves sculpting because she likes the squish of the clay between her fingers. And she loves food. Even as a kid she remembered scents and flavors like a chef. Not that she’s big on cooking food, but she adores smelling, savoring, and talking about it.

  She’s not alone. I’m not sure why, but younger women have embraced food in a way my generation never did. For boomers, getting out of the kitchen was part of being liberated. Our kids dined out more in one year than most of us ever did in the entire 1960s.

  Young women seem to have skipped a generation in their embrace of cooking, crafts, and gardening—they’re more like their grandmothers, only online and on speed. Even some of the cuisine is a throwback, much of it a return to the red meat and martinis of the Mad Men era.

  “The last thing we wanted to do when we left home was cook or do housey things; it was all about career,” I mentioned to a friend, Elise, the grande dame of food bloggers, in a recent call. She began simplyrecipes.com in 2003 because she found herself back in her parents’ home and realized that at forty-one, as a Silicon Valley MBA, she had no idea how to make even a roast. What had started as a way to share family recipes has become one of the most visited blogs on the planet. Which I doubt would have happened when either of us was in our twenties.

  I suggested it might be because cooking something great or knitting a beret and then blogging about it provides instant gratification for a generation with a short attention span. She thinks a lot of it is because the Internet is such a perfect medium for women. When BlogHer was created to give women a stronger voice on the Internet, she assured them that in a few years, that wouldn’t be an issue.

  “I knew we’d dominate the Web—women are verbal! We love to share what we know. And food’s so much more interesting and global now. Ther
e’s just been so much more attention, there’s the green movement, farmers’ markets, first there was Food Network, then came blogs. Cooking has become a want to rather than being the have to it was for our moms. Food became cool.”

  But for a lot of women, she added, it’s still about getting food on the table economically; in other words, cooking will always be a have to for many of us. Including Mia, who’d eat out every night if she could, or at my house if she lived close enough. She attempts to cook to save money, though she’s as clueless in the kitchen as Elise used to be.

  I’m watching her stack big basil leaves to make chiffonade for a pasta, clumsily, under my direction, because I never taught her to cook, and realize that, in yet another way, I’m becoming my mom. Because she never taught me, either.

  The answer to “what’s for dinner” in our house was always “Food.” To her, cooking was a mother’s job. Our job as kids was to play, do well in school, and avoid killing our siblings. The kitchen was her world and she didn’t want us underfoot. And I’m willing to bet that for all the moms who love cooking with their little girls, just as many treasure the kitchen as a refuge, as one of the few places they can have two minutes to themselves, where they can be alone with their thoughts and feelings.

  Since we’ve come here to spend time together, I offered to teach Mia how to cook some of her favorite foods (those that don’t need an oven). Today we shopped for ingredients for a pasta with fresh tomatoes, herbs, garlic, mushrooms, spicy sausage, and Parmesan. We’ve washed everything, laid it out, and chopped the sausage and garlic to sauté.

  We’ve spent half the day on this project already, and it’s gorgeous outside. Mia carefully (read s-l-o-w-l-y) rolls the basil leaves to chiffonade them.

  “Now,” I hand her the knife. “Thin ribbons like I showed you.”

  She cuts slowly, bruising the basil leaves instead of cutting cleanly through them.

  “Cut with authority, Mia. Keep your fingers clear and just”—I put my hands over hers on the knife and make one staccato downward push—“cut it.”

  “Hey, be careful!” she says nervously.

  “You gotta cut boldly, Mia. A dull knife or a weak wrist is dangerous.”

  What I really want to do is take the knife and tell her to go dust or something while I whip through this so we can eat and go for a hike. Actually, I’d rather just chop the tomatoes, garlic, and herbs, throw on olive oil, salt, and lemon, toss, eat, done in ten minutes. But, you know, this trip being about bonding and all.

  “Hey, Mia, do you think you never cared about cooking because you thought I didn’t want you in the kitchen?”

  “Why? Feeling guilty?”

  “It just would have taken too long to show you what to do.”

  “Would have? I know you’re dying to tell me to hurry up right now.”

  “Well, yeah . . . When you were growing up, I just wanted to get it on the table, not give lessons. It’s not like you ever really expressed any interest in cooking.”

  “I also never expressed interest in piano or Kumon math, but you had me take lessons. Here”—she hands me the plate of basil—“what’s next?”

  “Do the same with the mint.”

  I hand her the bushy mint plant on our windowsill.

  “I never wanted you to focus on the domestic. I wanted you to focus on a career, to be out slaying dragons and seeing the world. I still do. You have plenty of time to learn cooking.”

  She laughs as she plucks mint. “Sounds like you’re describing yourself. Mom, it’s totally fine if you don’t want to teach me to cook this summer.”

  “It is? You won’t be bothered or hurt?”

  “Of course not. I don’t want to stay indoors while we’re here either. Let’s just eat simply and buy more ready-made stuff.” She pauses. “But, you know, it would be nice to have some cooked dinners. I mean we’re in France, Mom.”

  “I agree. But I’m not doing them by myself. You have to be the kitchen elf, no convenient absences like you do.”

  “Pas de problème.”

  “Great. Now, strip a stalk of rosemary and chop it fine, and I’ll do the tomatoes.”

  I’m thrilled. I don’t have to think about feeding two, and when we do cook, we get to keep doing what’s always worked: I give orders and the kitchen elf obeys. Nobody walks on eggshells, no arguments, no teaching. Which is definitely not typical. If you want a ringside seat to a mother and her adult daughter’s relationship, watch them cook together when there’s pressure on, like guests coming in an hour.

  For most moms and daughters, it usually remains one place the old rules and roles don’t change. Elise thinks the sun rises and sets behind her mother, who is a remarkable woman; they have a wonderful relationship. Because she’s always mining her mom for old family recipes and the blog includes both of her parents, I assumed all three did the cooking.

  “Oh, no,” she corrected me, “it’s just me and Dad. I never cook with my mom. She tells me what to do.”

  When it comes to mothers and daughters, there is the issue of weight—a subject often fraught with hurt and anxiety—and then there is food, perhaps one of the most important ways in which we bond. It is, quite literally, our first bond; we come into being nourished in and by their bodies, and they then spend the next eighteen years feeding us.

  Food is its own language. During the times when my mom and I couldn’t go two minutes without yelling or crying, it was how we said I may not like you very much right now, but I still love you.

  And my mom’s a great person to be in a culinary conversation with. Lamb tagine with apricots and almonds, chicken with preserved lemons and paprika, chocolate bread pudding with brandy-soaked cherries—living at home was like bunking at Chez Panisse.

  My version of cooking involves combining cereal, milk, and sliced bananas or strawberries if I’m feeling ambitious. Her failing to teach me wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; patience in the kitchen isn’t my mom’s forte, and if she’d taught me everything she knew, one of us wouldn’t have made it out alive.

  I remember listening with a combination of shock and awe to our friend Kelly talk about her mother teaching her to cook. Kelly Sterling, a talented chef who’s worked for the likes of the Border Girls and Matsuhisa Nobu, is extremely gentle and soft-spoken. That she’s spent her days among swearing and tattooed men is a testament to her love of food and cooking, which she credits her mother for.

  Growing up, Kelly and her four siblings had their own plots in the vegetable garden, where they grew their own Halloween pumpkins and watched zucchinis turn from floral blooms to vegetables. Her mom taught her to make dough from scratch and cook a roast. She was patient and kind with her kids in the kitchen, gathering them around the oven to watch as the bread turned a golden brown.

  This floored me. The only thing I ever saw turn golden brown in the oven was my stuffed animal Little Ann after my mom read an article about how heat kills dust mites. To my mom, being loving and patient in the kitchen meant ignoring me rather than telling me to scram. But that was always because I thought she enjoyed cooking. Come to find out she only enjoyed it part of the time, and, more recently, not at all.

  It’s been interesting to notice my mom as she gains and loses interest in things. Watching her evaluate everything in her life from the minutia to the big picture makes me aware that I’ve avoided thinking about my day-to-day New York life since coming to France, probably because it’s somewhat embarrassing. I’ve always thought of myself as very active: volunteering, learning languages, sculpting, taking photos, playing soccer. What an outdated perception! I haven’t consistently done any of those things since college. If anything, I’ve become rather lazy and have a painfully predictable schedule.

  My late teens and very early twenties were some of the most exciting times in my life. I was finally free after two years of being locked away, and instead of destroying myself and avoiding life, I was eager to live as fully as possible. I sampled all sorts of activities. I had no ide
a I could sculpt, for example, until I randomly enrolled in a class. I loved everything about it, molding the dense, cold clay, re-creating the beauty of the human form.

  I didn’t realize how much it bothered me that I hadn’t enrolled in an art class since moving to New York, or never researched mentoring programs, since I love working with teens. Sure, I meant to take up sculpting, dancing, reading more books, and volunteering—I was always about to start something. What I actually did, however, was fall into a rut of working at an easy-enough job with steady pay and good benefits but that I wasn’t really happy at, going to the gym after work, and then, depending on how much energy I had left, going to a friend’s party or plunking down on the couch with my roommates to watch reality TV shows that I’m too embarrassed to name here.

  Because I wasn’t doing anything different from most of my friends, I didn’t see this as a problem. How could anyone think I wasn’t doing well? I graduated from college and wrote a book! So what if I do nothing with my free time? I have a great job title and apartment, I have successful friends!

  But if I was doing so well I wouldn’t have been subtly disappointed in myself; I wouldn’t have had to talk myself out of feeling guilty for (again) reaching for junk food and the remote. My life wouldn’t have started feeling repetitive, predictable, and rather uninspiring. I wanted more, which is why I’d start feeling restless, and, like a lot of people I know, thinking about moving or changing jobs. Sometimes I wonder if we make big moves because we underestimate the importance of smaller ones. Years are just an accumulation of thousands of hours, and what we choose to do with each of them matters.

  Maybe this is part of life’s learning curve, learning how to structure your time and which people and activities to fill it with. I’m part of a generation whose schedules were usually structured and determined for us. When they were children, my parents never had arranged playdates, they weren’t taken to soccer, piano, and art classes; they took off on their bikes and as long as they came home for lunch or dinner they were left to their own devices. I can’t imagine that kind of freedom and control of my time as a kid. Granted, adult supervision is more of a factor in a city as big as L.A., but, nonetheless, I think as a whole my generation is more deficient when it comes to negotiating our time and activities.