Cottage cheese roots, custard dreams

Follow-up to The Oatmeal of Madness

If you read my prior entry, you are aware that I own a great many ramekins and a blowtorch.

After its deployment that first Christmas long ago, the blowtorch managed to find its way out of the drawer five winters later. Granted, it wasn’t for brûlée duty. My windshield wipers had frozen solid the night before. I was late to drop of my son at school. It was sleeting out. I wasn’t in the fucking mood to chippy-chip-chip away at the ice while getting soaked. I used the blowtorch to coerce my wipers into begrudgingly returning to service. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I did what I had to do.

It would be another five years after that episode before the ramekins would see the light of my kitchen again.

By then, I had already been divorced and single-fathering for a good while. My life couldn’t possibly have been any more different than when I had first bought the ramekins. My career, finances, social life, who I was close with, what I did on weekends, all had radically changed.

When I first separated, my son was going on three-years old. He hadn’t been in daycare prior but soon was. It was good for all. My son liked it and made friends. I did too…

As often happens, I fell in with a group of parents who also had kids the same age. Five of them. All moms. Our original connection had been through daycare. Four of us had kids in the same class. We were what in a game of craps is called a ‘hard eight.’ Double fours. Four kids. Four adults. Then, two of the moms brought friends of theirs into the fold and they fit in well and easily and we had gone from a hard eight to boxcars. Double sixes. Six kids. Six adults.

Our kids were tight. And so were we. I loved these women like family.

We were five moms and a dad but all of us, including me, subconsciously thought of our group as pretty much just six moms. They were moms playing the role moms often do. I was playing out of position. That had put me in the company of five moms where I was in the dramatic minority. But I was used to that.

My son’s entire childhood, I was often the only man among women, the only dad among moms. When he was in elementary school and I was a ‘class parent,’ there were 44 of us. 43 moms and me. I thought it was funny. I made a joke of it. My icebreaker was that I’d be the easiest to remember.

I never minded being the sole dad or close to it. I got along with moms just fine and felt at ease and comfortable and could relate to them and that was pretty mutual. That was all nice and fine and goof for the most part… but there was always a certain unsaid which didn’t exist between moms. No matter how well we knew each other or got along, as a man, I had a visa not citizenship. And it had significant restrictions.

My visa made me just part of the group when we were setting up for a bookfair and it was just “us moms”. It did not, however, extend to when both parents were present, meaning when it was moms and their husbands. In those settings, like at parties for both the adults and the kids, it was just understood that the moms I knew and talked to often would either keep their distance, talk to me sparingly; or only with their husbands.

I’d be relegated to hanging out with the dads, many of whom didn’t want to be there and couldn’t wait to leave. I can’t say I blamed them. I felt pretty much the same way because, hey, I was stuck making throwaway small talk with dads doing the same thing rather than hanging out with the moms who were my besties at the bookfair and pickups and parties and who I knew sometimes very well and considered to be good friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I like dads. I like hanging around with my fellow dudes. It was just a weird phenomenon to be at gatherings and not really be able to talk to the people I considered my actual friends there – moms - because of the gender dynamics and the optics. We could trade over a thousand text messages as friends. They’d still keep their distance at mixed events… and then they’d go right back to texting me and being my bestie the next day.

It was just the way it worked.

When my son was little, it was the only thing about being a single father that felt a little lonely. I was a person without a country. I had a visa. I was not a citizen. There was a difference. Once you felt it, you couldn’t not feel it. It always hung in the background as a vague non-acceptance.

My closest mom friends though, the people this story is about, the five of them… they took me in. They didn’t have to but they did. They made room for me. They let me into their circle, accepted me. There was never a time when it was lost on any of us that they were women and I was a man. But there was never a time when I felt like I had only a visa. I will never not be grateful for that.

I will never not have a very soft spot in my heart for these five women. They were like sisters at a time when that helped so very much. Family is who you choose to love not who you are told you should. They are family.

Now, before going farther, I should probably share one additional note which I wouldn’t see as necessary to insert on its own but which is relevant to this particular story:

I wasn’t just the only dude, I was the only one of us who wasn’t a Person of Color.

Our circle was comprised of five Women of Color and yours truly, Whitey Whiterson… of the New Hampshire Whitey Whitersons. A people known for their long history of existing wholly cultureless like some kind of multi-generational cottage cheese. A tepid, flavorless curd which no one had ever thought to maybe pep up somehow.

I do not hail from a rich cultural stock. That is just the truth of the matter. If boringness were an inherited trait, its genome could be my family’s crest. Mine is a heritage of stultifyingly boring fluke-belly-whiteness dating back centuries. My ancestors set up camp in New England 400 years ago,. That was probably the last time they left the house.

As a result, while the three Latina moms, for example, had all of these rich, wonderful stories about the cultures in which they or their parents had grown up in, all I had was “There used to be a Howard Johnson on the Mass Pike on the way to my grandmas and sometimes we’d stop there for cheeseburgers.”

If it was coming on summer, they’d be talking about big outdoor get-togethers of yore with extended family and friends. Every story had food. It had always been made by a grandmother or a coterie of grandmothers working in league. My grandmother’s fridge typically contained a dozen eggs, a sixpack of Pepsi, and sliced white American cheese. That’s it. No communal repasts emerged from her toils.

If we were talking about the holidays, one of the three Latina moms would be like “Abuela used to start her [something-something-tradicional] the day after Easter so it would be ready in time for Christmas dinner and then she would stand at the stove stirring it for eight straight months without sleeping or using the bathroom because that’s just how they did it in the old country.” Then the other two Latina moms would nod as if in confirmation. And then all three would gush about how good the something-something-tradicional was when it was finally done.

And then I’d be like “Oh, I totally get it. Have you ever had potato salad? My abuela… Helen… used to make it… by buying it at the supermarket.”

I had nothing to contribute to those conversations. Like, nothing. Nothing at all.

Even worse, I had nothing to contribute to what grew into a tradition of ours: a holiday meet-up.

Now, y’all who’ve been enduring my varied misty-eyed reminiscences about, well, everything for years now can fully attest to the fact that I am sappier than a summer maple in general but bleed straight syrup when there is a winter tradition involved.

And my friends and I, my circle of moms, we came to have one.

A holiday get-together. A special one.

It wasn’t uncommon for us to get together. That, in and of itself, wasn’t special. When our kids were playdate age, we got together often. We’d meet up planned or impromptu, as a full group, or as random subsets depending on who was available.

This one particular meet-up came to be marked as different though. It was a bit more for the kids and the adults than most. It was a night that would start with the kids being the loudest and would end with them all asleep, a movie still playing on the TV, their arms and legs draped over each other, while we adults had picked up the baton and were now the loud ones playing music and laughing too loud.

The format of the official holiday get-together was very simple. We’d gather at someone’s house. One of the moms would typically make something. A main dish of some kind. The other moms would bring something to go with it. And then there would be me: tasked only with bringing wine and maybe picking up something from the bakery.

I was basically the parent all of the other parents know to only task with bringing paper goods when there was a bake sale.

Well, it was coming on Christmas one particular year and I had a mind to change that.

That year, I decided I wouldn’t just show up to eat my friends’ festive holiday-somethings bearing only wine and a box tied with bakery string.

I, too, would cook! Or bake! Or something!

I know! I won’t buy a dessert. I’ll make one!

And it won’t be some lame-ass sugar cookies shaped like candy canes. No, it wouldn’t be cookies at all.

And it wouldn’t be some lame-ass seasonal pie. “Oooh, apple pie, pumpkin pie!” My god, can they be any more trite? No pie. And that was final. (I’m sorry, apple pie. I didn’t have my head on straight. I was just talking crazy.)

I would make…

…flan.

The classic caramel-topped egg custard beloved in cultures which in no way overlapped with my own.

The dessert traditional to many Latino cultures including the ones three of my five closest mom friends had grown up in.

That is what I would make.

Flan.

(Breaking this here for length. To be continued.)