lessons in comfort
it's about mashed potatoes but it's not about mashed potatoes
One night when I was a teenager, my mother dropped her favorite mashed potatoes bowl on the floor. It shattered into dozens of pieces and as shards of glass went skittering across the kitchen she started crying and said “we can never have mashed potatoes again!” My first reaction was to laugh at such a ridiculous sentiment. My next was to wonder - out loud - why she was crying. Mom left the room, dad cleaned up the mess, and I thought about the horrors of never having mashed potatoes again.
It wasn’t until I was a mother myself that I understood why she was crying. Mothering three girls is hard. With two teenagers and a grade schooler to contend with, she had her hands full. This was the late 70s. Women stayed home. Women kept the house clean and cooked roasts (I honestly don’t think my mother ever cooked a roast), and chauffeured the kids and handled doctors appointments and teacher meetings. Dad worked two jobs, so it was up to mom to do it all. At the moment she dropped the mashed potato bowl, she was probably exhausted, maybe even frustrated that one of us got in trouble at school or broke a rule she’d have to tell my father about. When the bowl hit the ground, so did her ability to cope. So she cried and felt sorry for herself because her teenage daughters only thought to laugh.
I’m pretty sure it was a Corningware bowl. I don’t remember exactly but it was a pale blue and we did, indeed, always have our mashed potatoes served in it. My god, did we love our mom’s mashed potatoes. We didn’t have them often because no one likes to peel an entire bag of potatoes, but when we did it was reason for celebration. Eating them made me feel comforted and loved. And just as the potatoes were a comfort food for me, that bowl was a comfort to my mother. No wonder she didn’t want to make mashed potatoes anymore.
I think about my comfort items, the things that make me feel homey and warm and loved. Mostly those comforts are centered around food; my father’s chili on a snow day, a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs with homemade gravy (not sauce) on a Sunday, grilled cheese on a sick day. But there are things, too, that bring me comfort. I can’t imagine drinking my morning coffee out of anything but my schnauzer mug, or sleeping without the incredibly soft blanket that friends bought me when I was in the hospital last year. Sometimes when I need comfort I put on a record - Aztec Camera’s High Land, Hard Rain - and turn it up, letting it loose in my living room to envelop me in its arms, making me think of those heady winter days when I fell in love in a record store, when I felt cherished and appreciated by someone. I imagine any of those comforts being taken from me and I understand my mother with so much more clarity.
This is what adulthood is, really. Understanding more each year about your parents, about the way you were raised, about what they handed down to you, purposefully or not. I look back on my teen years and feel bad about what I put my parents through while I ran amok. Even into my 20s and 30s and beyond, I gave them reason to worry, to be anxious about me. As I raised my own kids into adulthood, not only was I getting payback for everything I did to my mother and father, but I was learning that valuable lesson most of get as we age: my parents were right. About everything.
And there is my real comfort. Sure, the blanket and grilled cheese sandwiches and music are wonderful, but it is knowing that I have the unconditional love and support of my parents that brings me the most comfort. Once in a while when I am feeling bummed out, I walk across the street to their house and just hang out in the backyard with them for a little while. Sometimes there will be pie and coffee. Sometimes they will invite me to dinner and there will be mashed potatoes. Mom serves them in an unbreakable yellow bowl now.