the mother sauce

Every sauce starts from one...so does every wound & every chance to raise the girl you used to be.

Millie has wanted a wolf cut for a few weeks now.

And by “wanted”, I mean “has completely obsessed over”.

If you don’t know what that is, welcome to the last month of my life. It’s a shag, layered and feathered in the front, and long/messy mullet-esque in the back…like…a cute mullet that went to art school. She found it on Pinterest this summer and has been consumed to say the least. Every waking minute, photo after photo, at all hours, she’s interrupted me for “this very important thing I have to see”…this one, Mom. No, THIS one. This is the one.

Last year, it was the obsession with red tips and highlights…then blue…with stripes. She still asks, actually, and never ceases to beg me to get the REAL thing, bleach and all, but I’m not ready for that commitment just yet…so we live in semi-permanentville for the time being. And so…that’s when attention turned to the infamous wolf cut. She has an entire mood board for her head, and she talks about it the way I used to talk about getting braces and finally having straight teeth…like this haircut is THE THING…the thing standing between her and the whole rest of her life.

I keep telling her not yet…trying my damndest to instill the timeless advice that you don’t make any drastic changes right before a big event. Certainly not the night before you start middle school, at a brand-new school where you know only a handful of people. You don’t make big, permanent changes to your hair or your body right before a big day…you just don’t. I told her to take a breath, pause the haircut discussion for the week, and then turn our attention to picking out the most fun first-day outfit. Let’s just see how the first week goes before making any drastic changes…let them see YOU.

She rolled her eyes at me like the angsty pre-teen she is and looked at me as if I personally ruined her one shot at happiness…I’m such a mean mom.

Because I know this…the thing this 11yr old doesn’t want to hear quite yet…I know exactly what she’s doing and why. I know that particular haircut isn’t just a haircut. It’s a spell…it’s the magic beans of it all…the thing she believes will finally make her “cool”…will make her belong…make her interesting enough…the thing that will convince the other kids to keep her.

I know it…all too well…because it’s the same dang spell I tried to conjure a hundred different ways throughout my childhood and adulthood. Despite my best efforts…never did my conjurings open the doors I thought I needed or wanted and quite literally never opened the way I thought they would. My puppet-mastery knew no bounds…

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I’m a chef. Self-taught for the most part, I spent hours and hours “Julia & Julia’ing” myself as I fumbled my way through years of recipes. After honing my skills, more professionally, in restaurant kitchens in NYC, I spent more years developing recipes. I can taste something once and figure out what’s in it…what’s missing…and I wonder what somebody was reaching for and what maybe didn’t quite land. It’s almost as if you can look at a dish and see and taste the fear…the anxiety…the preconceived notions before the person who made it even gives any explanation.

That’s what it’s been like to watch Millie in this life phase.

I can see it…I recognize it. I don’t have to guess what she’s feeling because I see it in her face and all over…as she spirals about the new year, the new school, the longing for new friends. The haircut is a stand-in, obviously…a diversion…she’s actually spiraling about who she’ll sit with at lunch, whether she’ll make friends, whether someone will choose her. I recognize it because I cooked from this same recipe…built from the same ingredients, almost to the gram. A heaping cup of am I too much?, folded in with a full tablespoon of I’m nothing to anyone at all, a long pour of fear…fear of being alone…of being unlovable…being left out…being not enough.

I started writing my own recipe when I was little…when I moved to a small town in South Carolina, started at a new school halfway through the year to a community where I knew no one. And here she is…my girl…stirring the exact same pot, working from the same recipe.

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I found my childhood journals a few months back on a trip to my childhood home in South Carolina. The ones from elementary school…middle school…high school and even ones from my early years of adulthood. I’ve mentioned them before and re-reading them wrecked me all over again.

There were birthdays in there…more than one…where I wrote my wishes for how I wanted to celebrate my big day….and then, the very next post that followed was a defeated report of expectations not being met. Posts where I wrote…in my reckless little-girl handwriting, that I hoped I’d get a party that year. And then the next entry: everyone was too busy and the party never happened.

I asked my mom about it recently and she of course felt terrible…she couldn’t even remember that happening…maybe that was the season my grandfather was dying and my dad was coming undone and both of my parents were just trying to keep the whole ship from going down. They were treading water, trying to hold it together for my sister and me. But little nine-year-old Jess didn’t know all of that…she only knew her big day went by like any other day, and she filed that away as evidence that she didn’t matter.

It was all evidence, I guess. Reinforcing the narrative that she was easy to forget…that love was something to be earned by being good enough, quiet enough, useful enough…and that if she didn’t try hard, she could just…slip through the cracks of everyone else’s hard week.

She was the little girl who spent most of her recesses on an island of one. Bucked teeth, weird freckles, living in a mobile home when everyone else lived in houses…the tag-along nobody remembered. She was the one who didn’t have a single person to call best friend until she was well into middle school. The one who eventually found her people in a church youth group and gripped them like a life raft.

She just wanted a friend…and that was…that was her recipe…she wanted to look cool, be cool…she wanted just one person to see her, choose her and keep her.

And now…here I am, looking at her again. I see her right in front of me…only this time, she has the face of my daughter. She’s the sassy eleven-year-old standing in my kitchen, insisting I look at her iPad of pinned haircuts. She’s there, wanting the exact same thing I did…showing me all the ingredients she wants to use, and every single one of them, I recognize.

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Day one of middle school, I watched her walk in with the horde of terrified sixth-graders, their wide-eyes braced for the unknown. And I was there, again, at 2:50pm, to pick her up. That first day, she came out of school and her face down…wrung out and disappointed. There wasn’t a standout friend…she hadn’t found her people quite yet…nothing good to show for the scariest moment of her year. When I watched her walk out of that school, face filled with defeat…every cell in my body wanted to hug her…I wanted to promise her it would all be fine. I wanted to tell her that everyone would love her…of course they would, because she’s extraordinary, because she is the most interesting, funny, ferocious human I know.

But I’ve learned…I know better now, at least a little. I can’t promise her those things…I can’t conjure up a friend…a group…a guarantee. She has to find it herself, she has to experience these feelings to learn from them…on a timeline that is emphatically not the one I would’ve ordered for her. Watching your kid walk straight into a painful truth you can see coming from a mile away…and not being able to step in front of it or protect them from it…that might be the hardest part of this dang parenthood gig.

Parenthood feels like scaffolding for a building under construction. As the building gets built, the foundation gets poured, and brick-by-brick gets laid and cemented in place, the scaffolding is there…to support, to frame and bolster, but not to impose…giving essential structure and guidance. I can’t make the bricks for her or even place them for her…that would just be me recreating myself. She’s her own person, with her own experiences…I can share what I’ve learned, I can be there if she falls, but I can’t do it for her. My job is not to right the wrongs of my own childhood through hers.

I read a piece about the lotus plant the other day…how it looks at the cherry blossoms in April and decides that it won’t be pressured…it won’t be rushed to bloom when it’s not ready. The lotus plant blooms when its own season arrives, on its own timeline. I want that for Millie girl…I want so badly for her to just trust…trust that her season is coming, even when every other kid looks like they bloomed already. I can’t force her to trust or make her understand…she’s still working on the foundation, and can’t be rushed. Sure…she’s itching to start laying the bricks…but the cement needs time to cure, and I’m here to remind her not to rush the process.

And then…then there was day two.

The second day of school was SO different than the first. She came flying out of those same doors …but this time with a new friend beside her and she was beaming. She was visibly lighter, her shoulders had finally rested…dropped back into place. The face of a girl who knew that things might be okay this year. That feeling didn’t come from me…and no wolf cut was required. It was just her…my sweet, anxious Millie girl…with her own clock, arriving right on time…her time, not mine. I stood on the sidewalk and my shoulders…they dropped too. I saw it…the bloom…the bud beginning to open up, just a little. It started to open exactly when it was ready to, and not one second before.

And yet…going through all of this, as a bystander…it still guts me and inspires me…all at the same time. She wanted me to just fix it for her…to let her get her funky haircut…but she didn’t need me to. The foundation was allowed to cure, all on it's own.

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Millie is R&D’ing her way through the same recipe I worked through. She isn’t doomed to plate the same lonely dish I did when I was a little girl. The frustrating and equally humbling part is that I can’t cook it for her…I can’t get in there and make it come out right knowing which parts may work better than others…but I can be the one who already seared and burned this thing to the bottom of the pan and lived to tell about it…there in the recipe notes, in the margins.

I held the line on the haircut. I actually love that she wants something fun and new and I know it’ll look SO cute. But the refusal itself was a small, boring act of love, the one that says I’ve got you even when you’re furious with me. I try to reflect instead of rescue…to say I see you, I see how scared you are instead of papering over it with promises I can’t keep…with promises that even funky haircuts can’t keep. My therapist suggested that I talk to her, and share some of my own stories with her…not the sanitized, filtered mom-version tied up in a neat bow. She deserves the messy truth, the chaotic re-telling of the actual ones…the island of loneliness…the downplayed birthdays…the tag-along tales. When I say “trust me, I get it…” she just rolls her eyes and calls me “old school” and tells me I don’t know anything. But…what if…what if I showed her the actual evidence…the old journals for her to read for herself. Maybe she’ll see her own reflection in my words and in the younger version of me…and she’ll see that I, too, was elbow-deep in pouring cement for my own foundation. And yet…I, too, bloomed…on my own timeline and no one else’s.

I wrote earlier that my job now is to help keep her own cage from ever getting built. And maybe that’s what this is: the same recipe, but this time, handed over with my edits scribbled in the margins…less of this, you don’t need it…more of just being yourself and trusting that friends will be drawn to the real her. I can share my notes, just sit back…trust the process…and watch her cook.

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Motherhood is crazy beans…here I am, mothering my own kiddo who is so different and at the same time, SO much like I was as a child. And Millie’s adopted, so that shit is totally nurture vs. nature. And with all this therapy and self-reflection I’ve done this year, I realize that I’m not just raising her…I get to go back and raise myself, too. Every single time I get down on Millie’s level and tell her she is amazing exactly as she is…unmanaged, unedited, untethered…no new haircut required…there’s an eight-year-old somewhere in me who is also hearing it, too…healing those old original wounds. I’m setting two places at my proverbial table now…one for my own daughter and one for the younger version of me…the freckle-faced girl with bucked teeth.

She’s cooking…I’m cooking…and I’m realizing, we may be working from the same recipe. But this time, there’s a chef in the kitchen who’s made this dish before…I already know exactly where it can go wrong. I can’t cook it FOR her, but I can stand beside her while she learns…makes her own adjustments and edits.

Good lord, I know we’re in store for a WILD-ass ride for the next few years of middle school and high school in New York City. I can’t fix it or shield her from the pain, heartache and anxiety…but I can give her my notes, those ones in the margins. I can be her support and solid framing…to keep her from growing sideways. And I, too, can keep cooking…for myself…adjusting and editing…learning and healing for that other little girl at the table…the freckle-faced one.

♥