Family Recipe
I concentrate on the force of the meat mallet as I pound the chicken breasts to half-inch thickness. My hands are gluey from dredging flour. The counter is a battlefield of eggshell shards and globs of trimmed fat. This preparation busies my hands and helps me focus my viciously cycling thoughts on a single achievable task. I wasn’t always like this, so obsessive about something as mundane as the daily meal. For years, dinner was sustenance and respite, a time to be with my son and watch cartoons together and forget about the troubles of the day.
My complicated relationship with dinner started when I remarried – when I moved into my husband’s house with his two teenage children. Almost overnight, I acquired a new identity that eclipsed the rest of me: I became that most unsympathetic trope of “stepmother.” My eyes narrowed to slits, my nails sharpened to talons, my voice grew strident, and my heart tightened to a fist. I became unrecognizable to myself, but somehow the chore of dinner tethered me to this new house, this new family, this new life.
My complicated relationship with dinner persists, despite knowing that my resentments and hurt feelings are par for the course. My stepchildren’s attitudes toward me aren’t personal. Not really. They don’t see me as a woman doing her best to acclimate to a kitchen that does not feel like her own, dicing peppers with knives from their parents’ wedding, filling plates their mother selected long before I met their father. They don’t see me at all. It isn’t personal. I tell myself this on a loop, but when I enter the room, they barely look up from their phones. They retreat to their bedrooms. Sometimes they eat with us, and sometimes they don’t. I rarely know in advance what their plans are. Maybe I should offer to make them grilled cheeses or smoothies to tide them over till dinner. Sometimes I do, but mostly I stay silent, relieved when I hear their doors click shut. I pound the chicken harder.
My complicated relationship with dinner started when the anxiety I initially soothed by cooking reasserted itself as anxiety about cooking. I once loved that I could solve the problem of what side dishes to have with the pork loin or how to prepare the sweet potatoes. Cooking was something I could contribute, something creative, something with tangible results. I’d like to say it was a way of showing love – my more generous friends suggest exactly this – but I’m not convinced. If the ritual of cooking dinner began as my attempt to nurture, it has devolved into a compulsive act I use to trick myself into believing I have control.
My complicated relationship with dinner started when I realized that the problem of dinner is infinite. It presents itself daily, and I spend more and more time trying to come up with solutions that will satisfy us all. I wake up thinking about dinner, thinking about ingredients, cataloguing what we have – one onion, green beans, an avocado that needs to be used. I take walks to the grocery store to get what we don’t have, and my days fade away into the sizzle of meat in a pan, the bubble of water for pasta. I listen to audiobooks as I chop and peel and grate. In one, a woman who has recently had a baby describes the tail she is growing, the way she is transforming into a dog. In another, a woman who has also recently had a baby describes the teeth solidifying inside her vagina. I listen to them lament the strictures of motherhood, these unexpected metamorphoses, as I melt butter for a roux. These women ultimately embrace the extreme changes motherhood triggers in them – but what of the changes in me? This evil mother who does not belong?
My complicated relationship with dinner intensified when I could no longer abide hearing my husband say in his most instructive tone, “Thank you for dinner,” followed by his children’s pointed silence, my son’s uncertain murmuring. Something in me snapped and I recognized how cruel a set-up this whole dinner thing is, asking us to play nice and talk about our days and break bread and pass the salt as if we are not strangers. The whole endeavor seems like a way to highlight my failure to “blend.” The stepmother inside me balks. She refuses to engage. The pressure is too much with all her haranguing, so I fantasize about escape. I could rent my own apartment or spend a year in France. I could find a new job with evening hours or take meals in my bedroom alone. Really, though, I want to be here with my husband. I want to enjoy the time I have with my son, who eats the food I make with gusto, who is now over six feet tall and still growing. Maybe I even want this make-shift family. What I don’t want is this anxiety, this sense that I have become a fairy tale witch with insidious intentions. It is from her – this evil stepmother who beats her fists against the walls of my body – I dream of getting away. The impulse to escape agitates like too much coffee, and my inability to manage this reaction deepens my discontent, drives me down a black hole of recipes, as if there is some combination of spices that could serve as salve.
My therapist tries to help. She tells me to cut down on caffeine, recommends B vitamins, a dopamine booster, and an adrenal regulator. I change medications. She marvels that I spend so much energy trying to manage my fight-or-flight instinct. She reminds me to breathe, references half a dozen books about blending families, assures me all of this is normal. She tells me it’s okay if we eat in front of the TV every night, okay if I fear intimacy, okay if I am not okay. I order the supplements, try drinking green tea, and consider the roots of my reactivity.
Maybe my complicated relationship with dinner started in my childhood home, before any of this stepmother business. My mother was the sole cook, trading her writing desk and sweatpants for the stove and a dress every day at five o’clock. This change was akin to Cinderella’s twirling transformation from shredded rags into sparkly ballgown, especially to my child-eyes. We ate dinner together – my mother, my father, my brother, and me. We talked about school and work, kept our elbows off the table, finished our vegetables, said pleases and thank yous, and asked to be excused before going to our rooms. My mother’s mother, too, had overseen meals, fulfilling her role as a suburban housewife despite her crushing depression. I remember her dead eyes after ECT, the only treatment that seemed to break her out of the cage of her own mind, the only treatment that saved her from disappearing altogether into anxiety and sadness. And what will snap me out of this nightmare of so many ingredients and dishes and elaborate sauces? I look up in-patient treatment centers, taking a break from my hunt for new recipes, but stop after a few minutes. If I was in the hospital, who would cook dinner?
I think my complicated relationship to dinner started as a war with myself, waged on my own body. Calories and the number on the scale have been a decades-long calculation. How can I take up less space, make less noise? What is the recipe for invisibility? What is the recipe for acceptance? I have spent most of my life trying to be smaller, less in-the-way, less inconvenient. But the role of stepmother counters these efforts, turning me into an intrusion, an uninvited guest. With a simple, “I do,” I became everything I have spent my life trying not to be, and this is never more apparent than at dinner. But I refuse to let this beast inside me win. Generations of parents– and stepparents – have managed to feed their families, regardless of the conflicts that texture the surface of any group dynamic. Shouldn’t I be able to do this? What does it say about me if I can’t do this one basic thing?
So, I undertake recipes with a militaristic determination. I do not go AWOL, but instead lean into the anxiety that hums throughout my body, feed that righteous beast who spits and curses. I dice onion, grate ginger, slice garlic into spicy petals. My husband suggests I not worry so much about dinner, he can cook some nights. My therapist suggests all this energy I spend dinner is a symptom of OCD, that there is no problem except in my own mind. My son doesn’t know what to say, but at every meal he enthuses about the food, takes seconds and even thirds. This pleases me but does not curb my obsession. I have taken on dinner as a territory to be conquered. It is my domain. I need this illusion of control; here I can fight the woman inside me, can compensate for her selfishness and spite.
My stepdaughter comes into the kitchen as I am preparing a spinach, apple, and goat cheese salad. I’ve plucked the arils from a pomegranate, and she starts scooping them into her mouth with a teaspoon. I say nothing, but my body tenses. I am unused to her nearness, uncertain what this intrusion means. Part of me thrills that she has come into the kitchen, that she wants something I have to offer. Part of me can’t stop the calculations as she spoons up half the garnish. “Delicious, aren’t they?” I hear myself say in some other woman’s voice.
I only work part time now, so I have hours to plan and prepare. Monday is salmon with a balsamic glaze, garlic smashed potatoes, grilled asparagus. Taco Tuesdays are no longer just ground beef and shells and jarred salsa. I make white rice, brown rice, chipotle sauce, green salsa, esquites. I grate two types of cheese, mash avocados, roast cauliflower, and season black beans. I make sure we have hard tacos, soft tacos of flour and corn. There is enough for a party. I pluck cilantro, cut limes into wedges. Wednesday, I assemble two types of lasagna, roast vegetables, grate beets into a kale salad. On Thursday, I take an afternoon walk to the organic market to get the red onion I need for the chicken recipe I found during my daily research. Friday, I bake cheesecake brownies and apple crisp, mix dressings, lament the broccoli I overcook, buy a hand mixer and an immersion blender, perfect my technique for weekend frittatas. Each day, I time the food to be ready at 6:30 sharp.
I eat few of the things I cook. I don’t eat gluten or meat. I rely instead on salad and veggie burgers. Is this my penance for the ugliness inside me – my own hidden tail, my vagina dentata, this selfishness, resentment – these feelings I have that have no place to go? Or is it fuel for future resentments? The stepmother’s trick to keep me bitter? A sacrifice I will hold against them like a shield? I have no answers, but the freezer overflows with leftovers. When my husband’s kids make other plans for dinner, I am relieved and angry. I try to enjoy the time with my husband and son, but something rankles under the surface of my smile. There is no winning.
In the mirror I try to find the woman who has done this to me, who is driving me mad. I want to explain to my stepchildren that this isn’t who I am, but I can’t find the words, and even if I could, how could they understand when I don’t really understand myself? Instead, I roll out pizza dough, putting muscle into the movements to get it thin and even. I skewer chunks of beef, assemble kebabs with squash and cherry tomatoes and peppers and mushrooms. A long splinter of bamboo lodges in my palm. I pull it out and keep working. I keep myself busy, direct my energy toward sustenance, even as the bitch inside spits poison, even as I avoid real intimacy, even as all this culinary engagement is itself an escape, an obsession, a recipe I will never get quite right. And yet here I am, mistress of the kitchen. At 6:30 sharp, I call out to them to join me.
Elizabeth Hazen is a poet and essayist. A Maryland native, she came of age in a suburb of Washington, D.C. in the pre-internet, grunge-tinted 1990s, when women were riding the third wave of feminism and fighting the accompanying backlash. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Epoch, Fourth Genre, Grist, The Common, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Alan Squire Publishing released Chaos Theories, in 2016 and Girls Like Us in 2020. She lives in Baltimore with her family.