Articles
Walking Through the Layers
from Eat, Darling, Eat
I was very fortunate to be approached by Aimee Lee Ball at ‘Eat, Darling Eat’ to submit an article for her online magazine. So my sister, Karin and I wrote this article together about our experience growing up: about food, about family and about alcohol.
https://www.eatdarlingeat.net/post/walking-through-the-layers
Karin, Patti and our mother Kathryn
The fragrant scent of rosemary and simmered short ribs wafted from the kitchen, assuring us that we were, indeed, at Grandma’s house. The two of us ran from the front door to the bedroom, which existed as a shrine to our mother and her two sisters. Three twin beds stood sentry in the room, just as they did when “the girls” were young, when they were growing up, when they were going to school, when this house was filled with Italian and English and music and food. Those memories continued to exist under six-foot lengths of butcher paper, covered in perfect rows of puffy floured pillows of pasta and magic. Our mouths were watering in anticipation of the moment we would get Grandma’s ravioli. Finally, the time was upon us.
Oh, that sacred first bite of ravioli. The salty-sweet tang of the focaccia drenched in the generations-old, never-written-down sauce. That first whiff and the visual promise of tradition offered us safety in the midst of a childhood too often filled with fear and confusion. But there were other layers we would all walk through before sitting down for that meal.
Most of the day was made up of gender-divided experiences. We kids, of course, played together in our grandfather's garden, under beds, and with new toys if it was Christmas. Husbands of the sisters gathered in the living room with Grandpa where the beers were opened and “the game” was turned on the television set. Meanwhile, the sisters migrated to the kitchen where the first of many drinks was readied, cigarettes lit, and the serious “work” of the day began.
That “work” consisted not only of readying the holiday meal (though Grandma was always insistent that she’d completed 90 percent before anyone arrived), but also the catching up, the incessant chatting, and the quiet conversations in Italian that signaled secrets young ears weren’t meant to hear. At the time, it looked like they were really connecting. In general, the conversations steered toward politics and the state of the world.
Then came the time that all the cousins looked forward to, the honor of being the one to very gently release the first ravioli into the boiling cauldron of salted water. The smaller ones among us had to stand on a footstool to get above the huge roiling pot, with Grandma hovering, so frightened was she of the scalding water potentially splashing onto our small arms. Very soon we all gathered at the table, and the nirvana of the meal took center stage, allowing a semblance of “all’s well” to abate any previous angst.
Over time, the level of tension and intensity rose at these gatherings. Hushed conversations would elicit a knowing that something was wrong, but no one would actually talk about it, and we kids knew better than to ask. The drinking became more obvious to us as we got older, and the tension between people rose. More than once, the bathroom would be locked behind someone sobbing. Maintaining the fantasy that culinary perfection could erase the underlying pain grew more difficult. As the chaotic and dysfunctional nature of these holiday scenes increased, so too did our mother’s disease.
Though her alcoholism progressed at an alarming rate once we were tween and teen, when she did cook, it was still heaven. Her leg of lamb was pure gustatorial bliss. Roast turkey or fried chicken meant not only a traditional meal that indicated normalcy but simmering stock and the makings for egg soup. Smoky spare ribs with mashed potatoes and corn on the cob left the house redolent with the scent of old-fashioned summer. One night a week, Saturday, we all sat down together in the dining room so we could pretend that we were a “typical” family with these gastronomical perfections—as long as you didn’t count the fact that no one at the table actually spoke to each other. Or looked at each other. And if they did, the underpinnings were forced and strained.
But then came the ho-ho-ho holiday when our father decided he was done. Two nights before Christmas that year, he packed a suitcase, sneered, uttered a few snide comments, and left. Fear, anger, tears, even hope in a way, descended on our dirty little alcohol-infused home as we grappled with this shock. And then, we went on as if it had always been this way. Our mother never spoke of his leaving, and we were advised never to tell a soul. It was another family secret.
Karin: By now, I was a teen, stuffing food in my mouth to squelch the fear and sadness. No amount of sugar and white flour seemed to help, so I added rage and then dieting. Because of our mom, I didn’t drink much yet; instead, I tried to control my friends’ drinking and drug use.
Patti: I inevitably started drinking and using drugs. After our father left and Karin was away at college, I was home alone with an alcoholic mother who usually passed out before I went to bed. By 13, I was drinking every weekend, taking acid or anything else that could help numb the pain.
Clearly, we were each already carrying the family dis-ease.
When we were 20 and 16, our mother turned yellow. The jaundice screamed of the progression of the alcoholism and likely cirrhosis. It turned out her liver was also filled with cancer. Within a few months, she was dead. The heartbreak and confusion that saturated our respective lives was overwhelming. We coped differently, but there was no mistaking the ironic and toxic presence of drugs and alcohol in each of our lives now. We couched it in jokes about partying and all of it being ever so fun. Inside we were drowning in grief, fear, and confusion. While the joking and light-hearted demeanor that we presented to the world had a shiny veneer, internally we were struggling. Each in our own way, each with our own stories, the family disease had taken root as an ineffective and obvious way of trying to ward off the grief, not only of losing our mother but being confused about how we were supposed to create our lives. Perhaps the only positive thread that held us together, and that we were able to use as a lifeline, was cooking—together and separately.
Karin, being the oldest, tried hard to maintain the cooking traditions and elaborate holiday meals, while Patti, the younger of us, didn’t fully embrace the power of those roots until she had her own family. There were times when we did it with the unconscious patterning of the past: elaborate meals to cover the real focus: drinking. But there were also times when the pure intent was to weave a community of people together with love in the form of food. And unbeknownst to us at the time, to somehow heal our family legacy wounds.
Thankfully, each of us ultimately found sobriety, healing, and connection within communities based on facing hard truths and building strong bonds. It feels good, and wonderfully hopeful for future generations, to have halted the legacy of alcoholism and avoidance of difficult feelings, at least in our mother’s lineage. Her addiction and depression led to our losing her far too soon. Today we're proud to own that no one carried the gift for those generational never-written-down recipes the way our mother did. It is the one way we keep her alive and pass some of the best of her on to our own children and their families.
