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Learning to Like Coffee (and Life): A Slow, Cream-and-Sugar Journey
On bitterness, bravery, and the art of sipping cautiously through the years
I was nine years old the first time I tried coffee. My mother sat across from me at our breakfast table, the same table that had seen dozens of failed school art projects and one too many family arguments. She sipped from one of our reversed-dyed Easter egg coffee mugs as if it held tap water, not some potion that made her tolerable before noon. I took a sip, trying to prove something, though I didn’t know what, and immediately felt betrayed.
“How do you drink this stuff?” I asked, scrunching my face like I’d just eaten a lemon.
“You learn to like it,” she said, not unkindly, but with the weariness of someone who knew that learning to like things — coffee, marriage, life — was less of an accomplishment and more of a survival skill.
She was 40 then, and I thought that was ancient. I’m 59 and still can’t drink coffee straight-up black like she did. I suppose that makes me somewhat lightweight in the lineage of womanhood.
After that first sip, I avoided coffee for a long time, which felt like rebellion in a world where everyone drank it like oxygen. By 25, most people I knew jolted themselves into existence…
