Broken Ties That Keep Us Bound
Or, I conned my mother into green cookies
When I was a kid, holidays were the only time where the entire family made an effort to get together. My grandmother has five living children who almost all have grandchildren of their own now. My mother and grandparents and I would have dinner around my grandparents’ ancient, enormous kitchen table, which took up exactly half of the largest room in the house. After-ish dinner, the rest of the family would start to trickle in for desserts and coffee. The volume was always high, the opinions were usually rude, and my grandfather’s homemade egg-nog was predictably strong.
My grandparents basically raised me while my mom busted her ass at a place that would unceremoniously “let her go” 21 years later. My grandmother is 100% Sicilian, four-feet-and-eleven-inches of Catholic rage, and when I moved 2800 miles away from Maryland to Oregon, it shook her. My grandfather is a practical German and it shook him, too. They cut me out of their lives like the time my grandfather cut my grandmother’s brother’s obituary out of the newspaper, as if she wouldn’t notice when she made her usual perusal of them.
This is standard protocol for my family: if you’re mad enough at someone, you just stop talking to them. If they have an experience that makes you uncomfortable, you invalidate it. Working through difficult emotions and finding common ground are not strengths of ours. Truthfully, my grandmother had a traumatic childhood as the child of poor, second-generation Italian immigrants, and I don’t much hold it against her. It hurt me more when she cut my mother out of her life for reasons still unknown to this day, because that pain I can see with my own eyes.
There is an absolute ocean of pent-up frustration, bitterness, and unspent grief in my family. It surfaces, quietly and subtly, during Christmas, as if the cosmic traces of those loud family gatherings still tug at us from what feels like a different lifetime entirely.
Mom is baking Italian cookies tonight. She hasn’t had the same level of practice that my grandmother did in swirling long pieces of dough into X-shapes, spirals, and candy-cane shapes, but the flavor is perfect. I’ve already eaten three while they’ve been cooling.
“Do you want to help me icing them?” she asks me with measured hope in her voice.
Since the family split, I haven’t been much for the tradition. My great-grandmother taught my grandmother, who taught her daughters, and then when she stopped speaking to her daughters, I lost my desire to learn myself. I can still remember my grandmother clearing off that enormous table and spending an entire day with her sisters and cousins, baking dozens and dozens of Italian cookies. It was an annual to-do. It was such a joyful moment for me each year that I think I wanted to escape the present-day feeling that the cookies brought me: a sense of loss.
But my mother loves to bake them. They’re not quick cookies to make — the dough takes a lot of beating, and there are always at least three flavors of icing: almond, anise, and vanilla. I think my grandmother also used lemon. For the brief moment that I ponder my mother’s question, I consider how a recipe, a tradition, a cookie gets passed down through generations, and that there was only way to change the subtle heartache I felt about it.
“Yeah,” I say, and get up to wash my hands. “I do.”
She’s whisking icing with spoons, and the only kind I like is vanilla. Truthfully, I feel wasteful when I eat one of the almond or anise-icing cookies, because I don’t enjoy them. But the vanilla? Totally different experience. This is a real conundrum, because traditionally we do not separate them by flavor, and since there’s no discernible difference in the hue of the three icings, one has no way to predict the flavor into which one is about to bite. (This was also a struggle in my youth.)
“Oh, I have an idea!” I say with the kind of excitement that mathematicians must experience when solving a difficult equation. “What if I put a drop of food coloring in the vanilla ones? Then we don’t have to separate them, but I’ll know which ones are which.” I know that “a drop” is a lie, I’ve never used just a single drop of food coloring for any reason in my life, but I have to choose my lies carefully when it comes to her cookies.
Mom’s face is stone as she peers at me. She’s a traditionalist, not much for change, even small ones. She makes a very slow blink, her shoulders rise and fall ever so slightly, and she says, “Yeaaaah, okay.” She has conceded this small piece of The Way We Make Italian Cookies, and I have food coloring in that bowl faster than you can say ya mama.
We spend a period of time earnestly dipping the tops of the cookies into our respective bowls, careful to avoid too much drippage, and arranging them on lined cookie sheets so that they’re not touching, but very close together to maximize space. After a few cookies have been dipped, we tap tiny round sprinkles from slender bottles into the drying icing. Mom talks about bake time: she’ll ask me repetitively how they taste, never trusting her skill. To be fair, she likes them baked much longer than I do; I prefer them a little doughy. I assure her, after my fifth cookie, that they came out perfectly.
Soon I have a tray of fat cookies with light green icing on them. I beam like a lighthouse into a dark clear night, proud of the success of my adaptation. Mom raises her eyebrows and says, “Well, they’re definitely…festive,” for my benefit. I suspect she secretly likes them more than she’ll admit.
I realize while we craft these cookies together that food is what I have left of my family — and my childhood with them. I can make my grandmother’s marinara sauce from scratch, my grandfather’s apple sauce, and soon I’ll make Italian cookies, too. I’ll keep feeding others as a way to mend the broken parts of my own lineage, because there is nothing on this beautiful earth that can last generations — or bring together new ones — quite like food can.
Questions and comments welcome. ❤
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