The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Lately, on top of reading for classes, I have been reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender.  It's the story of a girl who can sense the emotional drives of other people in the food they make.   The novel begins when she tastes a hollowness in her mother's lemon cake.  She, in fact, tastes this empty sadness in all of her mother's food and begins to sense that her mother is deeply troubled and discontent.  

When I read this, one chapter in, I began crying.  It resonated with the insecure part of my mother brain.  It's a part of the brain that I'm convinced all mother's have.  All women really.  Actually, I'm sure all men have it too.  It's the part of the brain that makes us feel like we're failing at the most important job we've been given.  In my case, that job is raising my children.  I began to wonder if my children can sense my insecurity.  Can they see the fear that I try to keep pushed down below the surface?  Children are so much more intuitive than we give them credit for.  They are closer to the wild than we allow our adult selves to be.  They can sense sadness and happiness and danger.  I sometimes fear that, in my attempt to redefine myself as a single mother in the last few years, I've left them feeling my own sense of being unsettled.  Not that I haven't tried with all I have to help them feel the complete opposite.  But I know things have changed for them too.  I know I'm not the mother I was.  In some ways, I'm better.  I've grown older and more patient.  In other ways, though, I don't know.  Sometimes I just feel like I'm failing in a crucial way.  

Being a single mother adds another entire dimension to the fears I have as a mother.  I worry that I'm not enough on my own.  I don't have a partner who can pick up the slack.  I don't have that other person who can see what I can't see.  There are three of them.  What if I'm so focused on one that I fail to see another one hurting?  Or I worry that I'm too much.  What if they grow weary with my presence?  Does absence really make the heart grow fonder?  And if so, what does too much presence do?  Does it make the heart grow resentful?  Does constant presence become background noise in their life so that they have no definite memory of you?  The other day we were sharing memories around the dinner table.   We had gotten onto the stories of our time in Virginia and the lovely little Montessori school that they attended.  Then the boy said something that pricked me.  It was really insignificant and seemingly not a big deal.  He said that he remembered that his dad walked him to school.  I said that I was sure he did a few times.  He countered and said no I only remember dad walking me to school.  Now that doesn't seem like a big deal unless you know that I took him to school and picked him up almost every day for the three years we were there.  I let it go while he was talking, but deep down I grew more and more hurt as this continued.  They were sharing stories and I wasn't in them.  Yet, I know that I've been more present than any other adult in their life.  Where am I in their memories?  Logically I know that I'm in the memory of their daily.  Logically I know that those other memories stand out because they are rare.  But emotionally, it still hurts.  

A fear like that is only compacted by the fear of another woman entering their life.  What if their dad finds someone who is better with them?  What if they go to that woman with their fears and concerns?  What if their childhood memories center around her for the same reason that the boy remembers his dad walking him to school?  And the ultimate fear, what if I die?  Will they remember me at all?  This is the fear of my nightmares.  I worry that their life will be completely different.  I worry that their dad won't know what's important to them.  That he won't know what to take from this home to his.  I worry that he won't know the rituals and traditions that I've sought to establish in their lives.  I worry that he won't remember to take the pictures or the letters or the baby clothes that I've saved for them.  I worry that he won't remember the stories of their births.  I worry about stupid things, like the fact that I can always find Sicily's bunny when it's missing before bedtime.  I worry that he won't care about the bunny.  And more than all of that, I worry that he'll forget to remember to remember me.  And I will fade from the earth having meant nothing.  

 In case you're reading this and you are now worried about my mental well being, don't be.  I don't sit here and wallow in these fears.  Most days I move through our daily life without a thought to any of this.  Most days I do the work of being a mother and at the end of the day, I feel good about that work.  Most days I go to bed with a heart full of love and hope for the next day.  I love my role as a mother.  It's my life's greatest work.  I am thankful for every minute that I get to spend with my precious three.  Good and bad, I love that I get to be here in their daily.  But some days the fear creeps up and consumes me to the point of anxious tears.  On those days, I can do nothing but hold it at bay with a carefully constructed wall until I can pour it out into words on the page.   It's funny, the things that prompt it.   Like a book about the sadness of lemon cake.  I love lemon cake.  And yet, I don't think I'll ever be able to eat lemon cake again.