Little Suzie Homemaker
There was a period of time—a solid three-year stretch—when I baked all of the bread my family ate, made all of our yogurt, grew most of our vegetables, picked 30+ pounds of three types of berry every summer and canned more jam than we could ever eat. We planted fruit trees and berry bushes. I pickled, fermented, and made jar upon jar of a coarse, hippie translation of kimchi. Once I renounced vegetarianism after 22 meatless years, I found a local farming family and bought all of our meat from them. We put a chest freezer in the basement and filled it with a half a hog (which we upped to a whole hog the second year), 1/4 steer, a lamb, and twenty free-range chickens.
I was productive, determined to care for my young family in the best way I knew how. I wanted to protect them from all of the unseen, toxic elements and pesticides hiding in the food supply. I wanted to make them as pure and healthy as possible. I wanted to death-proof them. But even though all of my energy was centered on my family, I remember this time as one where I felt profoundly alone.
Motherhood, particularly when the kids are very young, has a way of swallowing your identity, but it wasn’t only motherhood that had set me adrift. Before my son was born, I was a writer. That had been my primary identity, within my own mind where it matters most, since high school. Perhaps I wasn’t resolute enough in that identity, or perhaps my confidence was too easily shaken, but it’s no coincidence that this period of manic homemaking was kicked off by my first novel failing to sell and my first agent firing me. (See Tiny Letter of 3/26/2015 for all those sordid details.) What I haven’t mentioned in a previous letter is that those failures in my early publishing career came right alongside a massive upheaval in my life.
We had recently moved from Brooklyn to Portland, and I was home alone all day with a toddler. I’d been uprooted from my support system, and I hadn’t yet found my people on the West Coast. The friends I’d made in Portland were all other moms. I met them at the co-op playschool where my son went, and later at his hippie preschool. And so my identity for them, too, was MOM. That’s the context in which they encountered me, and that was how I was understood. I recognize now that I wasn’t seeing all that much of them beyond that immediate layer, either.
There’s a certain way of being a middle-class mom in Southeast Portland, and it involves a lot of homemade granola. If I was going to be a middle-class mom in Southeast Portland instead of a writer, well...shit. I was going to out-Portland them all. Let me slip on a pair of Keens and get to work.
I became hypervigilant about the food I fed my son and myself. Less so about what I fed my husband, and I can only guess that it’s because when kids are very young they don’t entirely feel like their own separate entities. Caring for my son was caring for myself, and vice versa.
None of this was about food. Or rather...it was about food, because I do truly value healthy, sustainable food sources and continue to be concerned with food security and food politics, but...
Though I still find value in these acts, these gifts of caring for the family; and though I still firmly believe that growing your own food and doing your own preserving and baking, and sourcing meat in sustainable ways is worthwhile, the intensity with which I pursued them, the desperate frenzy in it was all about fear and needing to carve a new identity for myself. When Tin House Books bought The Revolution of Every Day, and my available time grew shorter as publication approached, and then shrunk down to nearly nothing as I dove into book tours and publicity, and then the writing of my next novel, those activities that had seemed so essential fell away one by one. First I started buying bread at the store. Then yogurt. Then—and this was the final straw, something unthinkable before (and how ridiculous that it was unthinkable to me. I was really insufferable)—I was letting my kids eat Z Bars instead of homemade granola bars.
I am happy to report that my family has been eating store-bought bread and Z Bars for two years now, and no one has burst into flames. Not yet, anyway.
I still cook most of our meals. Our freezer is still full of homemade stock. We still have our backyard chickens producing their gorgeous, shit-smeared eggs for us. But I let the vegetable garden get away from me this year. All we’ve got is the no-maintenance perennial asparagus bed and some rogue arugula that self-seeded from last winter. I get a little flash of shame sometimes when I look at the empty garden beds, but then I let it go. We’re still eating plenty of vegetables. We’re just letting someone else grow them now. And that’s okay.