Home Cookin'

Venom


One part fear, shame, humiliation or failure.
Add a healthy dose of guilt.
Stir in equal parts distrust, confusion and resentment.
Mix well with alcohol.
Season with neglect.
Top with verbal or physical abuse.
Serve chilled.


Although I never knew her to refer to one, my mother kept a collection of cookbooks on the kitchen counter where they grew old, faded and gathered dust.  She'd received most of them as gifts - the thought of actually purchasing one seemed to offend her - and she cooked pretty much as she raised her children - on the fly,
when the mood struck, and rarely bothering to clean up the mess she left behind.


It was this memory that came to me on a recent visit to the nursing home to see my friend, Henry, and listened to him talk about his own daughter.


As a little girl, caught between two adults at war with each other, she mostly tried to keep out of the way.  When taking sides was inescapable, she stood with her daddy - it was quieter, safer, a little more sane and as a general rule, comfortably predictable.  As she grew up, she came to accept that madness was a way of life, that violence was the backdrop, and that she was the main point of friction.  As a teenager she began to plan her escape - first college in another state, then the nearest and most faraway harbor she could find - marriage.Through it all she stayed on her daddy's side.  Her mother's vicious tantrums and scenes were so second nature that she barely gave them a thought, becoming adept at shrugging off the wild behavior, the threats, the domination and escalating hostility.  She never once stopped defending him, never once considered him anything except a victim.  Even so, she fled as soon as possible, detaching and putting distance between herself and her parents.  A child and divorce followed in quick succession and not long after her daddy's debilitating stroke, she remarried and abruptly changed direction, taking her mother's side with a fierce determination.  This about face, brought on by the possibility of everything becoming public and destroying the carefully concealed facade of a marriage in desperate trouble, undid her and she turned on the man who had always protected her with a calculated vindictiveness no one would've thought possible.  The little girl who had spent most of her life covering for him, taking his side, and repairing the damage, was suddenly a grown woman with a new outlook and a stunning new interpretation of what was was wrong with her parents' marriage - she turned angry and distant, refusing to visit, call, listen or forgive.  She blamed him for it all, passionately justifying her mother's rage.  At the mention of a divorce, she exploded.


You'll lose everything, she warned him coldly, Your home, me, your grandchild.  You'll be all by yourself with no place to live, no money, and no one to take care of you.  Now, leave me alone!


Her words, so hateful and so like her mother, struck him like a blow, doing more damage than the stroke itself.


Mind what you put on your children's plates.