Chasing Superwoman (11 page)

Not being Italian was my father's first mistake. But his fatal mistake was much more serious. He didn't like Grandma's cooking, and he didn't even fake it. Grandma would spend hours laboring over the very foods he didn't like—ravioli, gnocchi, minestrone, wedding soup, and pizzelles. Not only did he not like these foods, he complained when they were served, so much that my mother had to make him his own plate of plain spaghetti, the only pasta he would eat. My father would be served first. Never mind whether or not he liked the food. I always liked Grandma's meatballs better than my mother's, although I would never admit it. But I had to agree with my father about the sauce. I was used to my mother's sauce. Grandma always made her sauce by first browning a roast, and she usually left the fat in for flavor. Too much fat for me. Yet another thing for my father to complain about.

Sometimes, I wished he would just keep his mouth shut and eat, but like Grandma, keeping quiet wasn't his nature. Not to mention that he liked to tease Grandma, and the more he got a reaction out of her, the more it entertained him. Grandma would yell at him and tell him how lucky he was to have my mother. Then she would proclaim, “Uncle Sam will eat anything that Aunt Rose puts in front of him.” She would always end the sentence by saying, “He will even eat dog food.”

At least she never talked about my father behind his back. One thing I fully appreciate about Grandma's generation of women is their honesty. Brutal honesty. Even Lady Lawyer doesn't have the guts to tell people what she really thinks, so she acts diplomatic on the outside so later on she can undermine them when they're not around to defend themselves. Not Grandma. If she had something to say, she'd say it right to your face. When I was dating Doug, he was standing right next to me in the kitchen when Grandma proclaimed that I was spending too much time with “that boy.” She never called him by name until long after we were married.

Communal Living

Grandma modeled community—a real sense of knowing and caring for your neighbors—so much that often I long for a houseful of women making pasta together or sitting on my back porch. Most of us live far away from family, don't know our neighbors, and certainly don't hang out on our back porches for conversation when we can be talking on our cell phones or multitasking on our laptops. Yet my roots convince me that women were designed to live together in large communities. Unfortunately Doug has informed me he has no interest in communal living. So I hold tightly to the memories of my mother's kitchen, and I live for my college reunions every few years.

The last college reunion was at my house. We don't get hotel rooms. It's against the rules. Husbands are invited but not expected to attend, and children are always welcome. So last year we had a houseful of eight women, one brave husband (not counting mine), and a dozen children under the age of five. Doug made it until Sunday afternoon; then he locked himself in our bedroom until everyone left Monday evening. Built Becky had taken all the furniture out of my living room and turned it into a fitness studio, and Self-Employed Stefanie and Trusting Tracy had turned my kitchen upside down entertaining guests while Meticulous Molly and Caring Christie cleaned up everyone's messes. It was just like we were back in college. At least I got communal living out of my system for a few years.

Sometimes I still wonder, didn't Grandma have it right? Why are most women trying to do it all alone? In the New Testament church the believers were devoted “to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”
1
This requires a devotion to
other people.
But in today's modern church, it's unusual for families to live together in rich community. In fact, I would venture to guess that in circumstances when the mother works outside the home, the family is less likely to be involved in a church. Why? Probably a variety of reasons. Like me, some working mothers have felt judged by the church so they've decided to pull away. Others are simply too busy, too overwhelmed, or don't feel like the church can even begin to relate to their daily world. The result? Too many of us feel as if we are all alone. Why can't we live in a greater sense of community with other mothers and families? After all, wouldn't communal living be ideal for the working mother? Is a sense of community completely lost in my generation?

I was recently talking with my brother-in-law Jon (Encouraging Amy's husband) about their church in Las Vegas where he serves as one of the pastors. No, it's not perfect—there's no such thing as a perfect church—but they really take the message of community to heart. So, you don't have to clean up your act and become the “church lady” before you'll be accepted. Instead, they preach the three Bs—belong, believe, and
then
behave. There's something about belonging first that really has a nice ring. It's all about being part of a community—knowing that you have a “neighborhood” to call home. Too many of us are sitting at home and talking on our cell phones or glued to the TV watching chick flicks when what we really need is a live group of women to talk with, laugh with, and even cry with—like the women who gathered around my mother's kitchen when Grandma visited.

Lots of working mothers just need to hear that they belong.

Saying Goodbye

The hard thing about losing people you love is you're never ready to say goodbye. And looking back at those last few years, I could have learned so much more from Grandma. But I was busy getting ready to be Lady Lawyer, and I rarely saw Grandma after I went to law school. She traveled less in her late years, and it was always inconvenient for me to visit her. She continued to play favorites. I visited her during my second year of law school with Artist Sister, who was then in graduate school. She gave Artist Sister a twenty-dollar bill right in front of me and wished her luck in school. She turned to me and said, “Tell Doug I said hello.” Grandma eventually learned to like Doug. In addition to being Italian, he scrubbed her favorite pan, ate her food, and even sat in the kitchen and listened to her stories. But Artist Sister was by far her favorite, and Grandma always felt sorry for her because she didn't marry until she was almost forty. “Poor Marybeth. She still isn't married,” Grandma would say. And Grandma would always say that she hoped and prayed Marybeth would get married before it was “too late.” Of course, we all knew what that meant. Soon, Artist Sister would be too old to bear children, and a husband was a necessary part of the progression to motherhood.

Grandma understood, as I do now, the wonderful gift of motherhood. But she never got to see me wear my mommy cape. I was four months pregnant with Nick at her funeral. The last thing she told me was that I was going to have a boy, something she rarely got wrong. Like so many women who never had ultrasounds or genetic testing to determine gender, she could just look at a pregnant woman (Is she carrying “low” or “wide”?) and know the sex of the child immediately.

I know we would have finally bonded after I became a mother. Sure, she probably would have given me her share of criticism, but I would gladly take it to have her back. I can hear her saying, “Miss Prissy is always off traveling while Doug takes care of those poor kids at home. And did you hear about that nanny who fell asleep in the attic?” But she would understand my deep love for my children and would feed them in my mother's kitchen, telling the same stories over and over again. In the end they all would love her, and she would teach them the importance of family values and community.

When Doug says that the girls and I have D'Ercole blood, we take it as a compliment. I pray that my girls will have Grandma's determination, independence, and zeal for life. Grandma had all the traits to be a great lawyer in her time—articulate, clever, and tenacious. She could have held her own with Sassy Shelly and even rivaled Jock Jill in the courtroom. I'm just thankful she made an even better grandmother and mother.

So many of the women who came before us would have been successful career women in their time. Like Grandma, they were working mothers in every sense of the word. They modeled their faith by putting their families first and, unlike us, they didn't complain about having more time for themselves or needing their own “space.” They were proud to be mothers first and modeled rich community. We have so much to learn from their generation of Superwomen.

TEN

The Bread of Life

Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life.…

I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.

John 6:27, 35

Unlike Grandma, I will never be a domestic goddess. I hate to clean. I can't even tell you the last time I pulled out an iron. I'm terribly disorganized and can barely keep up with the kids' schedules, let alone my personal mail. And I hate to decorate. The last time we got a new couch, Abby had Vaseline smeared all over it within an hour of delivery (and, no, we didn't buy the fabric protection plan). Maybe I'll decorate when the kids get older. For now, why waste the creative energy, time, and money?

I may not clean, sew, organize, or decorate. But my roots have taught me the central importance of food in my family life. How could I ever live with myself if I relinquished the fundamental God-given right of preparing daily bread for my family? The women in my family were largely judged on the food they put on the table. Why should I be any different?

My First Apron

It's not like I set out to cook. Like everything else on my journey, it just sort of happened.

After I entered law school, Doug and I were completely broke. We quickly found that if we shopped smart and were a little creative, we could get by eating well on a shoestring budget. Pasta, our all-time staple, was cheap. And my mother provided me with an endless supply of homemade tomato sauce through law school. I know what you're thinking: Why couldn't a grown woman scrape a few bucks together and buy her own sauce at the grocery? It's simple. I'm spoiled. No canned or bottled sauce tastes as good as my mother's.

Not being able to eat anyone else's sauce had its consequences, especially when my mother lived two hours away. And our first apartment barely had enough room in the freezer for the ice trays, let alone containers of frozen sauce. The solution? I just had to learn how to make it myself. I've always been practical about domestic work, and I could see that cooking—unlike cleaning the toilet or dusting cobwebs—had some immediate and tangible benefits. Like feeding us. So my mother bought me one of those sixteen-quart stockpots, and I never looked back.

Kids in the Kitchen

Nick's favorite food is spaghetti, and he also refuses to eat store-bought sauce. I can't blame him. I've created a monster. If you open my freezer, it's packed with frozen sauce. I have it down to a science. Now that I have a commercial stovetop with six burners, I've upgraded to the twenty-quart pot. It still takes a full day to make a pot of sauce, and if I'm quick enough I get started early in the morning before my helpers get out of bed.

My kids all love to cook. Anna is in charge of stirring, Nick is in charge of rolling the meatballs, and we're all in charge of cleaning up Abby's messes. Maybe we should try to stop her from helping, but I don't believe in crushing the spirit of a two-year-old, even if it does take twice as long to accomplish a simple task. Besides, I'm not in a hurry. Cooking together beats just about any other family activity, and Abby is quickly learning to embrace her roots.

Besides sauce, our favorite projects include homemade pasta and variety of soups, birthday cakes, and all types of cookies. Every holiday we make cutout cookies, even though I hate cleaning up the mess. The kids end up eating half the dough, and Abby usually has about an inch of flour on the floor. She eats icing by the spoonfuls, and I always regret it when it's 10:00 p.m., and I'm exhausted and she's still bouncing off the walls.

The kids decorate the cookies in a variety of colors, and we're each careful to respect everyone else's work and talent. No one will eat Abby's cookies because she licks all the icing before, during, and after she finishes her work. I've become completely obsessive about decorating “my” cookies ever since Nick bought me my first cake-decorating set. The Christmas trees have to be green with white glitter for snowflakes and red bulbs. And the Easter eggs are always purple and yellow, with alternating stripes. I love saving them for my mother so she can marvel about them for weeks. “How do you ever find the time, Susan?”

There is nothing more rewarding than sitting down to a meal with your children, especially when they've helped prepare the food. Sunday afternoon dinners are sacred and easily my favorite time of the week. Give me a kitchen full of hungry kids, a glass of red wine, and an apron and I'm happy as a clam. No TV, no distractions, no rushing around, and no billable hours. We just sit and eat, and there's always plenty of food. It's one thing to spend family time together. Sharing a meal is intimate.

Once again, Lady Lawyer and Devoted Mommy have something in common. They're both food snobs. Lady Lawyer prefers to dine at the finest restaurants, especially when she's entertaining her clients. And Devoted Mommy is completely tired of her kids eating junk under everyone else's watch, so she always refuses the kids' repeated requests for fast food. Whenever we eat out, I'm always scrutinizing the food, thinking about how I could have made it better at home. Most restaurants are overrated and overpriced, and the kids always order the same greasy foods. Their eyes are usually bigger than their stomachs, and we always order too much. We take the extras home with good intentions, but inevitably leftovers end up in the trash. Who wants to eat a greasy, soggy kid's meal the next day?

Even Doug prefers to eat at home. We have always shared a special bond over food. Like me, he appreciates both the quality and experience of a good meal, something not easily accomplished in kid-friendly restaurants. Even if the food is good, we usually end up chasing Abby around because she won't sit in her seat, and as soon as we get our food, we wolf it down in about five minutes because we know our time is limited before someone is going to ask us to leave. It's no way to enjoy a meal.

This is why whenever Doug and I get out for dinner alone, we try to pick a restaurant that doesn't accommodate children. Sometimes, some inexperienced parents will bring their toddler along, and I join in with the rest of the crowd and give dirty looks. Who wants to be around screaming kids when you just left yours at home? It's one thing to have your own children ruin a meal. But somebody else's kids? I'd rather stay at home.

Unfortunately, eating at home isn't always that simple. Someone has to cook. Doug will grill hamburgers, boil rice, or stick a casserole in the oven. And he makes and rolls the dough for homemade ravioli every Christmas Eve. But most of the other daily meals in our house fall squarely on my shoulders. If I don't plan it, it doesn't get done. So my Sunday afternoons are usually spent planning dinners for the week. While I've got a roast in the oven, there's soup cooking on the stove, and a whole chicken in the crock pot that I'm going to debone later for casseroles and quesadillas. The kitchen is about 105 degrees, and at the end of the day Devoted Mommy is tired but strangely satisfied. At least we will have dinners through Wednesday. Then it's back to pasta and frozen dinners.

My Little Secret

Most people are shocked to hear that Lady Lawyer spends her Sundays cooking. Like my parents. They didn't think I could boil water for the first ten years I was married. My mother just assumed Doug did all the cooking, and would ask him questions such as how he makes his sauce and what brand of olive oil he prefers. He would play along with it, and it would make me furious. No one believed that I could cook.

However, there are certain advantages to having your family think you can't cook. Advantage number one: You don't have to bring side dishes and casseroles to family cookouts. I have a special exemption. My sisters all say, “Susie is just too busy to cook,” and my mother insists, “Please don't bring anything. We already have too much food.” It's hard to argue with that rationale. So just like Aunt Helen, I usually sit back and let everyone else do my work.

So long as my secret is safe, I still don't have to lift a finger. Everyone thinks I'm too busy. But sometimes I get a new recipe that I can't help sharing with my sisters. There's nothing like having everyone enjoy your creations or hearing, “Wow! That's the best avocado dip I've ever tasted.” So, a few times a year, I actually contribute something to the meal.

When my mother visits, she likes to do all the cooking. It's in her blood, just like it was in Grandma's. Some women just can't enter a home without taking over. She brings her own supplies, despite my insistence that I have spices and regular baking staples in my kitchen. Even though I generally welcome domestic takeovers, I finally couldn't hold back anymore. I really wanted to show her I could cook. So I insisted on preparing the meal. She wouldn't hear of it at first, but after some arm twisting, she finally gave in. I told her that I really wanted her to spend quality time with my kids since they absolutely adore her and see her once a month if we're lucky. Why spend your time in front of the stove when three children are all begging for your attention? She couldn't disagree, so I made her pork tenderloin with stir-fried vegetables and garlic smashed potatoes. She was in heaven. She talked about my pork tenderloin for weeks, and even my sisters were a little annoyed that I had become Julia Child overnight. Never mind that they had been bringing casseroles, dips, and main courses to family functions for years. I was now the most recognized chef in the family. It would cost me the exemption, but it was well worth it.

If only Grandma could see me now.

Leftovers and Junk Food

When guests enter your home, the first thing to do is offer them something to eat. I learned this from my mother. Inexperienced guests at her home smile and politely refuse. This is their first mistake. She won't take no for an answer and will even take personal offense. “What's the matter, don't you like pie?” The more you refuse, the more she will insist, and if you claim you are full she will pack it up and make you take it with you. She makes the best pies around, and—unlike her sauce—I won't even attempt to replicate them. I'm too afraid of failure when the standards are this high. After eating some pie, she'll entice you with brownies, chocolates, or some homemade cookies. Who couldn't feel at home?

Guests are also good at getting rid of leftovers. I grew up on leftovers, and as much as we all liked to eat, we weren't allowed to waste. So we would have a meal that included a piece of roast, a pile of dried-out spaghetti, and some leftover casserole. My father would complain like mad, but even he didn't believe in wasting food, and he didn't lift a finger in the kitchen. So, like the rest of us, he ate it.

I try to make my kids clean their plates. I tell them stories about the starving children, and how I always had to clean my plate as a little girl. We have contests. Threats of no dessert or no snacks before bed. But they don't have an appreciation for the evils of wasting food. Part of the problem? They've never seen leftovers for dinner. Doug refuses to eat leftovers, which is where our neighbor Ed the Eater comes in. We can always count on Ed the Eater to clean up anything, which makes me happy because I hate to waste and, like my mother, I love to feed guests. It also takes that extra pressure off the kids, not to mention the guilt off of Devoted Mommy for wasting perfectly good food.

I don't know what upsets me more, wasting food or junk food. Few things irritate me more than my children eating unhealthy snacks. I recently saw some study that working moms are more likely to have overweight children who develop health problems because of all the poor food choices they make when Mom isn't around. Of course, I felt guilty. Just what I needed. Another negative study about working moms. My kids are living proof that validates the study one hundred percent. They love junk.

Even though I wholly embrace healthy eating, I simply don't have time to make them healthy food like they deserve. When it comes to snacks, I'm a terrible packer. Most mothers who have nutritional control over their children carry around these coolers filled with fresh fruits, raw vegetables, and purified water. Not me. It's downright embarrassing when Abby constantly bums food off the other mothers at Nick's baseball games. We usually race to the ball fields right after I get home from work and the poor thing is starving. The other mothers look at me like, “Don't you have your own cooler?” Actually, I don't. I'm lucky if I have an extra diaper on hand, let alone food or water. The few times I actually have snacks on hand, it's because Doug had the foresight to pack. He picks up all the prepackaged garbage at the grocery, but I can't complain because at least he took the initiative, and it stops Abby from eating other people's food.

As much as he tries, Doug has yet to embrace my nutritional standards. He makes up for it in other ways, so I try to turn my head when he feeds the kids junk on a constant basis. For the record, Ho Hos are deadly and even though Doug allows them, I wouldn't feed them to my children if they were the last piece of garbage on the planet.

Why do I spend an inordinate amount of mental energy, time, and passion on food? Maybe I'm trying to overcompensate—the Superwoman complex again—since I'm not domestic in other areas. Maybe I'm just obsessed with food because of my upbringing. Some roots run too deep.

Food for the Soul

As soon as I have some extra time on my hands, I'm going to go through the entire Bible and mark every reference to food. I'll start with Jacob's birthright meal, manna from heaven, Elijah and the ravens, the widow's jar that wouldn't run empty, David and his men eating the consecrated bread, and Daniel's kosher diet plan. I'll then move on to the New Testament, including turning the water into wine, feeding the five thousand, and Jesus' final meal with His friends—the Last Supper. I love to picture Jesus and His disciples in the upper room, reclining at the table. They had shared many meals together before, but when He broke the bread everyone had to know that this one was different. Sometimes I wonder if there will be food in heaven. I'm convinced it would only be the finest of quality, all perfectly made from scratch and no fast food or greasy kids' meals. I get hungry just thinking about it.