After the war started in my home country of Croatia, an incredible man named Zorislav Laksar, who had no formal training in art, felt the need to create something out of all the destruction the war was causing. He would walk around after brutal, deadly attacks, looking for shrapnel from the grenades that were thrown on our city. He would pick up the shrapnel, take it home, and use it to build amazing sculptures. My parents had one of his sculptures, and on my fortieth birthday, they gave it to me, knowing how meaningful it is to me. The sculpture depicts a mother walking with her child. The child is holding the mother’s hand and holding on to her teddy bear. It’s a stunning work of art created completely from shrapnel, from something that had literally destroyed homes and killed people.
Wednesday Night Dinners were my sculptures. I had no formal training in cooking, but I knew that I had to stop passively staring at all the destroyed pieces of my life and instead build something meaningful out of them.
I still occasionally visit the restaurant where I waited tables during those dark days. Every time I return to have dinner there, I order my old grieving buddy, that delicious flatbread. I ask for it to go. I get in my car, open the cardboard box, and eat it while driving home. I don’t sob. I don’t feel alone. I don’t feel hopeless. Because life no longer sucks. But I like the reminder. I like to remember what I’ve gone through so that I don’t take anything for granted. I like to remember how I crawled out so that I never feel completely helpless again. It’s the reason I still carry my old food stamps card in my wallet. It hasn’t been active for years. But I still keep it right behind my credit card, so that every time I pull that credit card out to pay for something, I’m reminded of where I was and how far I’ve come.
One day during that first year after my divorce, I pulled out the food stamps card to pay for my groceries with one kid in my arms and the other sitting in the grocery cart. The woman behind me, sort of under her breath but loud enough to make sure I heard her, said, “Why don’t you get a job instead of mooching off the government?” It felt like a punch in the face. My eyes welled up with tears and my hands started shaking. Though I was working two jobs at the time, I couldn’t stand up for myself in that moment. I said nothing. Because I felt worthless as a person. I maybe even felt like I deserved that punch. Holding on to my food stamps card is a reminder that if I’m ever back in that place, I am not stuck. There is a way out, and I have all the tools I need to rise up. I just have to choose to utilize them.
When we’re in the midst of despair, it feels so permanent, doesn’t it? But a bad year or two or five doesn’t equal a bad life. It equals a bad year or two or five. And getting to a better place is as simple as it is difficult: Keep moving forward. Stop worrying about what you’re not, and start focusing on what you are. Stop worrying about what you don’t have, and start focusing on what you do have. Dwelling on the negative will leave you stuck, and you can’t get to a better place if you’re standing still. So on those days when you don’t have the strength to walk another baby step, crawl. Even if it’s uncomfortable. The only way out is through. No detours. No waiting. Just keep moving forward. And you will get there. Stronger and better than ever. Understatement.
Five
The G Spot: Guilt, Grades, and Grace
When my son Luka was nine, he was completely obsessed with the Titanic. He hadn’t seen the movie, a romantic tragedy, which was loosely based on the 1912 sinking of the luxury ship, because I didn’t think it was age appropriate, but he did have books on the Titanic and knew things about the ship and its first (and last) voyage that I had never known. Like the fact that there were only two bathtubs available for more than seven hundred third-class passengers. Or that Milton Hershey, the founder of Hershey’s chocolate, purchased tickets to be aboard the Titanic but canceled his reservation at the last minute (a big relief for my chocoholic son). So for Luka’s ninth birthday, I decided to make him a Titanic cake.
Elaborate cakes have become a birthday tradition in our family. I’ve made everything from various animal-shaped cakes to a chessboard with edible, movable chess pieces to a toilet cake with poop-shaped brownie bites in it.
If you’re looking for a tutorial on how to make your kid a fabulous cake, here it is: bake a normal cake. Then stay up all night cutting, assembling, and rearranging cake pieces like a puzzle while googling hundreds of photos of the shape you’re trying to re-create. Use fourteen thousand pounds of butter to make enough frosting to cover up all your mistakes. By the time you’re completely exhausted, delirious, covered in flour, butter, and sugar, sweating in desperation, and asking yourself, Why do I do this to myself?!? I should have just bought a cake like normal people do! the cake will almost be finished but will still look like crap. Then, after a few more hours of torture and regret, voilà . . . the cake will be complete.
Midmorning on the day of my son’s ninth birthday party, I was in my kitchen feeling exhausted and stressed-out. I was covered in so much gray frosting that if you’d seen me out of context, you might have assumed I was suffering from some obscure but severe form of dermatitis. I was rushing to cut up some fruit before all his friends arrived when the knife slipped. I gashed myself and screamed at the top of my lungs, “Shit!”
At that time, Luka had never heard me say a bad word. In this one area, I had been a generally successful mom, watching my mouth around my kids. Except for the word “crap.” That one doesn’t count. It’s not a bad word. It’s just the reality of my life. Literally and metaphorically, my life is full of crap. Other than that, I had been really good about my language around my children. But there I was, half an hour before my son’s birthday party, with him standing right next to me, screaming, “Shit!”
His face turned white. He stared at me. “Mom? Mom, you . . . you just said a really bad . . . I can’t believe you said . . . I . . .” He couldn’t even get the sentence out. He was so shocked and disappointed that his mother could have said that word. And so loudly! (I know, I know, he was a sheltered little kid. Sheltered and utterly oblivious to one of his mother’s greatest gifts: vulgarity.)
Instead of just admitting it, apologizing, and using the moment as an opportunity for a lesson, like a mature grown-up would, I said, “What do you mean? I . . . I didn’t say a bad word.” I avoided eye contact because, unlike cursing, lying well is not one of my talents. And then, panicked, I continued, “What’s your cake? What’s that cake that you wanted me to make?”
“The Titanic.”
“Right! And what is the Titanic?”
“What do you mean? Uh, it’s a boat, Mom.”
“No . . . it’s a ship. It’s a ship. Right? And that’s what I screamed. Ship!!! Because I was reminding myself to take the ship cake out of the fridge so that your friends would see it. I didn’t want your party to be ruined if I forgot to serve the cake. The ship cake. Ship!”