My son called on Sunday and left me feeling all warm and snuggly. He asked me to email all our favorite family recipes so he and Abbey, his fiance, could start their Christmas baking. Don’t ask why the request has me feeling like I just watched a Hallmark movie. I’m not sure I can explain.
But I do know this. For a long time, our relationship with our son was fragile, breakable and delicate as a spider’s web. During the years when he in Washington state and then at the monastery in West Virginia, often the only safe topic of conversation was cooking.
“What’s your recipe for shortbread?” he would ask, and I tried not to cry while I read it to him. Then he wanted the recipe for Early Bird Coffee Cake, Pecan-Caramel Rolls, Gingersnaps, Sugar Cookies and more. When he started asking for them a second time, saying he’d misplaced them in the monastery kitchen, I made a computer file and sent it to him.
When he called and asked for the recipes a few days ago, I found that old file and attached it to an email. I thought of how our relationship began to heal as we talked about baking tricks we’d discovered, variations we’d experimented with, new recipes we’d found. Recipes strengthened my once strained relationship with my son. Maybe they will strengthen the good relationship I already enjoy with my future daughter-in-law. So I added a note to the email. “Let me know what family meals you and Abbey want to learn to cook when you’re here over New Years. I’d love to teach you.”
That’s when my insides went all warm and snuggly. Cooking with my son and his fiance, and perhaps my daughter and her fiance as we celebrate the New Year as a family for the first time. Sounds like a Hallmark movie to me.
