Awake.

I’m not really sure how I’m going to pull all of this off.

Having to get this semester finished, given the things I have to do around here, and the issues that have come up with my youngest, seems more and more unreachable.  I guess you could say I’m highly discouraged, at the moment.

This is about school, of course.  I really do love my work, a tremendous amount.  But it’s such a fight right now, between the kids and his needs and all the rest of it, even though in some other universe it would be a challenge, right now it’s just backbreaking labor that I’m having to move heaven and earth to even get the time to do.

For instance, right now I’m awake with a two-year-old at 3:30 am.  Bad mother!  Bad mother!  And absolutely, I’d agree if anyone else told me the story about someone else.  But my kid has sleep issues, and we’re in the process of trying e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g to fix them.  Keeping him awake.  Letting him sleep during the day.  Pushing naps. Not letting him nap more than 30 minutes.  Waking him up early.  Running him around all day.  Giving him an early dinner, a late dinner, what have you.  He wakes up at 3 am, no matter what.  Whether he went down at 8pm or midnight.We are planning to try melatonin, since it seems this may have to do with how early it gets dark these days.  We’ve tentatively broached the let-him-cry-it-out possibility, but since this really does seem to be some kind of problem requiring attention, given that he’s an otherwise really easy child and he obviously wants to sleep, that might just be needless cruelty.

But it basically means that someone has to be awake in the middle of the night.  And it’s the sort of awake that doesn’t lend itself to paper-writing.  It’s baby-wrangling awake, which leaves you drained the next day, and my husband has classes first thing in the morning, so it technically makes the most sense for this to be me.  And I’m worried.  I’m worried I’ll make a huge mess of of everything, home, academics–all of it.

Bread.

 

I kneaded and set to rise enough dough for two loaves of bread tonight, thus committing myself to stay awake for at least another couple of hours–something I really need to do, in order to finish up final papers.  

The bread is a mixed whole-grain and millet, made lighter and softer by a very elaborate (or so I’m told by the people to whom I describe it) sponge and rising process.  Onward, then:

(a warning: recipes given by me will almost never have specified amounts; those that do will be sheer guesswork)

FINALS BREAD

Millet, bulgur wheat, or whatever grains you like

Bran, flax meal, or other, more processed, grains or cereals

Wheat and unbleached white flour

A little brown sugar

Yeast

Warm water

Olive oil

Salt

1.  Put about a half-cup each of millet (rinsed) and bulgur wheat in a bowl to soak.  The water should be about an inch higher than the grain.

While we’re waiting on that, it’s time to admit that I didn’t exactly take the realization that I wasn’t cut out for serious academia with unmixed delight.  I was always raised to do something.  I love my subject.  I’ve worked hard for seven years on it.  And yet, having finally arrived at the great big serious top #1 school, I realized that I simply had no desire to do this in a way that was going to require competition, or ambition (which I’ve never had much of), or a sort of striving that I can muster up.  I’m hardworking, but this was about more than intelligence and hard work.  This was about making a life’s work.

2.  Add to the soaking grains about a cupful of whole wheat flour, whatever other grains or meal you like (I used flaxseed meal and wheat bran), and some brown sugar.  Add warm water.  If you’re like me, and store all the baking supplies in the freezer, use hot water.  I get it straight from the tap.  Sprinkle maybe a teaspoonful of yeast on top.  Mix the whole thing together… it should be soupy.  This is the “sponge.”  Now let it alone for a while, any where from two hours to all evening.  Every so often, it will look foamy, feel free to keep stirring it back down.  If it separates into a foamy dough layer and  watery layer, just stir them back together.  I like to feed it another handful of flour or so at that point.  

I love what I study.  I’m in the humanities, in a subject that requires a lot of language study and historical and archival research, and I really get a charge out of all that stuff.  I could never really picture doing it as a career, though.  I’d get stopped up at a certain point in the imagining.

My husband, on the other hand, is a wonderful scholar.  As importantly, he can also teach.  He can connect with a roomful of people and get his point across.  He wasn’t getting as far as he could have been, though, because we were working within an entire mindset where we had to take turns, and it was my turn.  So I was working too hard to pay the slightest attention to him or anybody, and he couldn’t work as hard as he’d have liked… because he had to give me my “chance.”

3.  About now, you should probably have forgotten that you set a sponge out to rise, and are getting ready for bed when you say “Oh, hell.  I need to at least make the dough and put it in the fridge.”  Start mixing white flour into the sponge, which I’m assuming you made in a very large bowl, anticipating this step.  Add as much salt as you want your bread to have, and a bit of olive oil.

4. When you can’t stir with an implement anymore, stop and get your kneading surface ready and floured.  Your dough is likely still really, really wet.  Make a nice pile of flour, and put into it half the dough from the bowl, pressing and incorporating flour into it until it can be kneaded.  Then, knead it.  A lot.  A bread full of millet and flax and whatnot will be like a brick without a long kneading; there’s no way around it.

I’m not leaving my program, that’s the thing.  I would like to finish this degree.  But I don’t really see any chance that I’m going to want to work as a professor in this field.  I probably could, even as a lackluster non-competitive grad student.  I have an interesting specialty; I go to the top name school.  But instead, I’m basically planning to slowly orient my work a bit more toward my husband’s specialty, and have the best of both worlds.  That’s the plan, anyway.

5. Knead and knead and knead and knead and knead.  When the dough is fully kneaded, it will start to push back.  Experienced kneaders know what I mean.  Once the dough is really fighting you, roll it into a ball, rub a bit of olive oil on it, put it in a big bowl with plastic wrap, and either put it on the counter or stove to rise, or in your refrigerator.  This dough will stay good for a while.  You can freeze it, too.  

Repeat the whole process with the rest of the wet dough you left in the bowl.  Having been left to slightly rise, this one will be a bit easier.

This is the part where I’m supposed to make a case for several long, slow rises… and that can be really good.  But honestly, the days when I’m too overwhelmed to let it rise much, i’ve had it turn out wonderfully–and do a fair bit of rising in the oven.

Part of me can’t help but feel that if anyone knew I wasn’t planning on “doing anything” with my degree besides, well, be a really educated wife, that they’d throw me out.  I can’t tell you how much my marriage does NOT go over with my social circle, what little of it I describe.  The assumption at school, obviously, is that I plan to be a professor and contribute to the field.  Even I sometimes wonder if I’m taking up a spot that could be better given to someone like that.

But I can’t see that there’s anything wrong with continuing to do what I’m good at, but within a private sphere.  My gifts are still my gifts, even if they’re not for the world.

6. So you’ve let the bread rise in whatever way you like, and shaped it or braided it or put it on a loaf pan and slashed the top.  Brush the top and sides with some egg and milk that you’ve beaten together, or just milk, or olive oil with coarse salt, or whatever.  Start the bread at 300, increasing to 350 after 10 minutes or so.  The first time you remember and say “the bread, the bread!” go check on it and brush some more of whatever you used the first time.  Raise the temperature to 400.  The second time you say it (which should be when the smell of baking bread no longer has a yeasty smell, but is starting to be a bread smell), check to make sure it’s not burning and lower the temp back down to 350 or even lower.  Remove it when you can tap it with your fingernail and know it’s done.  This is not a foolproof method, and if it’s underdone and doughy in the middle, your kids will eat it anyway and get stomach-aches, so it’s better to err on the side of burning it a bit.

Take it out, wish you had a wire cooling rack, cool in dish drainer.  Voila.

Time to finish the semester’s work, and check on that bread.

Oranges.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My son eats a rather tremendous amount of oranges and apples, to the point where I buy the big bags of each roughly every few days.  This morning, rather than throw away all that orange peel, I removed the outer peel from the pith with a vegetable peeler, and am simmering it on the stove in a pot of water into which I threw a cinnamon stick and a few cloves.  Not only is this perfuming the entire downstairs beautifully, but it really is knocking out an kitchen odors (and as a Mediterranean cook, those do tend to linger.)

Which got me thinking about kids and food in general.  I spend a lot of time talking online to other mothers, many of whom are committed and loving to their children but seem to have a real blind spot when it comes to food.  There are few subjects, in my experience, that will escalate to nastiness faster than “judging” what someone feeds their children (it starts with the breastfeeding question and just never ends, from what I can tell), so I’m really unable to express what I think when these people are telling their stories.

The most common of such stories is that family eats relatively healthy, and “tries” to feed the child in the same way, but the child has three or four foods that are the only ones that he or she will eat.  Generally, these foods are unhealthy, but the moms will be explaining that their child has sensory issues of one sort or another (I’m not snarking this, it’s often completely true, I simply challenge this as the reason for the problem) and it’s a challenge to get them to eat anything.  The less-extreme version of this is the child who will eat only one thing on the plate, usually a starchy thing, and leaves the bulk of his or her meal untouched.

I’m not making light of what is a very common and fairly serious issue–a lot of the mothers who tell these stories have had clueless relatives or friends tell them things like “make him eat what you’re cooking or nothing” or “she’ll eat when she’s hungry.”  A number of these kids won’t eat when they’re hungry and those are just the facts of the case.  What I wonder, though, is how that limited list of foods the child will eat came to be what it is.  These lists usually go something like:  ”Jack will only eat the powdered macaroni and cheese, pop tarts, chicken nuggets, take-out pizza but he won’t tolerate vegetables in the sauce, candy although we try to keep him away from it, and apple juice.”  

When a mother posts a dilemma like that on one of the message boards I frequent, there will often be a lot of commiseration and pointing out that there’s actually nutritional value in those foods (chicken is protein! pizza sauce a vegetable! white flour is fortified!).  Often there will be discussion of ways to “sneak” more nutrients into the food (could you add some pureed orange squash to that powdered cheese sauce?  Make your own pizza crust from whole grains?) or into the child in general (meal-replacement drinks or smoothies).  What’s not discussed, ever ever ever, is how on earth the child developed a list of four or five convenience foods that they’re absolutely devoted to, in a home where the mother is devoted to his nutrition and presumably cooks enough that home-made smoothies and pureeing zucchini into brownies (or what have you) is a possibility.

I’m sympathetic.  I really am.  With my first child, probably not so much, because she showed not a hint of finickiness until the age of ten, at which point she developed all the same picky little traits that I have, which are mainly a squeamishness processed or ground meats and a dislike for anything too sweet.  Awesome, right?  A testament to my amazing parenting.  Those mothers of picky eaters must just not be doing it right!  Nevermind that I wasn’t “doing” anything; the child had just happily eaten whatever the adults were eating since birth.  Because that’s her nature where food is concerned.

My small one, though?  All bets are now off.  He’s sensitive to textures, shapes, things he doesn’t know, certain strong flavors.  He absolutely hates many of his sister’s old standbys and perennial kid faves like yogurt, bananas, anything dulce de leche, or any cheese with a flavor stronger than fresh mozzarella.  So, suddenly I feel for the moms of the picky eaters.  My husband and I realized recently that our small boy has a pretty limited list of what he’ll eat.  Apples, oranges, blueberries, raisins, paneer, mozzarella and ricotta, scrambled eggs, oatmeal, pastas (but he’ll pick anything chunky out of a sauce), vegetable soup but not many of the vegetables in it if any, and chicken or turkey only if plain and cut into cubes (put a sauce on a meat, or fry it, and he won’t touch it), and rice.  Occasionally he’ll pick up something and try it.  He’ll eat almost anything out of my salad bowl that’s covered with balsamic vinegar, but only from my salad bowl and he seems to know when not really eating it and trying to trick him, so it’s not to be depended upon) and he’ll eat things like ice cream and cookies unless he’s not in the mood.

So I do a little sneaking myself.  Molasses in cookies and oatmeal for the iron, raisins for the iron, broths stirred into the brown rice, heavy cream or egg cooked with the oatmeal if he really is in dire need of some fat in his diet because he’s refused anything but oranges and oatmeal for three days, and so on.  In general, though, I can pretty much rest easy because none of the foods he depends on are particularly unhealthy, it’s a pretty balanced assortment, they’re relatively cheap and easy to keep in the house, and I know toddler finickiness doesn’t last in most cases and that if you just keep putting a small plate of whatever’s-for-dinner in front of them, they’ll eventually give it a try because they’re bored.

So I’ve developed more empathy for the mother of the finicky eater.  What I don’t understand is how your child gets dependent on Tyson nuggets and Annie’s shells and “cheddar” in the first place, or rather, I do understand but to bring it up is not done.  But, aha, this is my own blog and cooking’s one of the few places where I’m even remotely together so I’m milking it for all it’s worth, which means that I have to say Why do people feed their children such unpleasant, bland, processed ‘kid food,’ that they do not eat themselves?  I’m serious about this.  From the jarred baby food to the yogurt in a tube, children are habitually fed any number of things that would make right-thinking adults retch, which do absolutely nothing for their developing palate, and which are usually nutritionally kind of substandard if not downright damaging.  

Does anyone remember the episode of Top Chef, first season, in which the two competing teams are cooking for a children’s day camp?  And one of the teams panders entirely to the “kid food” idea, turning some really nice monkfish into deep fried “monkey dogs” on a stick, and the leader of the other team (Tiffany, who I adore with a passion) completely loses her mind over how it’s not respectful and barely ethical to take the easy route of making everything into a “nugget” because, after all, these kids probably aren’t really fed food.  She says something like  ”they’ve been trained to respond to three different tastes: salty, sweet and fat.”

Isn’t there a responsibility to make sure our kids can taste more than that?  Isn’t there a responsibility to teach a child how to share a meal with people?  In these nugget scenarios, I can only imagine that either the parent is eating a completely separate meal (which isn’t something I do, a hungry child can eat something else later, but the dinner on the table is the dinner on the table) or the child is eating alone, which is really just depressing.  

I really think I’m going to be venting about children and food a lot more, it’s one of my pet issues, because it’s something that comes up so often, yet any real advice is considered “judgmental.”  Also, one has to contend with the attitude that children will want crap no matter what.  That children will magically one day decide to refuse any food but corn chips.  That any and all children scream for McDonald’s.  That’s it’s tantamount to child abuse not to give a child sweet drinks.

Because, stepping away from food for a moment, this no matter what attitude really does get under my skin.  Children will insist that their toys be only licensed characters no matter what.  They will become addicted to television no matter what.  Teenagers are just horrible and prepare for misery no matter what.   It doesn’t matter what you do, so why bother doing anything.  It’s just what happens.  You’ll see.

There are some things I don’t have control over.  My eldest, a strong-willed individualist from a family of strong willed individualists, is an atheist.  This, obviously, doesn’t thrill me.  But it’s where she is right now, and as long as she’s morally sound and respectful, I do have to accept that maybe I could have really got down there with her and read her more religious storybooks and and and… but in the end, this is something she came to on her own, for whatever reason.

The television’s my own fault as a mother; I’ve let the television babysit the little guy in order to be Having It All Academic Mom, and as things settle down I’d like to get him out of that, but it’s something I see myself as having control over.  I have the option of flicking on the Blue’s Clues, or the option of taking a nature walk.  There’s no inevitability about it.  Maybe other people’s children are different, but I don’t see mine, if engaged in the world with mama and happily occupied, stretching themselves flat in front of the darkened screen and screaming that their lives are over if I don’t turn it on.  Choices.

As a child I was terrified by being told over and over again how awful I’d be as a teenager.  I don’t know if most parents realize the damage that the rebellious-and-horrible-teenager stereotype does to some children, often the ones who are closest to their parents as children.  You’re basically told that at some point, you will become unpleasant to be around and a trial to your family, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.  For me, at least, I had a constant fear that I wouldn’t be loved anymore, and on some level I knew that I’d need that familial love to deal with al lot of the problems that beset adolescence.  I didn’t have that, and it didn’t turn out well for me.  But I spent my entire adolescence being told I was rebellious, and doing rebellious things, all the while wishing that I’d somehow ended up in the sort of life where I had the option of just being.  I did not get to use those years to figure myself out, which is what they’re for, and arrived in my twenties pretty bereft and lost, with a few major sins and tragedies that I carried with me.  

I’ve diverged wildly off of toddler food here, so I’ll stop.  Suffice it to say, that as a mother, I think that what I do does matter, and the decision I make do matter, and I’m not going to be told differently.  I can take the responsibility that I’m the one who screwed it up, but I won’t be accused of claiming that my children’s outcomes simply happened all on their own.

OK, I promise I won’t post nothing but didactic moralizing about my superior parenting on this blog.  Promise, promise, promise.

Kitchen.

Here’s a picture of what my kitchen looks like lately:

Fairly bleak, unfortunately.

When my husband and I moved into our first apartment, a tiny walk-up in a falling-apart building on an unsafe block–but full of sun–I attacked every corner, used every bit of space, with the fervor that only someone setting up housekeeping on a shoestring can really appreciate.  By the time we’d lived there for three weeks, I’d filled our freezer with soup and bread made from scratch.  Until we were ordered to stop, we grew tomatoes on our fire escape.

That kitchen was mine.  I knew every shabby inch of it.

When we moved into our next apartment, ostensibly with a much “better” kitchen, I barely knew about it..  My second pregnancy coincided with the move, and hyperemesis gravidarum and associated woes, and somehow I was never really able to relax into that kitchen the way I had the previous one.  

When we moved here, it was a chance to start fresh.  I’ve gradually and slowly started working around to more cooking, but more than that, to just bonding with the space.  It’s where I do my homework, where I “hang out.”  When the crisis came mid-semester, and we were eating nothing but take-out and said “we can’t do this anymore,” the alienation from my kitchen was a huge part of it. 

It’s a work in progress; so am I.

Wisdom.

I’m linking to this post at the Apple Cider Mill, because of the difference it made in my recent decisions.  Thank you.

Countdown, crunch time, whatever you’d like to call it.

In 2010, I reduce my school schedule to half-time and start actually trying to practice what I preach in terms of being there for my family.

Right now, though, I have finals, final papers, and the end-of-semester misery and stress.

Pray I make it, please!

Hiding.

The tagline of this blog is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but only a little.  I’ve grown pretty used to the idea that in my world, being the girl that I am is simply not the done thing.  And for a long time, that was all right.  The thinking behind it, for both my husband and I, seemed to be something along these lines: Even though nothing about who we feel ourselves to be or the way we want to live our lives really fits in with the people we find around us, we could somehow live out our vision of happiness secretly.  In private.  Because of course, the only people who openly affirm the sort of life, work and marriage ideals that came so naturally to us are not the sort of people with whom we’d fit in.  There was some sort of idea that either we had a modern, post-feminist marriage, at least on the surface–or we might as well start buying sunbonnets and move someplace where there aren’t any bookstores.  Or something.

Thus, the hiding.  Which, to be honest, hasn’t really worked.  No matter how much I publicly distanced myself from views that might seem too reactionary, or too anachronistic, I still found myself being told I needed my consciousness raised.  Meanwhile, the idea that because I’m an intelligent woman of scholarly inclination I had a responsibility to have a career was taking its toll on my life, my marriage, and my family.  

In the paradigm of false dichotomy, there wasn’t really any room for me to excel in the ways that mattered to me.  Contemporary understanding of the buildup to second-wave feminism would have it that being an educated and scholarly woman and then pursuing marriage and motherhood as a vocation was a path of inevitable misery.  Studying needed to lead to a career of my own.  Most insidious of all: if I was just going to be a wife, why had I bothered to learn anything in the first place?  Why not just cook and make the beds and stop mucking about with Stafford loans and punishing course schedules?

This all completely ignored the fact that I’d married someone who needed me, a fact that embarrassed both of us on a regular basis.  The idea of the two-career “power-couple” had become ingrained to the point where he felt inadequate for needing and wanting to use my talents to further his own academic career, while I was in a constant state of mild self-doubt and impostor syndrome over the fact that I really didn’t want to do anything else.  

We were married some time ago, with a shared vision of what we both wanted, which was a chance at a life focused around books, study, children and home.  After marriage, we both returned to college, and helped and supported each other through all of it.  He worked; I took care of our home; his ambitions were focused, mine were as always diffuse.  Over the years, and in the circles we travelled, our path somehow went off course.  We became the egalitarian couple we’d never wanted to be, and much of our married life suffered for it.

I was accepted to do graduate work at a prestigious ivy university at about the same time my husband’s job became a casualty of the recession… in many ways the best thing that could have happened, as he was finally able to focus on his own studies exclusively, something he’d never been able to do.  Meanwhile, I was floundering.  In a competitive environment, it was becoming harder to disguise my lack of personal ambition.  I love scholarship, but have very little desire to make use of it outside of my private sphere, and the focus on advancement and recognition was making it harder and harder for me to remember what I’d loved about it.  My home wasn’t my own anymore.  My entire private world, it seemed, had been split apart.

So we’ve made some decisions.  I’m turning back inward, focusing on being my husband’s wife, doing the things I was meant to do, using my scholarship in a complementary rather than an independent way, and allowing myself to focus on the things that are more important to me.  I’m tired of telling myself that the real fulfillment in my life… my home, children, family, marriage, and entire domestic vocation… is completely valueless because it’s lived inside, rather than out in the world.  We’re taking a year.  I’ve scaled back my coursework considerably, citing “considerable outside commitments.”  I’ve revised my course of study a bit to bring my skills more in line with the things that might be useful for my husband’s academic work.  And for a year, we’re going to see where this takes us.

I hope to follow this year in this blog.