Life From Scratch (45 page)

CHAPTER 28

One Fam
i
ly

O
NCE BACK IN
T
ULSA
, I miss my family more than ever. But in the summer I find unexpected solace in Mongolia. It is impossible to feel sorry for myself after reading about Mongolian nomads.

Between the constant moving (about five times a year with the changing seasons) and the Gobi’s brutal winters (especially in the mountainous north and on the dry, grassy steppes, where temperatures can plummet to minus 40°F), Mongolians have to be tough. Even their homes—tents made of wood and felt called
gers
or yurts—are portable. Since little can grow in their country’s harsh conditions, they rely on meat—30 percent of the population breeds livestock. With a lifestyle constantly on the go, the food has to fit in when it can.

But the nomads are never truly
homeless. Never alone
. For starters, the hospitality is extensive; anyone who turns up at a nomad’s tent will be invited for a meal and even an overnight stay. When something happens, good or bad, other nomads show up to help. They come out of nowhere, from miles away, from over bleak hills through the vast emptiness. And they chip in however they can. Although it can seem like each family unit is isolated in nothing but a giant expanse of blue sky and crusty grass, nothing could be further than the truth. These are
real
neighbors. Friends. Family.

I realize with astonishment that there is a way to have a family, even from afar. But it involves reaching out continually, and communicating. In the meanwhile, even our neighbors have a role to play.

We need each other, near and far.

That’s when the packages from Mom start arriving. Each one contains several three-inch binders—17 total, with thousands upon thousands of pages comprising every single post and reader comment of my blog since day one.

“Mom!” I exclaim when I call her. “What is all this?!”

“I thought you should have a backup of the website. You’ve worked so hard.”

I laugh. “Oh, Mom, Keith
does
back it up—on two different …” I stop myself before I get too technical. I explain that Keith knows what he’s doing. In fact, he’d recently been offered a double promotion to senior technical engineer responsible for 911 design and structure on a national scale for AT&T.

“Don’t worry, Mom—he can handle this blog. It’s safe.”

“What if the Internet disappears someday, Sash? You can’t take any chances.”

Ava helps me line up the binders that span half the office wall. I tell her what they contain and she repeats the words, stringing them together for the first time: “Gwobal Twable Abenture.”

Mom isn’t the only one waxing nostalgic.

The international meals now pepper our whole week. I realize that we’ve already tried more than 500 recipes: We’ve made our own sushi, preserved peppers from our garden, and learned to make chicken 32 ways, with versions from every continent.

On any given day, we might eat a Greek salad with green bean soup from Luxembourg and naan from Afghanistan. Dessert just as well might be Ireland’s famed Dark Chocolate Guinness Cake With Baileys Buttercream, as a tropical fruit salad inspired by Rwanda, heavy with banana and avocado. Even Grace cooks the food from her New Jersey home, every so often sharing photos of her renditions with me. It makes me feel a little closer to her somehow, almost as though we’re sharing a kitchen.

That fall, winter won’t come. Summer lingers in the air, hot and humid, well into October. There’s only about a year left to the adventure; Ava is three and a half. As I’m deciding whether or not I should bother putting a pumpkin on our hot stoop for fear it’ll rot in the sun, I get a Facebook message from Toni.

I haven’t heard from her in a couple of years. She says she wants to visit in November. “Yes,” I type, without hesitation, “Please come.”

The week we cook Samoa, Toni arrives from Boston with her laugh still full of ripples. I am transported to another era, even though we’re both grown women; she now uses her neuroscience degree to research alternative medicine. She brings small gifts: a Wonder Woman apron for me, a Superman mug for Keith, and Superman pajamas for Ava.

I don’t have gifts, I tell Toni, but I do have Samoa. I warn her she might not like the food; it’s going to be a big pot of spinach and canned meat cooked in coconut milk. I wince as I describe it, but she nods enthusiastically.

I rinse the spinach and add it to the stirring pot, along with the meat and coconut milk. As the mixture simmers down into a swampy stew, I explain that I got the recipe idea from my mom, who once stayed in Samoa when she was pregnant with me.

“I didn’t know that,” Toni says. I realize how little she knows about my childhood—my
first
childhood.

“I don’t know why I never asked you about it,” she adds.

“We were just kids,” I say, shrugging it off. But there’s a twinge of pain in my eyes I can only hide by looking away.

For dessert, we head to the kitchen to make
koko Samoa—
Samoan rice pudding. First, I steam the rice. In another pot, I plunk a few chocolate squares into coconut milk. As the two slump together, I zest in a heavy orange. The citrus oil mists my hand and glistens on the brown surface before my spoon folds it deeper into the pot. I draw a breath. Bitter zest might not sweeten the mix, but it does deliver a gust from the rambling orchard in which it once grew.

Toni helps me tip the tender rice into the chocolate and coconut milk. I whip with tight circles. But something is wrong. The mixture doesn’t thicken.

Toni leans over the mixture and suggests cooking the rice
with
the coconut milk. She speaks with the confidence of experience; rice pudding is one of her favorite desserts. She adds that when the dry rice plumps with liquid, the outer starches slough off like the scarf and hat of a hot traveler. These swirl about and thicken the coconut milk.

But I don’t have any more coconut milk to try the recipe a second time.

“I don’t mind,” she says as she ladles herself a bowl of the too-thin pudding. It’s chocolate, after all.

While we spoon the thin dessert, I ask Toni about her parents.

She smooths her napkin, “Good. They’re … good.”

“I stopped reaching out after my wedding. I thought it best to honor their wishes. But I can start again, if you think they …”

She nods, and then slowly shakes her head. “I would just leave it alone.”

She sighs. “They’ve never really talked about your stay with us. I don’t think they know how. Maybe that comes from their childhoods; both of them lost a relative in sudden, tragic deaths—Papa’s brother, Mama’s mother.”

For the first time, I tell her about how Patricia blamed me for Michael’s death. Her face falls.

“Oh, Sasha …” She swallows hard, looking down. “That might be my doing. I told them his death was their fault. I was so angry—at them, at myself, at God. I didn’t know how to deal with the feelings. I didn’t think my outburst would affect you. I’m sorry.” She brings her tear-filled eyes back to mine. “Communication isn’t our family’s strongest suit. It wasn’t until just recently that I learned how to name
my
feelings about
anything
.”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” I say quickly, seeing her flounder. “We were all young and struggling—unsure what to do with our emotions. It’s not like I handled it well. And later, I wasn’t banging down their door. I just … disappeared.”

She leans forward, “Maybe they were afraid to make you their daughter. We could all see how much you missed your family.”

I think about how exhausting it must have been to pour so much energy into me when I wouldn’t even let myself
be
their daughter.

“But I still want to be your sister,” she quickly assures. “If I ever get married, I’m going to invite you to the wedding.”

I shake my head quickly. “No, I—the sentiment is nice, but I wouldn’t want to fill your special day with that kind of stress. You don’t need it. And if I’m being honest, I don’t think I can take another rejection. I’ll always be open if they want to reconnect, but at some point I just have to say
enough is enough
.”

She shakes her head, tears falling down her cheeks. I put my hand on hers.

“This is enough,” I tell her, gesturing between us, softening. “This is good.”

There’s a Samoan proverb that says,
“O le fogava ‘a e tasi”:
We are one family. I cannot help but wonder if Mom knew the quote when she sent us to live with the Dumonts.

After Toni leaves, I call Mom and ask her.

“Of course!” she chides, “Those people help each other—they know you can’t raise a child alone. Look—if a teen gets in trouble, the whole village has a meeting. Family, friends, neighbors. That’s what Margaret Mead’s research was all about—that was the main point of my trip. I wanted to see firsthand what I’d studied in psychology class.”

Understanding came like a thunderclap. Mom had used the wisdom of the islands to circumnavigate her tough parental choices.

That night, I write a post about Samoa and talk about Mom’s time there: how she was a free spirit, dropping everything and exploring in an era when few women would have dreamed of traveling single, pregnant, and with a toddler.

Grace sends me a message, asking how I can always paint such a rosy picture of Mom.

“We were the ones she escaped from when she went halfway around the world,” she said. “We were her ‘drop everything.’ Sometimes you seem to forget about
all
her children when talking about her.”

But even as I read her words, I do the math: The divorce was years before Mom’s trip to Samoa. For the first time, I wonder if Grace grew up feeling like I took her mother away from her. Horrified, I want to apologize, tell her I was insensitive—not just about the blog post, but for never realizing how hard it must have been for her to see me living with Mom, even for those ten short years.

I read on.

“I don’t know if you understand how important you and Michael were to me, Tim, and Connor … we loved you and yearned for a relationship with you. We never ever forgot about you … ever! We did what we could to stay connected. I constantly missed you both, I sooooo wanted my sister!”

In her words, I see my own heart reflected.

Slowly and carefully, I write: “I couldn’t have made it without you—truly! About Mom—I’m so sorry. We have different experiences, different memories, so of course we see her—and Samoa—differently. I might paint a rosy picture—too rosy at times—but when it comes to parents, she’s all I have, Grace.”

“I only had my dad,” she replies, and I can feel her pain through the letters on my glowing screen.

“I never had that choice,” I type back. “Sure, sometimes I wonder about Mom’s choices. I used to try to make her the parent I needed her to be, but she is who she is. She’s all I have.

“It hurts too much to be angry at anyone, let alone my own mother. And she is there for me now. Under it all, I know she operates out of love. I have to love her back, Grace. It’s not even a choice any more. It just is.”