Monday, Day 37: Waffles

Today started out a little like this poem, “Primary Wonder,” by Denise Levertov:

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.

I have never failed at making waffles before. That is, not until today.

My daughter wanted to make me waffles for Mother’s Day. My spouse was working a 12 hour shift, so my daughter’s plan was to bring me breakfast in bed, a Mother’s Day tradition.

But, we both slept in, which honestly, was OK, because I desperately needed to sleep.

Plan B.

We went to church, where I taught Sunday School, putting together a lesson plan on the fly because I’d forgotten it was my week, struggling with a child who was more interested in putting glue on my arm than talking about Jesus. My daughter sat through a very long service of confirmation. We were starving at the end of it, but that was OK, because waffles were in our future. But, we needed to stop at the grocery to get the blueberries and dark chocolate chips that we both wanted in our waffles.

When we got home, we discovered that someone else who lived in the house had apparently used the kitchen the night before or early this morning, at some point while we were sleeping, and, well, there was a huge mess to clean up. “I’ll do it, Mom,” my daughter said, noticing my agitation, and she did.

We started making the waffles in a spotless kitchen, only to realize we were out of baking soda.  Who runs out of baking soda? Isn’t that the kind of staple that most kitchens always have too much of? 

Apparently, not always.

“Fine, I guess I’ll go back to the grocery store and get baking soda,” I sighed, martyr-like. I was getting hungrier by the minute, and it was pouring rain, and my daughter can’t drive. And of course by this point everyone had decided to stop by the grocery on their way home from mother’s day brunches, making me even more bitter. All these well-fed, happy people.

I wanted my waffles.

Finally, at 2:00 or so, we were making the waffles. Except that for some reason, we couldn’t get the batter to look like batter—no matter what we did, it kept coming out too thick. We looked up a few different recipes, all similar—we had put in the right proportions of all the important ingredients. So we moved forward anyway, pouring the too-thick batter onto the iron.

Burned waffles. Badly burned. Major clean up job.

We tried pancakes, but they, too, didn’t come out right—raw in the middle, burned on the outside.

“I don’t get it,” my daughter said. “I’ve used this recipe a thousand times.”

“It must be my fault,” I said. “Who can f up waffles, when she’s been baking her entire adult life and is 44? Forget it. Nobody asked me what I wanted anyway. Who said I wanted waffles?” I stormed out of the room.

I heard my daughter quietly crying.

I took a few deep breaths, then went back into the kitchen. She was cleaning up the new mess.

“Oh, honey,” I said.

“It’s OK, Mom,” she said back to me. “If you didn’t want waffles, why didn’t you say so? I always make you waffles on mother’s day.”

“I wanted waffles,” I said. “I just didn’t want burned ones. And basically, I’m just being an asshole.”  We both started laughing. “Seriously, I just want to spend time with you. I don’t really care what we eat or what we do.”

How was she—my adopted trauma kid, for whom mother’s day is complicated at best—managing to stay calmer than I was? Truth be told, Mother’s Day has always been a nightmare for me—painful throughout my childhood, mother-loss always thrown into my face, and a challenging dance after adoption, as it is for most adoptive parents. 

The first year, my daughter went overboard, figured out how to make some of her own money behind my back, bought me a gift and a beautiful card. Each year, she’s been less and less enthusiastic, more and more conflicted about the memories associated with the day. And, of course, after seven years, the novelty of having a (somewhat functional) mom has lost its—well, novelty. Especially when said mom acts like, well, an asshole.

And yet, here we were, together, cleaning up the kitchen for the second time.

Finally, we went out for our first meal of the day—at 3:30. The only place open on Sunday afternoons in our town was mediocre at best and totally dead—they’d had a mother’s day brunch that had been over for a long time. The wait staff were sitting at the bar drinking, along with a handful of men who looked like they’d been at it for awhile.

The cook came out of the kitchen, waved at us, and said to the wait staff, “I made you some good money today, didn’t I? Now go home and call your mothers.” They all laughed, but none of them moved. They ordered more drinks.

We were ravenous and stressed and I needed a Bloody Mary. My daughter ordered a Daiquiri, her first one.

“Sometimes, things don ‘t turn out the way you expected, but they end up OK anyway, right, Mom?” my daughter said, lifting her glass.

“Right,” I answered. We clinked glasses.

We may have downed our drinks a little more quickly than one should. But, to our credit, when we were asked a short time later if we wanted another, we both declined.

“I have two moms and I never thought I’d have parents. And I have everything I could ever want,” she said a little later. I wanted to record that, since I was sure she’d be asking me for something she desperately needed within the hour.

For that moment, as I ate my overcooked, fattening food and sipped my water, everything was shifting like the shift that turns Levertov’s poem on its head:

                                And then
one more quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all
let along cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, you still,
hour by hour, sustain it.