Watch, little child
She stands on a step-stool in a sunlit kitchen in Damascus, watching her grandmother’s pale hands fashion food for a family of ten. Although her grandmother tries to shoo her away, the bird-like six-year-old perches at the old woman’s side everyday, straining her small neck to catch every motion. She learns how to pluck the feathers from a chicken, how to blend chickpeas into hummus, how to burrow walnuts into fresh dates.

As the girl grows older, her grandmother sends her to do the shopping and she pumps her knobby knees to the local butcher and the outdoor vegetable market down the street. She returns home slowly, arms spilling with peppers, with eggplants, with nuts, with bright red meat wrapped in clean, white paper.
No longer needing a step-stool, she hovers by her grandmother every day until she leaves to boarding school, absorbing the motions and learning the ingredients that will soon form the recipes of her future.

What is the recipe for love?
My mother encounters my father in the summer of 1985. At the age of thirty-five, she has decided to make the permanent move from the Middle East to the Bay Area to study education. When she walks up to a dusty Toyota dealership on El Camino Real in search of a new car, she finds a curly-haired salesman welcoming her at the door. After they exchange hellos, she recognizes something familiar in him.
“Where are you from?” she asks in Arabic, assuming he will understand.
“Lebanon,” he replies back, trading his learned English for his native tongue.
“You don’t look Lebanese. You’re Iraqi,” she blurts back immediately.
“How…did you know that?” A blush pushes through his dark, craggy skin. He has been living in America since his freshman year of college and has grown used to people not having any conception of his birthplace. At 42 years old, he has long since decided that it is easier to offer an answer that people might understand.
“You can’t fool a fellow Arab,” she responds, her sharp black eyes smiling as she slowly scans his face.
Although she doesn’t end up buying the car from the charming car salesman, she remembers him a few weeks later when she needs the signature of an Arab in order to renew her old passport. He agrees and she invites him over to her apartment for a simple meal to thank him for the favor.
Hummus blended to garlicky perfection. Warm pita bread. Tangy bean salad. Rice that is slightly burned at the bottom of the pan. In Iraq, they call the burnt bits hokoka but my father just calls it love. Her “simple” meal tastes better than anything he has eaten in years. Looking around her tidy kitchen, he notices that there are no cookbooks to be seen, no recipes strewn across the counter. This is a woman who cooks by heart.
When he goes home later that night to the girlfriend he has been living with for five years, he can only think about the meal he just had and the woman who made it. He remembers the way her tight, pale cheeks folded into a bright smile each time she slid a new dish onto the table.
“I have a life to live with this woman I just met,” he finds himself admitting to his soon to be ex-girlfriend.
My parents get married four months later on January 29, 1986.

A leafy lunch
Soon after their marriage, my mother, pregnant, rises early in the morning and makes my father’s lunch. She presses her swelling stomach against the kitchen counter as she leans over the cutting board to slice a tomato for his sandwich. She slips the food into a brown paper bag and writes, “Have a nice day” punctuated with a smiley face on the outside. In this way, she goes to work with him.
Summer fades into fall. As the leaves parachute to the ground, I am growing inside of my mother’s womb. I like to kick her hello in the morning as she bends over to pick up fallen leaves from the driveway. She writes short love poems along their veins and places them in my father’s lunchbox.
She thinks it’s important to feed his soul. He has been lost for a long time.

Colostrum and Cuisinarts
My mom breastfeeds me for eleven months. She is very proud of this fact and likes to use it as scientific justification for pretty much anything.
“Your daughter is so healthy,” my doctors say.
“Well, I breastfed her for eleven months, you know.”
“Your daughter is so intelligent,” my teachers marvel.
“Well, I breastfed her for eleven months, you know.”
“You and your daughter are so close,” her friends chime.
“Well….
The first real word that gurgles out of my tiny mouth is not “mom,” but haleeb, the Arabic word for milk. I speak the soft syllables to summon my mom to me when I need her the most. When she tries to gives me a bottle of formula, I screw up my face and refuse the tainted goods. When she offers me a bottle of her own milk, I accept it. Even as a baby, I know that my mother’s food will always be better.
After my mom finds a sliver of glass in a jar of Gerber’s mashed peas, she calls them to complain because she considers herself “a consumer advocate.” The company sends her coupons but that cooing baby-face label will never be seen on the pantry shelves again. I will not be a Gerber Baby. Instead, she invests in a mini Cuisinart and blends her own brand of baby cuisine for me. At one-year-old, I have already experienced more vegetables than some will taste in a lifetime.

The ties that bind
The three of us sit down to breakfast every morning before my dad goes off to work at the car dealership which he now owns. When he returns from work, we always sit down at the table for a homemade dinner. In between bites, my mom asks us about our days. She starts with me, and I ramble out the tiny details of my day as she continues eating. She tries to ask my father questions, but he would much rather chew than answer, so she turns back to me after he says a few words. I am more than willing to talk with my mouth half-full.
At the end of meals, my father and I traditionally chime an Iraqi saying he has taught me.
“Ashe-ayadiki,” we say to my mother as she swoops down on the table to clear the plates. Bless your hands.
“Shukran,” she smiles back. Thank you.
Even after she starts up an educational toy company and works as many hours as my father, if not more, she still manages to feed us every morning and every night. This sounds a lot like a ’50s sitcom, except it’s not. I am allowed to leave the table before my father finishes eating and my mother never wears an apron and still never, ever cracks open a cookbook.

Sunny Solstices
Everything tastes better in the summertime when my mother brings the life of our garden to our mouths. Onion bread laced with rosemary from the herb patch. Tart apples boiled with brown sugar and cinnamon and drizzled over French vanilla ice cream. Fleshy figs, little loquats, and sweet strawberries swirled into compote. Baby zucchinis stuffed with rice and ground lamb meat. Bowls of bing cherries that we eat until our lips are stained dark red.
On bright afternoons, I play outside while my mom works her magic in the kitchen. Sometimes my dad pushes me on the garden swing, pressing his palms against my bony back so that I can ascend higher than my knees can take me. He leaves me and goes to pick an orange from our tree, unpeeling it on his way back while I try to pump higher without him. As I feel myself losing momentum, he begins pushing me again with one, distracted hand. He eats the orange with the other hand, occasionally placing a slice into my laughing mouth as I descend from the sky. Even though he is pushing me away from him, this is the closest we will ever be.

Weekend mornings
On Saturdays, my dad makes breakfast. He wakes me up early to embark on our exciting expedition, scooping me out of bed and carrying me towards the garage. I float through the house in his arms, weightless until we reach the car. When he lowers me, I climb into the passenger seat, curling up in my cotton pajamas and closing my eyes again as he starts the engine.
At La Boulangerie, I pick out a dozen donuts dotted with fluorescent sprinkles and several pastries, pregnant with chocolate or fruits. When we return home, my mother removes the pastries from their baby pink bakery box and cuts each one into three parts.
“We have to be fair,” she likes to say as she places the pieces onto our plates.
After breakfast, my dad either dozes off or disappears somewhere. He has done his duty for the day. My mom then takes me to the Farmer’s Market, where she weaves through the stands with purpose as I follow her sandaled feet. She lets go of my hand to gently squeeze some peaches or rub a cantaloupe before holding it up to her nose. I hold my breath as she laughs and lingers with the fish vendors, trying to find the freshest pick of the day.
On the drive home, the leathery scent of my mom’s sedan is masked by a curious blend of citrus, salmon and fresh flowers.
I love the smell of Saturday mornings.
The moment we arrive home, she pours the produce onto the gray granite of the kitchen counter and begins to wash each fruit and vegetable, one by one. Every so often, she summons me from a nearby couch, where I am absorbed in a book.
“Come look at this eggplant, Natalie,” she gasps. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“…Sure, mom,” I reply. I never quite understand what she’s talking about, but I want so badly to see what she does.

I carry your heart with me
No matter how busy she gets with work, my mom prepares my lunchbox every morning. While my little comrades stand in the cafeteria line or peel the sweaty plastic from their Lunchables, I stare into my lovingly packed mini-Igloo, trying to decide what to eat first. It is different every day. Hummus stuffed into triangles of pita. Homemade fruit cups. Pesto pasta salad. Sugary rings of dried pineapple. Celery stick logs lined with chunky peanut butter and raisins. A savory sample of mixed nuts. Cream cheese and raspberry jelly pressed between two pieces of whole wheat bread. She has somehow mastered the art of making healthy food delicious.
She sharpies “Be Good” onto my white paper napkins and draws two smilie faces underneath the inky letters. In this way, she comes to school with me every day for most of my life.

A missing ingredient
When the car business proves less than lucrative, my father abandons it and becomes a different sort of businessman, a “financial consultant,” he tells me. I don’t really know what that means except that he’s not around as much anymore. He leaves to Geneva, Switzerland to embark on a business venture when I am seven-years-old, and I sob under my covers for hours after we drop him off at the airport.
Although he no longer sits at the breakfast table, I hear his voice through the telephone line every morning after I read the comics. I ask him when he is coming home and he always says, “soon.” It takes me a year to realize he is lying to me, and it takes him two years to come back.
When my father is gone, I go through a series of stages. For a few weeks, I want to eat nothing but raisin bread. I was never a picky eater before.
In the morning, my mom eats the Sun-maid toast with me as we sit alongside each other at the kitchen table. I always nibble alongside the crusty border first, wanting to savor the small square of butter-saturated swirls for the last moments of breakfast.
The raisin bread is harder to come by at dinnertime. Sometimes I catch my mom eyeing me as I mash my barely-eaten bean salad into the corner of my bowl with a fork. She and I both know it will not disappear the way I want it to.
“Natalie, you’re eating like a bird,” she sighs.
“I don’t feel like eating this now,” I reply. “Can I have some raisin bread, please?”
She stares at me for a moment and my throat constricts until she silently gets up from the table to get a box of Saran Wrap from the counter. She tightens a layer of plastic over my abandoned meal, slides it away from me, and walks towards the toaster. A few minutes later, she sits back down again with the bread in hand, and I begin my path around the crust as she resumes eating the now-lukewarm meal she cooked us for dinner.
My raisin bread stage eventually subsides as I approach my seventh year. For my birthday dinner, my mom crafts a three-tiered black forest chocolate cake, each dark layer lined with a different fruit: raspberry, pear, peach. When I squeeze my eyes shut to blow out the candles, all I can wish is for my daddy to come back.
“It’s just you and me, Natalie,” my mom says sometimes after she hangs up the phone in the morning. I can’t see her eyes because her glasses have clouded over from the steam of her Earl Gray tea, but she sounds sad.
We learn to turn that lonely declaration into a mantra.
“It’s just you…,” she starts as she tucks me in at night, gesturing towards me with her index finger.
“And me,” I reply as I smile and point at myself with my thumb.
Sometimes we reverse it and though we know this makes no grammatical sense, it gives us a strange sort of comfort. We are in this together.
By the time I am blowing out the candles on the chocolate cake my mother makes for my eighth birthday, I no longer am wishing for my father’s return. His absence has become more familiar than his presence.
Only months after my father’s return in 1995, my mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. She puts her business on hold, but she keeps on cooking and taking care of the household while he spends the entire day on international business conference calls. It is like he never came back. Although she is back in good health after a few small surgeries, her relationship with my father has taken a less-than-benign turn.

Dough
At least once a month, my mother devotes an entire day to baking. She wakes up early with a certain look in her eyes and soon, the kitchen counter is coated in chalky flour. When my mother bakes, my mother bakes. Chocolate-chip cookies with walnuts. Oatmeal raisin bars. Anise biscuits. Banana bread. Foccaccia Bread. And my favorite: a Swiss Bread reminiscent of challah. I stand beside her at the counter, watching as she kneads the dough briskly with her pale knuckles. She lets me braid the elasticy strands before we slide them into the oven.
Hours and dozens of trays later, we sit down to enjoy the labors of our day. Before she raises anything to her mouth, she will hold it gently for a moment, her eyeglasses slipping down her nose as she rotates it in front of her. When I laugh at her, she tells me she has the right to admire her creations.
Sometimes I catch her looking at me with the same thoughtful tenderness.
When I am in middle school, my mom confirms that I am, in fact, a baked good.
“Children are like bread,” she explains to me one night as we talk about the kind of person I am and the kind of person I will become. “You can choose which ingredients you will add to the mix when they are babies and there is still time to shape them after the dough has risen. But once you put them in the oven, it’s hard to do much else.”
“You’re already in the oven,” she tells me. “It’s all you now.”
“But don’t worry,” she goes on. “There’s always time to add a little egg wash or some jam once you’re out of the oven.”
She had a point. I am not that much different from my 11-year-old self, except for a garnish or two.

Letting Go
A few weeks into my world history class the summer before ninth grade, we are learning about ancient Babylon and Hammurabi’s code. That same week, I learn that my mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer again.
After a few minor tissue removals, her doctors tell her that there is a chance that the dense cells within her breast can become invasive. Because my mom hates taking chances almost as much as she hates the possibility of prolonged suffering, she rejects a lifetime of medicinal cocktails and radiation treatment and opts for the most extreme solution.
“Just take them both off!” she shouts at her doctors, even though the cancerous cells are only ravaging the right side. She labels her breasts the “the bad and the balanced.” She’s always been a fan of symmetry.
She spends the days before her mastectomy in the kitchen, preparing meal after meal and freezing them in Tupperware containers. My father spends the days in his room, shouting on his phone to business people who are somewhere far away, somewhere that isn’t here. He reemerges at dinner time with a guilty look on his face.
In the anesthetized moments before she rolls into the operating room, I cannot even hold her un-needled hand because it is painfully swollen with stress and sadness. I sleep in the hospital next to her bed for the next two nights.
Only one day after my mother’s surgery, my father departs on another business trip, leaving me alone to take care of my mother, even though it is she who always ends up taking care of me. I bring juice boxes to her in bed, and she insists on getting up to reheat the food she had so carefully prepared the week before. The only other time she gets up is to clean the drainage pumps that are connected to the flesh where her breasts once hung. I sit on the bathroom counter as she cries out from both the physical pain of her lost flesh and my father’s final, stinging abandonment. Every time she screams, I hate him more.

A Broken Table, a Battlefield
The kitchen table used to hold my family together and it is at the kitchen table that I realize my family has fallen apart. At breakfast, I hide behind the newspaper so I don’t have to confront my father’s empty stare or my mother’s sad eyes. Dinner is either thirty minutes of silence or an endless verbal joust:
You’re never around. I’m working! You never tell us anything. In due time. Why can’t you just tell us the truth? It’s more difficult than that. We’ve been at your mercy for years. Why do you have to bring up the past like that? We’re financially instable because of you, we never know what tomorrow brings. Why don’t you go back to work   again. I’m trying to hold this family together.
Their words incessantly swirl into the same, sad story every time.
It is at the kitchen table that I also begin to wonder why my parents didn’t separate years ago and what kind of joke it is that we are trying to sit down together for a civilized meal.
My mother now hates preparing food for him. “My brother always told me that you shouldn’t even fry an egg if you aren’t doing it with love,” she tells me.
But she keeps cooking anyways. “The two of us have to eat, too. What’s one more plate?” she mutters as she removes three forks from a kitchen drawer.
The acid dripping from my parents’ daily arguments begins to burns my esophagus, and I develop heartburn at the age of fifteen. When I start to acquire gastrointestinal problems, my mother takes me to my pediatrician, who chides me for my “Type A” personality. I never seek her medical advice again. She doesn’t understand that my body is grieving.

Reconciliation and Rotisserie Chicken
During the summer before my junior year of high-school, my mother takes back her maiden name and accepts a job to direct a Montessori school in Kuwait for a year. She leaves in November because she can no longer handle my father, but also because she wants me to learn to love him again.
An hour after the Super Shuttle takes my mom away, it is dinner time and my father and I move towards the kitchen. I walk to the fridge, where a final meal has been left for us with careful instructions about rearranging and reheating.
“I can help,” my father tries as he leans against the kitchen counter, swirling a glass of Merlot in his hand.
I shake my head no. Only one interloper in her world at a time.
He retreats to the table and leaves me to bumble about. The kitchen never seemed this big before. Was the microwave always so loud? When I open the spice cabinet to get salt, fifty clear Tupperware containers filled with crushed powders stare back at me. Her magic ingredients. I can barely stand to look at them.
I scoop the warmed meal onto two plates and bring everything to the table, now littered with my dad’s business papers. He pushes them aside and starts tucking into the food while I settle in my chair across from him.
When I try to raise the first bite to my mouth, I break. My fork falls from my hand as I bend my head down and start to quietly cry.
“Natoolie,” my dad murmurs, invoking the nickname he called me when I was a little girl. He has stopped eating.
I shake my head no once more without lifting my eyes. When I hear his fork clinking against his plate again, I steal a quick glance across the table. His big, watery brown eyes look cloudier tonight. Maybe, in some way, he misses her, too.
“It isn’t too late for him to learn how to be a father.” My mom’s voice echoes in my head as I blink at the empty seat on my right, remembering the conversation she and I had only hours before she left.
Maybe she’s right, but I’m just not ready for it to happen yet.
**
As the weeks pass, my father and I slowly negotiate our relationship in the kitchen while we stretch the potential uses of rotisserie chicken in every meal. I find myself regretting that I hadn’t always paid close enough attention to my mother when she urged me to watch her kitchen techniques, but there’s something fun about the ignorance that my father and I share.
On good days, my dad and I work together to make a meal and only argue about how much olive oil should go in the pasta sauce and whether or not rotisserie chicken really jives with ravioli. We laugh about the moody oven when I make brownies out of a Betty Crocker’s box, an event my mother would have considered blasphemy.
On bad days, we butt our stubborn heads and our arguments are bigger than the space of the kitchen. I am trying not to see him through my mother’s angry eyes, and I know that every time he looks at me, he sees her. In my inability to forgive him. In my acerbic rejoinders. In my laugh, in my smile, in my silent tears.
“I can’t take it anymore! Can’t you do anything right?!” I shout at him when something explodes in the microwave.
“I’m sorry, Natalie.” He looks hurt. “I wasn’t paying attention. Let me clean it up, at least.”
On most days, we exist sort of like tolerable roommates, acknowledging one another’s presence pleasantly while mostly staying out of each other’s way. We prepare breakfast separately each morning, but we eat together. Occasionally we will exchange a quiet smile or even a word as our newspaper pages overlap in the middle of the table, a picture from my features section resting on his business article.
I do all the food shopping, not only because my dad has a tendency to come back with everything but what’s on the grocery list, but because I find solace in the shelves of the supermarket. I remember my mother as I now linger in the produce section, sniffing the cantaloupes as nearby shoppers stare at me, bewildered.

Meals for One
My mom returns home just before my eighteenth birthday and my last year of high-school. For my birthday, we celebrate not only my entrance into legal adulthood, but also my parents’ divorce. It has been a long time coming. We continue living in the same house until high school is over. Probably not the best idea, but it is convenient and my parents have been living estranged for so long anyways that we’re all used to it. We drive to my graduation in separate cars. I go with my mom. My father goes alone.
Just before I leave for college, my parents finally go their separate ways. My father is now the fully realized version of the working vagabond he has always itched to be. When I see him on rare occasions, we always meet in a different place, a different country, a different restaurant table. An Indian restaurant in London, an outdoor café in Spain, a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles. We talk about college, about my future. We talk about the food in front of us, neither of us able to say what we really think: She can make this so much better. We also talk about his current business ventures; when he starts to ramble about a new project I have to remind myself that he is a lot like those characters in the books I read as a child who constantly invest in new-fangled contraptions that almost always fail. Sometimes I can just nod and go along with it, but sometimes the talking becomes too much for me and I rush to the bathroom, crying against a stall door as the past comes flooding back. Give him a chance, I convince myself, as I walk back to the table with a red nose and a tight smile.
I go home to my mother whenever I can. At the kitchen table, my body is purged of dining hall food, of college commotion, of constant motion. We talk about everything over plates of food. Fruit salad infused with rose water. Spicy curries. Homemade raisin bread. At breakfast, I study her hands, curled around a mug of Earl Gray, and I trace her startlingly blue veins with my eyes. Later I will stand beside the kitchen counter and carefully follow these hands as they fly across a cutting board and sprinkle spices into three different boiling pots. I don’t want to forget a single step. I am finally ready to learn.