Please, Not While We're Eating

To say that my mother and I had a contentious relationship is a masterpiece of wild understatement. When I was small, we were quite close. My father was largely absent and she was, for all intents and purposes, a single mother. She was my world.

Beautiful, brilliant and creative, she had come to Los Angeles with the touring company of a fairly successful Broadway play, and stayed when the run of the play was over.  Unfortunately, while she was a working actress in New York, she found that Los Angeles was a different game altogether -- one she never was able to master.  After a few spots on The Phil Silvers Show, she never seemed to be able to land a professional acting role again, and was forced to take a job as first a secretary, then as a full-charge bookkeeper. These were jobs that paid the bills and supported us, but they didn't harness her astounding energy, or help her in expressing herself creatively. Life in Los Angeles proved an exercise in frustration and failure for her. A bad relationship with my father and an unplanned pregnancy (you're lookin' at her), and that pretty much sealed my mother's fate.

As I entered my teens, we began to bicker, then argue, then fight. It didn't take long for our fights to turn physical. This shocked me, because while I'd received the occasional swat on the seat as a small child, my mother had never really spanked me. By the time I was fifteen, our fights when from yelling to beating in 6.2 seconds.  It destroyed our relationship, and because she became chronically ill when I was in my mid-teens, then died when I was thirty-one, we never fully reconciled.

Still, there was one time of day that I could count on relative peace in the house. Mealtime. My mother was a working mother who was stressed and miserable and overwhelmed. But she made dinner every night, and we ate dinner at the table, together. Sometimes, she'd turn on the news and we'd watch Walter Cronkite together. Sometimes, we'd sit and talk. We might have been screaming at each other only moments before dinner was served. I might have been lying on my bedroom floor while she beat me repeatedly.

Still, dinnertime rules of engagement were clear. At the table, you spoke in civil tones and discussed civil things. At dinner, things were nice and calm. We behaved like ladies and gentlemen at the table, not like low-class swine.  We saved the low-class swine behavior for after dinner. This is where I learned that dinner could be my salvation. Sometimes -- often time -- the time spent being civil at dinner made my mother forget her anger, and the rest of the evening would be peaceful coexistence. Food was the thing that soothed her savage breast. She was my teacher -- not in cooking, but in food and all of its detriments and benefits.

I've been struggling with my ambivalence toward food ever since. This blog is my therapy -- my way of coming to grips with my love/hate/lovelovelove relationship with food.


You'll find that, here on this blog, I will resist the temptation to use the phrase "addiction" or "food addict".  I wish not to be misunderstood here. I believe that food is as much a potential drug as alcohol, sex or gambling. It's just as cunning, just as baffling. But in reality, unlike the other addictions, technically speaking, we're all addicted to food. If you don't believe me, try giving it up cold turkey, and see if you don't go through some really nasty withdrawals. Unlike sex addicts or gamblers, I can't stay away from my addiction. I still have to find a way to walk that tiger three or four times a day, if I'm going live to tell my tale.

I have been trying to stay away from fast food, since I think that most fast food companies are trying to kill us.* But I also began to become obsessed with cooking shows. I blame Rachel Ray for this, as it was on her mainstream morning show, where she prepares a quick meal in the last segment. I have a whole theory as to why Rachel Ray is a gateway to stronger, more addictive cooking shows, but that's really a subject for another post. For now, I'll say only that, eventually, I progressed to Giada at Home, to Alton's Good Eats, and to Ina's Barefoot Contessa.

Along the way, I discovered that, for me, much of my food addiction could actually be assuaged with the process of cooking. If I concentrated on what I was doing, I could make the entire experience rather zen and calming. Cooking and food have gone from being my enemy to being my oasis and refuge. Writing is hard, there is no roadmap, and there is absolutely no instant gratification to it.  Cooking is hard, too. But you get a recipe, which is a roadmap, and if you follow it carefully, and enjoy the process of the journey, in a fairly short period of time, you get to sit down to a lovely meal that includes all the foods you love.

Times are hard now, for me and for my family. Things are uncertain and a little unstable. We have amazing moments of joy and deep moments of anxiety and depression. But dinner has, once again, become a salvation, at least for me.  It keeps me sane, which keeps me from driving everyone else crazy. Just as it did with my mother.

Not that I'm like my mother mind you.

Look... Just have a seat at the table, and I'll try and explain it all to you. Given enough time, I'm sure we'll figure this voyage out. But I warn you -- mind your manners. I have my eye on you. Yeah, you... over there.  I see you're up to no good.

All I have to say to you is... Please... not while we're eating.

~Catharine~

*In the interest of full disclosure, your intrepid author was in the midst of typing that asterisked sentence when her daughter (you'll meet her later) and her boyfriend decided to take a quick run to MacDonald's.  I finished typing this blog post in between bites of a Big N Tasty. It was big. And tasty. So sue me.