Recently Discovered

 I just found this, written when I was early in (undiagnosed, because they said I was "too young") peri-menopause, life was a cascading cluster of craziness, and I often felt very out of control. I typed it up and am sharing it now, almost 40 years after the original event and 20 after the second event recounted in this missive. 

Enjoy!

When I was a very young mother (18), my grandmother, who I am certain was convinced that I was inadequate as a mother would appear at my door with food products in unusually large quantities.

She was a member of a local food program that served the elderly, gifting its members with bulk quantities of common standard American grocery items: a #10 can of peanut butter, for example. At the end of the program day, large quantities of food remained unclaimed, as local seniors struggled to get their heads around uses for such large amounts of food. At this point, Gram would step forward and say “My granddaughter can use that.” 

Maybe she thought I had some skills after all.

The following morning she would appear on my doorstep with things like 5 pound boxes of elbow macaroni, or giant uncut logs of American cheese food, or - my favorite - the #10 can of grape juice concentrate. Often included in these deliveries would be a large box of powdered milk, clearly labeled “USDA FOOD PROGRAM” on the side. The boxes stood nearly 18” high. 

I was skeptical about some of these food gifts. A #10 can of peanut butter for example…that is a lot of sandwiches. I made cookies, I made more sandwiches, it was the can that had no end. This was long before I knew the value of peanut butter in, say, an African stew or Asian sauce. But I did my best to use what was given to me. A penny saved is a penny earned. Waste not, want not. And so forth.

I found uses for the pasta and cheese - endless mac and cheese, but it freezes in a pinch. I even managed to make enough grape jelly (from concentrate!) to outlast the peanut butter. 

But the milk. The milk posed a problem for me. I am fundamentally opposed to “just add water” food. I let the grape juice slide, this was the era of juice from concentrate. I am also opposed to foods that refuse to do what the label says they will do - that is to say, dissolve in water. 

I tried everything. 

Shaking, whisking, cold water, hot water, warm water. I tried starting with a low water-to-milk ratio to make a paste that I could then thin into something resembling milk. In the end I had, every single time, I had thin milky water topped with curd-like clumps of undissolved bits that were mostly fine in a recipe, but wholly unacceptable when poured over my toddler’s morning cereal. 

Once, in a final attempt to make the milk obey it’s own directive, I placed the requisite amounts of powder and water into my blender. This was long ago, when my blender was a department store model. Nothing powerful, just a 1980’s household blender. I put the cap on, turned the knob to the highest number, and hit “blend”.

Within seconds my counter was awash in a slippery mess, a raging tidal wave of foam, perched delicately atop a thin layer of milky water. 

It was everywhere. I grabbed containers of every size and shape, and with my hands I scooped the offending slurry into what would hold it. A 5-quart stock pot seemed a good choice. 

Unwilling to accept defeat, I carefully cleaned the counter and pondered with to do with the products of my endeavor. Taking a funnel I poured most of the liquid product into the one-quart glass bottle my grandmother had generously provided for such purpose. I held back that foam with my hand.

The foam. So much foam. Slimy, dense…there was no choice. Down the drain it went. 

Time passes, years go slowly (or quickly) by, and hopefully we live and learn.

Or maybe we do not.

Around 2008, with no kids at home to speak of, I had returned to powdered milk as a stand-by. Not the cheap kind in the 18” tall USDA box, oh no. Bob’s Red Mill Organic Nonfat Milk Powder is what you would find in my cupboard. Neither of us drank fluid milk. so it made no sense to have it on hand. A container in the cupboard of powder, however, can be a lovely stand-in. 

Some things never change, and powdered milk is one of those things. Using a recycled glass bottle obtained from a local dairy, I combined 1/2 cup of powder and 3.5 cups of water, per package instructions, and shock them up. I shook and I shook and I shook, to no avail. There, perched atop the thin, watery, whitish liquid sat those unhappy curds in my “whey”.

Usually I can let things like this go. It isn’t, after all, “real” milk, right? It is a facsimile. I was not going to drink it. I may put some over salt pork, onion and clams in a stock pot. I may pour some over chicken and mushrooms in a crock pot. I may make my favorite rhubarb tapioca. The lumps should, I told myself, should not matter.

Except on this day, for some reason, they did. When everything feels chaotic and dramatic, the soft flow of smooth, un-lumpy milk is soothing. No lumps means something has gone right, for a change. 

Have I mentioned that I am a slow learner?

Frustrated by the lumps, I poured the mixture into the smaller of my two Vita-mix (1380 watts!) containers. I told myself that a quick whiz on low would solve the problem. “Just variable speed 1 or 2.” I told to myself.

The next thing you know I am at variable speed 9, holding the lid firmly on with one hand, insisting in my head that this time, just this one time, there will be NO LUMPS in my stupid powdered milk. “So what” I thought “if there’s a little foam?”

Removing the container from the base of the Vita-mix, hand still clamped on the lid, I noted that the foam had completely filled the container, bottom to top, and was oozing a bit from the lid.

Undeterred, right there on my counter top I brazenly removed the lid. 

And I watched, feeling a bit stunned by the sheer quantity of cascading foam and thin milk pouring across my counter, precisely as it had 20 years earlier. 

I grabbed towels. I grabbed the other Vita-mix jug and the one quart glass milk jug and a funnel and quickly distributed the mess as evenly as possible between them. 

As I cleaned up my mess I thought a lot about irony and the timing of this minor kitchen disaster. This was, indeed, a chaotic season of my life. Hot flashes, brain fog, kids gone…and we were back to cascades of foamy powdered milk.

I wondered as I scooped the slimy mess remaining on the counter into any available container if I were, indeed, capable of learning.

The fluid milk quickly sank to the bottom of each vessel, just as it had in 1987, leaving behind towers of useless foam. Or maybe not useless. Maybe THIS time I would find a use for the foam.

I glanced around the kitchen and spied my coffee maker, half empty pot in place, still warm from breakfast. 

I grabbed mugs, very one I could find, and did the only thing I could think of.

I made lattes. No matter that I was the only person home to drink them, I made them anyway. 

A row of coffee cups, each with a perfectly delightful, cinnamon-dusted tower of foam on top.

I lifted the first one to my lips and drank. 

Yes, I can learn. It may take a while, a really long while, and it may be a damned ugly process, but in the end, when life hands you foam? 

Make lattes.

Thinking Trad Wife? Things to Consider

Purely anecdotal thoughts from someone who's now a grandmother, who lived the life you are aspiring to.

First this - I believed in the family structure practiced by my ancestors, with god at the head, the husband over the wife, the wife under the husband and the kids under that. Umbrella of authority, as it were. It sounds pretty simple and logical right? I mean, in all areas of life, or most anyway, we seem to have a hierarchy of power. Someone is at the top. Someone is in the middle. Someone does the dishes. And so on.

I did not interrogate it. It simply was the space I inhabited. My mother mostly stayed home, my father worked. Most of my friends mothers stayed home as well, or had part time work scheduled around their kids, who generally took center stage. The home was where children were reared. If my own home was not particularly effective, that was a failing of my mother's mental status, and bore no reflection on the system as a whole. It must work, and we had just stepped away and needed to get back to it.

Then I became a single mother of two. Because life happens. I had no job skills, and no prospects, and no choice but to find a way to feed my kids. Their father, who previously had agreed with this lifestyle in which I remained under his authority, suddenly decided that I was a mercenary bitch bent on his destruction, and refused to pay support. 

I went to college. I got a boyfriend who had more stability and commitment in his little toe than my ex had in his whole body. 

I got a degree (and became an RN), and "earned" myself a second MRS. I went to work, but part time with a schedule fit around my kids. I got written up for missing a pop-up meeting to do my daughter's hair before a school event (which I missed, because I was at work). Inhumane work, no work life balance.

Home seemed so far away. I missed long mornings with coffee and dishes and kids, no endless stress, no mountain of work at home and work at work, and juggling schedules. It never occurred to me to expect my partner to do anything to assist with the home. If he did something I took it as a romantic gesture. He did laundry, and occasionally on a Sunday morning he would get really weird about the vacuum and work until there was not a shred of pet hair in any crevice anywhere in the house - I just stayed out of the way, and said thank you a lot, hoping he would do that more often (he did not). It never occurred to me to demand more humane work conditions.

And I had started having panic attacks that I perceived as convictions of the wrongness of my choice to leave my kids in the hands of others. What was I doing, going to work every day when we could make it work with one income...surrendering my kids to who knows what, unable to protect them from the big bad world while I toiled away at a job for some nameless, heartless corporate entity. Big giant panic attacks that made me stop on the way to work and vomit out the side of my car, shaking and pale and pasty. And still, I did not ask my partner to take on a larger load. It did not occur to me. His job was to work and bring home the bigger bacon. Mine was to work and do everything else, bedsheets, toilets, dishes, meals, schedules, shopping, garden. I am not saying that he did not "help". He did. But it was just that - occasional help, not expected contribution. And I certainly still had no expectation the the system should change.

After much soul searching (and some digging into the utterly lacking mental health benefits of our insurance), I returned home. My kids left private school and we began homeschooling. There are many memories of that time that I hold tender reminiscence of. In reality, it was hard. Unpaid, unappreciated, but I was doing The Most Important Thing - I was raising my kids. And the panic attacks subsided some, so I must be doing the right thing, right? I was less stressed. I could focus fully on one thing and not feel endlessly divided between many, doing all of the things, usually badly. 

I sewed a little for money on the side. I baby sat. I gardened and canned and gleaned to keep food costs low. I bargain shopped. We did not have real vacations. But everyone was fed and clean, and the house was mass chaos but full of furry things and dirty feet, and later yarn and chicken poop. I am sure - and I know because you only need to read this blog to discover - that I spun that into a delightful romantic fairy tale. I tried some entrepreneurial ventures, but lacked the education or internal resources to push to real success in any. I do know why, now. I did not appreciate why then.

This is where the catch begins to reveal itself.

Those fun little side gigs. odd jobs, and all that unpaid labor, both physical and emotional? Unless you are lucky, or have previous education or a wide base of resources and connections on which to draw, they don't fill your retirement account, or give you any sort of stability or long-term safety or control. 

You are trading immediate comfort, sacrificing your future, for an illusion. You may believe your kids will rise up and call you blessed. Maybe they will. You may believe that your chosen life partner is committed to you deeply in a "whats mine is yours for life no matter what" sort of way, and maybe he will. You certainly do have it much much easier than your peers, who struggle to keep up with school hours and play dates and work obligations and family obligations and housework. You have all that....you just never get paid, never build any personal wealth or personal power, and that matters. A lot.

So let's fast forward a bit, shall we, from the sunny vision of the "Trad Wife", dutifully grateful (and I was!) for her loving spouse who makes it all possible, for her darling babies growing at her knee - she's made the "hard choices", she sacrificed her goals and dreams and visions. It has been, she is deeply aware and always humbly reminds herself, a privilege to have this opportunity to sacrifice herself for the greater good. And now, why she must be beloved? Cherished? Etc?

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Maybe little Sleeping Beauty wakes up to realize she has no financial security heading into retirement, and if her husband drops dead tomorrow she better hope he had a plan. She better hope she can find a job when the kids go off into the world. She better hope that her thin grasp on co-opted patriarchal power doesn't slip. She better hope those panic attacks don't return with firey vengeance because she certainly does not have the financial resources to pay for therapy. 

Here's what I did:

I made cheese, baked bread, gardened, schooled kids, sold eggs. I sewed and knitted and crocheted and wove. It made for pretty pictures and non-reimbursed content, just like this post. I asked nothing of that dog eat dog 'man's world' beyond the chance to not be starved to death at the end of my usefulness. 

Which I have begun to reach. 

I have no higher education, no savings, no retirement, and am mostly unemployable. You would not believe the numbers of resumes and applications I have filled out in the last six years. I could paper a house, inside and out. I can't get hired. No idea why. I mean, really? So I push onward. 

I have a couple of side gigs - quilting and face painting - but they are gigs, not consistent income that will feed me if Mr. W drops dead tomorrow. I better hope he had a plan. Because mine? Turns out it was built on a bunch of bullshit spun up from a big pile of lies and misrepresentations, both sociocultural and religious. 

So stay home if you want, but understand fully and clearly the choices you are making. I know it's hard. I know you've been reared to believe that those strident, angry first and second wave feminists just didn't understand and need to stop being so....loud. I thought the same. I thought my gift to the universe was quietly rearing my kids and caring for my home and living the lifestyle of white patriarchal privilege, which simultaneously helped me managed CPTSD with no therapy or mental health support. I guess I saved a lot of money that way. Hell of a cost though. 

I was taking the easy way out. It was easier to go home and shut my mouth than to buck a system that dumps the majority of the load on women. 

I know it's hard. I mean I KNOW it's hard. 

But hard isn't wrong. It's just hard. You hand over the money, you hand over the power. You give up your earning potential, you are handing over your place at the table, your voice, your input. You are surrendering all of that to an authority which may be benevolent... or may be malevolent. Maybe you will get lucky. Most do not.

You need to understand completely and fully the choice you are making. It will be easier now, for absolute certain. Much. 

Later? Well. The odds are not in your favor.