The loving came easy, but cooking was a different story.
The worst thing about accidentally becoming someone’s mother is that you have to feed them. The happiest moments of the first few years of my daughter’s life were spent in cafés, where I would regularly go over my credit card limit paying someone else to feed us, in a place that was warm and structured but that would eventually close—and then we’d have to go home. Home was less of a fixed shape in those days.
The first Saturday night I had ever stayed in, by myself, was the night I realized that I was nine days late for my period and should really go down to the drugstore and buy a pregnancy test. Reality had finally crept within earshot, first as a whisper and then, after the test was positive, as something rather louder. I had known the baby’s father for some years but he said no to this unplanned family life.
I found the loving part easy, as we gradually became a team of two against the world, or even with the world—we enjoyed the world. Playing with a child came naturally because I was a child. A 35-year-old one. I had lived inside made-up stories all the way through my adulthood, so it wasn’t hard to create make-believe for my girl. But the kitchen scared me in a way that no cliffhanger, no adventure, no travel, no journalistic assignment ever had.
My daughter will turn 10 this year and has developed the personality of a small Joan Rivers fan. We make ourselves hysterical by seeing who can outwit the other with sarcastic one-liners. She rolls her eyes at me a lot, having not had life handed to her on a silver platter. Perhaps because it still takes me by surprise, for example, that after you buy food once, you also have to buy it again. This system seems deeply flawed.
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