I am making that wonderful soupe au pistou I posted about the other day. I know the boys won’t eat it. When I make something like this, I often think about my mother and food and my own relationship with her cooking. 1/8

She almost never cooked once my parents split up. When she cooked, one thing she would make was vegetable soup. When she made it without beef or cabbage, I loved it, but once she got close to menopause, she just refused to make it the way I liked. 2/8

Of course I was old enough to find my own food, so she wouldn’t make anything else for me. I think about what I would do in the same situation. The kids are little, and I will make them something they like for dinner. 3/8

I sometimes think my mother used food to punish me, but I don’t know what for. I was and remain an incredibly unfussy eater. There were really only a couple of things I didn’t like, but that soup with beef and cabbage was awful. 4/8

What I would do now would be to make two pans of soup side-by-side, splitting the recipe between them. And I would put the cabbage and the beef in one of them and not in the other. 5/8

It would’ve been no extra effort for her, particularly since I was the only person who ever washed dishes in that house. 6/8

Now that I am perimenopausal, I absolutely understand the impulse to demand something for yourself and yourself alone. But I still don’t understand why there couldn’t be something for me, too, when I had so little. 7/8

When you’ve had an abusive or vindictive parent, everything you do, even making vegetable soup, is a reckoning. I am tired, and my kids and I both need an escape from one another, but all I can do now is try to come out on the right side of the reckoning as often as possible. 8/8