– An Easy Spread –

When I went away to college, I realized that I had developed some weird eating habits.  My roommates and friends often commented on this.  I now recall the source of all my funny food habits – my mom.  The simple foods my mother made, while far from gourmet, were a significant part of my childhood.

At Virginia Commonwealth University, I ate my weight in french fries.  My roommates occasionally got irritated with my empty fry cartons.  After a really bad day, one of my roommates,Sarah, walked in the apartment to find my carton on the table and snarled “Throw your greasy-ass wrappers away!” I remembered back to my first experience with french fries.  When I was a baby, my mother often took me to McDonalds.  I instantly loved the crispy fries.  But mom, realizing this probably wasn’t the best snack for a baby, licked the salt off the fries and gave them to me one at a time.

During my childhood, my mother was a vegetarian.  She never cooked beef for me and rarely served chicken.  My palate was too sensitive and she was too poor to serve seafood.  Instead, she made a variety of savory vegetable dishes like her milky creamed corn.  The creamed corn was a delicious mix of sweet and salt.  She also made steamy black-eyed peas and baked sweet potatoes, which were gooey and covered with butter and brown sugar.  This vegetarian lifestyle at such an early age made me a little obsessive about the meat I ate.  I often ate chicken noodle soup (the fat noodle kind, not to be confused with the skinny noodle kind).  I had to pick out each chunk of chicken before I rendered it edible. She also made us delicious dishes of vegetarian chili and spaghetti.  Even though I am no longer a vegetarian, I still do not like ground beef, especially in spaghetti or chili.  My college roommates often got mad at me for making these dishes. “Where’s the meat?” they often asked.

Although my vegetarian diet left a mark on my eating habits, it was not necessarily good for my diet.  As a child, I was repulsed by most meats and began to refuse them in my sandwiches.  I would eat mayonnaise sandwiches or faux hamburger sandwiches made of bread, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and pickles.  My pediatrician, once he realized what was going on, had to tell my mother that, as a growing child, I needed a constant source of protein.  He suggested that she try to incorporate more meats into my diet.  To cope with the problem, mom became a meat eater to prove to me that it was tasty.

The vegetarian scenario was not the only time I copied my mother’s eating habits.  Like my mother, I developed a great love for coffee.  When I was young, my mother brewed a pot of coffee early each morning before she went to work.  I woke to the sound of her heels tapping toward the kitchen.  I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and went to watch her.  She haphazardly scooped coffee grinds into a pleated filter.  Then she filled the pot with water and began pouring it into the machine.  The water sloshed over the side of the pot, dripping down onto the counter.  On some mornings, I woke up late to the bitter, sticky-sweet aroma of the already-brewed coffee.  I ran to see her before she left.  I wrapped my arms around her and sucked in the smell of her fancy perfume.  She kissed me on the cheeks, leaving behind a sticky, coral print.On weekdays, when my mother had work, I was not allowed to drink coffee.  Weekends were different.  With the workweek behind her, my mother was a different person.  She slept late and did not bother to tame her hair with combs and sprays.  It was a time for leisure and small pleasures, which she extended to her children.  During the weekends, mother would fix me a cup of half-coffee, half-cream with breakfast.  The coffee warmed me, all the way from my tongue to my tummy.  She made chocolate chip pancakes that set off the richness of the creamed coffee.  My mother’s coffee was comforting, not like on the cruel weekday mornings when I could smell the pungent aroma, but never feel the warmth.  In college, I remembered this comfort every time I made myself a grande latte.

When I was about four, my mother began working longer hours and traveling for work.  She enjoyed her work and began going away more often, usually leaving me with my grandmother.  She would wait until the night before to tell me she was leaving, so that I only had a few hours to cry.  On those evenings, the only weapon she had to ease my mood was food.  I sat cross-legged on the floor, beside my mother’s large feet.  She raked her acrylic nails across my back as I ate Oreos soaked in milk.  On those nights, I knew that I would be allowed to stuff myself until I passed out in a tearful, sugar-induced coma.  The cookies were a small sugary promise that, no matter how awful it seemed, she would come back.

For a long time, the event involving Oreos and my mother’s absence had little significance in understanding my life as a whole.  It was not until after I graduated college that I could look back and see a pattern.  When I was 18, I went away to art school in Richmond.  Although it was only 2 hours from my mother, my roach-infested apartment seemed light years from the comforts of home.  I cannot remember who bought the first package, my mother or me, but Oreos again became a part of my diet.  Each evening before I went to bed I would grab a handful and a glass of milk.  It became a nighttime ritual, almost as important as brushing my teeth.  The foods from my childhood continue to comfort me even as an adult.

Alyssa is an MFA student at GMU in Virginia. She is a fan of bar cuisine and live music.