Of Mess and Moxie

by Jen Hatmaker

  Pile up any dipper you want.

  This is spicy and creamy, and it literally got me through the 2010 National Championship game when Colt McCoy got injured on the fifth play and we handed off our dreams to a freshman quarterback who had ridden the pine since August. The only winner that day was the buffalo dip, my friends.

  * If you hate blue cheese, you can substitute ranch dressing here, but in that case, perhaps you should give this recipe a new name because the only thing worse than serving your friends something called “Buffalo Chicken Dip” without blue cheese is stocking your cooler with O’Doul’s. It’s un-American.

  BACON-WRAPPED STUFFED DATES

  I cannot even with these. I cannot even, and I cannot odd. I actually think these are a sin. I’m sorry, Lord, but I need these in my mouth. And may I bless with heavenly blessings the first pioneer who decided to make cheese out of a mama goat’s lactation. The following quantities make about a pan full, but by all means, double this bad boy if you’re feeding a big crew.

  1-pound tub pitted dates

  1-pound package bacon, cut in half or thirds (not thick-cut bacon)

  4-ounce log fresh goat cheese or cream cheese 6 ounces roasted almonds

  Balsamic reduction*

  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Use a paring knife to make a slit on one side of each date, but don’t cut all the way through. Pitted dates are kind of hollow inside, because they obviously want to be filled with almonds and goat cheese. If your dates have the pits inside, just remove them after you cut the slits. It is their culinary destiny. Fill each date with a bit of goat cheese and one almond, close it, and wrap the whole thing with half a strip of bacon. Place on a baking sheet seam down (don’t crowd the pan), and bake for 20 to 30 minutes until the bacon is nice and brown.

  These can be served at room temperature (make before!) drizzled with balsamic reduction. They are sweet and salty and creamy and crunchy and chewy, and you almost feel like you should go to confession after eating one. Forgive us, Lord, but there was bacon.

  *You already have balsamic reduction in your fridge if you have paid any attention to me online. It’s something you need to have. If you, for some reason, do not have it, make some stat! Heat 3 to 4 cups of balsamic vinegar plus 1 tablespoon of sugar in a saucepan over medium heat until it reduces by half and looks like syrup (if it coats the back of a spoon, it’s ready). It is sweet and basically perfect. Store in a closed container (I use a mason jar) and keep it in your fridge. Drizzle it on everything (veggies, potatoes, eggs, ice cream, strawberries, avocados, salad, chicken, salmon, pasta, cheese and crackers, air).

  Any time women come together with a collective intention, it’s a powerful thing. Whether it’s sitting down making a quilt, in a kitchen preparing a meal, in a club reading the same book, or around the table playing cards, or planning a birthday party, when women come together with a collective intention, magic happens.1

  — PHYLICIA RASHAD

  CHAPTER 17

  BONUS MOMS

  Last summer, as often happens, the Hatmaker Moving Parts outpaced our bandwidth, and we had to call in reinforcements. (We have five kids, and they mostly all live here and it is just bananas, you guys.) So my friend Amy took Ben for a couple of days while we shuttled other kids somewhere or flew somewhere or whatever cluster we were managing.

  Amy is a rare find. I have never seen her remotely unhinged, and she homeschools four sons in the house her husband grew up in. She manages this Zen because she quietly, gently curses like a sailor and fancies bourbon. She is always sending articles about weird stuff like emu oil and protein structures of different mammalian milks and how Thomas Jefferson wasn’t math educated until thirteen. She once took a maimed chicken to the vet instead of the dinner table. When the flu struck our house last year, she called in $150 worth of holistic oils and colloidal silver and lauric acid to our hippie pharmacy with explicit instructions, and I proceeded to pump my people full of crazy for the next week. (Fine, the flu was totally eradicated.) Amy once locked me into a discussion on “sacred geometry on the micro and macro levels,” so that probably explains things well enough.

  I tell you all this so you can make sense of her text to me during Ben’s stay:

  “Burying dead parakeet at 10:15 p.m. in the backyard, and Ben dug up old cat bones. I think. Not sure. Have buried 20 animals back there since 1976. We all had on headlamps. Changed hole locations and went on with ceremony. Might be traumatized. Be aware.”

  This is what happens when your granola, unschooling, earth mama friend lives in a pet cemetery: your son becomes a grave-digger and has attended not one but two services for Amy’s dead animals. (Tiffany, the handlebar-riding chicken, began resurfacing after a few months and required a second ceremony and bigger rocks. Ride or die, Tiffany.)

  Jenny, Shonna, Stephanie, Trina, Michelle, Tonya, Alison, Angie, Lana, Lindsay, Cortney, Sarah, Amy: these girls are the ones I lovingly refer to as my kids’ Bonus Moms. Some go back to my oldest in diapers, some in the last five years, but all have stood in as extra mothers to my children, and me to theirs.

  From my earliest memory, Bonus Moms were a given, a childhood staple. Sure, I was raised by Jana King, but I was also parented by Sharon, Melissa, Prissy, Cheryl, Judy, Rita, and Debbie. I knew their houses as well as my own, and their kids were practically my brothers and sisters. I was either grounded or swatted by each and every one of them, and I have nearly as many memories under their care as my own parents’. I loved them like an extra daughter, and their faces were in all our pictures: vacations, games, graduations, weddings, baby showers.

  Because my mom assembled such a tight tribe, I had a precedent for prioritizing my own, my girlfriends, my consortium of Bonus Moms. At first, it was simply survival, as early childhood often is. In that stage, it seems like every friend is having a baby every five minutes, and when you get together, you must group-parent or someone might not make it out alive. To this day, I cannot believe my girlfriends and I met at the pool with almost twenty children under five between us. We’d set up watch stations around the perimeter and chatter across the pool while pulling one anothers’ toddlers out of the water periodically, dabbing more sunscreen on any kid in reach. We’d group feed them with whatever we scavenged from our kitchens: six peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (one on inside-out end pieces of bread), five pieces of leftover pizza, two bags of Goldfish crackers, some grapes on their last legs, three baggies of carrots, and eight juice boxes. It was like the loaves and fishes—somehow it always stretched.

  In the preschool years, the Bonus Moms traded kids and swapped free days. Trina and I rotated: Tuesdays at my house and Thursdays at hers. Six straight hours of liberty to grocery shop and clean toilets was the sort of dream life we’d only read about. Our kids barely had a memory without each other, so parenting three or six? What was the diff? We basically had the same rules, the same food, the same parenting style, and the same naptimes. Our kids were like a tiny pack of wolves, and we raised them as a conglomerate.

  Trina’s youngest daughter Hannah and my Gavin were absolute best pals and had more sleepovers than I could ever number. (When we moved neighborhoods and ended their future in the same middle and high school, Hannah cried bitter tears and Gavin stopped speaking to us.) Anyhow, Gavin had night terrors until he was six, and during one sleepover with Hannah, he woke up screaming nonsensically about spiders in his bed. Trina’s husband, Andrew, quick on the draw, sprinkled baby powder all over Gavin’s bunk and declared it “a spider’s worst nightmare.” We used that trick for the next ten years. (Huge shout-out to Bonus Dads too!)

  When my mind wanders back over those years, I cannot recall a single scene that didn’t include my girlfriends feeding my kids at their tables, bathing them in their bathtubs, squeezing their ketchup at Chick-fil-A, holding their hands crossing parking lots. I braided their daughters’ hair, tucked extra sons into bed, wiped their noses against their wishes, attended their band concerts. Our husbands always group texted
us, looking for a specific wife, knowing she was likely among her tribe, or in any case, one of us was probably supervising her kids.

  As we got older and parenting became less strenuous physically but more complicated emotionally, Bonus Moms became ever more vital. I once hoped to be the repository of every precious secret, every social apprehension, every burning question my children harbored. But as real life took prominence, much like it did for all of us, I realized teenagers need other trusted adults to help them navigate the pitfalls of adolescence, because some conversations are easier broached with someone Not Mom.

  This season introduced a whole new crop of Bonus Moms, some who were not even mothers in the traditional sense of the word. AJ, Shea, Angie, Kelly, Kim, Sam, Faitth: these women became safe havens spiritually, emotionally. A few of them have not yet reached thirty, but they’ve invested deeply in my children and, consequently, became their confidants, advisors, mentors I trust and love. They connect with my kids at Bible studies and coffee shops, over movies and hiking, Snapchatting and texting. One time, Faitth, twenty-five, asked to spend the day with Sydney, fifteen, and an hour later I received this text: “Can we drive to Fort Worth and get popsicles at Steel City Pops?” This was a three-hour drive from Austin. One way. So my sophomore and this vibrant young adult drove six hours round trip for four popsicles.

  If I once imagined this threatening, now I am only profoundly grateful my kids have a stable of trusted advisors at the ready. Mamas, we need not become territorial over our children’s every thought and concern. What a gift to surround them with a team of Bonus Moms (and Bonus Dads), trustworthy adults who love our kids and stand available to lead, counsel, basically reinforce everything we’ve ever said but somehow come off more credible. We want this for them, a safe runway to complicated discussions, a place to warm up, to slowly accelerate, to try out ideas before takeoff, if not with us then with other adults we trust.

  I rarely hear anyone talk about this, but sometimes a mom simply has a different personality than a kid or two. This obviously isn’t about love, affection, or devotion; those are completely intact. It might just be a matter of an extrovert raising an introvert, a shy mom raising a rabble-rouser, an academic raising a cowboy, a party planner raising a mathlete. Sometimes, our DNA combines in interesting ways, or we grow our families outside of biology, and we end up parenting a child with a completely different operating system from how we are wired.

  For example, our family is incredibly fluent in sarcasm. Satire is our religion, and we are its disciples. If it is snarky, ironic, hilarious, or slightly inappropriate, we are down. Gavin’s sixteenth birthday present was live tickets to Jim Gaffigan’s comedy show. We share hilarious memes, snarky group texts, stand-up comedy podcasts, and vintage comics.

  Except for one little precious family member who came to us at age five. She is a purist, a literal, a tender heart who doesn’t understand a solitary word of sarcasm and is regularly horrified, terrified, confused, shocked by our conversations. Upon discovering the complete consumption of a twelve-pack of Coke in one night, my husband said at the breakfast table the next morning: “Guys, I think we’ve been robbed. A band of thieves must have broken in and stolen all the Cokes.”

  SONS: Weird. You would think they’d take the TV. We should report it.

  REMY: What??!! We were robbed????

  It is a hard life for her, this trying to discern sarcasm. While the rest of us bantered in affectionate satire, that poor soul went to school having barely escaped the fresh knowledge that our house was violated by cola bandits. Add to this her love for structure, schedules, and a detailed agenda to the minute, and sometimes it is difficult to understand a sarcastic, loosey-goosey mama who struggles with sensory overload.

  No one is right or wrong in the slightest. Just different.

  So my friend Michelle is the absolute dearest Bonus Mom for my little one. She provides a secondary environment where all her wonderful traits are understood and celebrated. On Remy’s ninth birthday, aware that waiting until 5:00 p.m. for her party would exacerbate her particular anxieties about details and expectations, Michelle drove to my house at 9:00 a.m. and swooped her away for the day as a blessed distraction, delivering her back with five minutes to spare. I didn’t even ask for this. She just knew. Because she is an attentive, loving, intuitive Bonus Mom. (Plus, Michelle’s husband is Brazilian, which accounts for Remy’s obsession with Shakira and her insistence that at Mrs. Barreto’s house, they are “international.” My little Ethiopian also doesn’t understand irony.)

  Bonus Moms can lend fresh, enthusiastic ears to our children who operate in their personality spheres. My friends readily pass off their budding writers to my counsel, and my girlfriend Tonya takes Ben to Six Flags with her boys every summer (crowded theme parks in July are where all my dreams go to die). Sharing the parenting load with other trusted adults increases our capacity and sustainability. What a gift for our children to know they are deeply loved at another home or two besides their own, that a Bonus Mom or Dad is proud of them and in their corner too. We cannot overlove our children with too many doting adults; there is no such thing as too much adult affection lavished on any kid. Childhood and adolescence comes with such deep insecurity, so many questions and worries about the world and their place in it, providing additional layers of bedrock through Bonus Parents is a buttress, a safety net, a balm.

  When my girlfriend Jenny and her family moved to Austin from Corpus Christi to plant our church with us, her children moved from the only home they’d ever known. Her oldest son, easily the nicest, most gentle kid in Texas, was immediately bullied by a pubescent psychopath (I’m still bitter). Like, daily taunting, punch-in-the-face bullied. It was devastating and disorienting, and having already sacrificed so much for us and the church, Jenny and I were undone that her son was now suffering even more.

  On the face-punch day, Jenny and I went upstairs to his room, crawled on either side of him in his bed, and the three of us cried our eyes out. Just a mom, a Bonus Mom, and an enormous eighth-grade boy bigger than both of us. There was no avoiding us; we were family and I’d once given this big kid more baths than I could count. He was going to suffer our broken hearts. (Especially since our husbands downstairs gave him this exact advice: “Find a corner where no teacher is looking, and take him out. It will only take one time.” I’m just saying he received a variety of parental responses.)

  Last week I was an accomplice in an elaborate scheme in which that same kid got engaged on a lake trip with all of us and his third Bonus Family. While he got down on one knee, Jenny smiled on lovingly, thrilled but dry-eyed while his two Bonus Moms bawled our ever-blessed eyes out. He was one of our own, one we all raised together, out there with a girl and a ring, growing up despite our threats, while all our other kids and Bonus Kids cheered and took pictures, and we claimed a portion of the day’s happiness because we’d logged so many years group parenting and group disciplining and group mentoring and group defending, and by gosh, we were going to celebrate like he was our own flesh and blood. We popped champagne, made toasts, and started planning our first wedding like proper Bonus Mothers-in-Law.

  We promise not to be obnoxious.

  I mean, we promise to try.

  HOW TO (PART THREE)

  HOW TO PICK A RESTAURANT WITH YOUR HUSBAND OR SIGNIFICANT OTHER

  1. Wait until he asks the fated question, “Where do you want to eat?”

  2. Respond with, “Whatever. I’m breezy.” Imagine sincerely that you mean this, because you can’t think of anywhere specific.

  3. Turn down his every suggestion with a grunt, scowl, or dismissive wave of the hand.

  4. Become moody and frustrated with his inability to correctly sense what your body is craving. Why can’t he get this right? Surely he doesn’t think you actually want Applebee’s. It’s like he doesn’t even know you. How have you stayed together this long? This person is flawed.

  5. Dramatically declare your appetite ruined and you don
’t even want to eat. Just never mind. Channel your inner preschooler. Make sure body language communicates petulance.

  6. Get into a medium-grade fight.

  7. Have a lightbulb moment and declare the exact perfect restaurant! You saved the date! You came through! You are such a good partner! You are clutch.

  8. Remember that you are starting your period tomorrow, which may account for just.a.wee.bit of your big feelings this evening. Do not share that information with your husband, because he cannot be trusted with it. If he gives you that I-knew-it look at this point, you might accidentally stab him in the eardrum with your steak knife, and that is no way to go down. Give the man a chance to live. It’s date night.

  HOW TO HANDLE A TWEEN WITH ATTITUDE

  1. Read eight books with conflicting advice. Choose a course. (This is arbitrary.)

  2. Set her down and explain the new rules in a June-and-Ward–level family meeting.

  3. Be consistent for fifteen entire minutes.

  4. Become increasingly irritated when tween won’t act like the book described. She is nothing like “Annie” in chapter 6. Annie transforms from tyrant to model child after two strategic sentences from the Book Mom, but when you reply, “What I hear you saying is this makes you feel unsure and scared, which is why you are choosing anger instead of constructive words,” your kid rolls her eyes and asks why you are talking so weird.

  5. Lose your mind and start to boil.

  6. Begin yelling things about how Annie is nice to her mother and has a lot of Jesus in her heart.

  7. Pour wine. (Could also insert straw directly in bottle or box. Your call here. There is flexibility on this step.)