Burning the Granola

It’s been years since I last burned the granola. Three homes and one kid ago, five states away. We rented a little bungalow in midtown – two bedrooms, a little more than a thousand square feet – where my daughter took her first steps, and my husband and I walked the neighborhood most days hatching a plan to move back north. I was struggling with motherhood, having left a full-time job I didn’t love to teach part-time and stay home with my new baby. Like many new moms, I felt like I lost my identity and couldn’t fully embrace the fact that my life would never go back to normal. Instead, I’d spend years trying to accept that this – a little face staring up at me, taking in who I was and what I did and reflecting it back – was now normal. 

When I left work two weeks before my daughter was born, I knew I wouldn’t return. I didn’t love my job as a proofreader for a trade magazine. I was bored every day and told by my supervisor to fill my idle time playing games online. I should have been writing, but instead I spent the bulk of my day chatting with coworkers and reading blogs. Once my husband and I did the math – both the income calculations and the math in my heart – we decided I’d stay home with our baby and adjunct part-time at the college. Then, I added in the part about trying to be a perfect housewife and suddenly learning how to cook. That’s what moms did, I thought, and I was determined to rock this mom thing.

I figured out quickly that I hated to cook but loved to bake. This worked out well because my husband loves to cook. So he cooked dinners and I started researching bread recipes and how to make simple, delicious granola, two things that I had no clue how to do. I had read in Kathleen Norris’s Quotidian Mysteries that baking bread was one of her favorite and most contemplative activities, and I found that for myself. It was slow, the kind of work I could fit in around a new baby’s sleep schedule. But granola was a whole other thing. Somehow I’d gotten it into my head that making granola would make me a good mom. If I figured out granola, maybe I could figure everything else out too.

I wanted granola to be uncomplicated. I realized quickly, as I perused recipes online, that granola was perhaps not complicated, but it was also not simple. Many recipes had a too-long list of ingredients, most of them expensive. I just wanted simple. I wanted to throw something together, quickly stir, then put it in the oven and forget. The simpler, the better. No mistakes because being a mama was making me feel like I was always making mistakes. Over a thousand miles from home and family, every day felt lonely and tiring. Even though my baby slept, I didn’t. I was filled with anxiety about who I was and the family I was creating. How could I ever do this? Couldn’t I just make granola and feel okay about myself?

When my daughter was born, the day we were supposed to leave the hospital turned out to be the same day my mother flew in to visit. She and I had always had a tough relationship. She and my father divorced when I was eight; several years and too many fights later, I would move out at sixteen to live with him, not her. She didn’t make granola, but I didn’t blame her. It wasn’t the thing to do in the early eighties. Still, I was riddled with doubt about who I was, what I was doing, and how I was ever going to be a good-enough mother. Just a few months earlier, me with my giant belly and navel turned inside out, we decided to put the past in the past. Now my mother was here, peeking around the hospital room door, me different than when she had seen me last — the baby now on the outside, and me on the same side as her, a mother. 

Something shifted inside me that day – the feeling that I was no longer a child and was now, maybe, an equal, a peer, a friend. I quickly realized I was not my mother’s peer. I was a tiny little girl who needed someone to mother her. I needed her to cheer me on when I cried, to run the vacuum and take me to the store, to tell me about when I was a baby, to answer questions about my childhood. She stayed for a week, and it was both relieving and exhausting. I learned more about her than I thought I might ever know. More about her, more about me. And several months later, in a phone conversation where I was giving her hard time, she would say to me, “You know, Lindsay. You’re a mother.” I would realize she was right. If I wanted to be a peer, a friend, I had to grow up. 

I’d have to learn to make the granola.

So I did. I rifled through recipes and decided to go to counseling. I wanted answers about what I had termed “my crappy childhood” and how I could ensure my daughter wouldn’t have a crappy childhood of her own. I wanted to learn how to be the kind of mother who not only made the granola, but made sure her children felt loved. More than anything, I wanted them to feel loved. 

My counselor suggested we work through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and, to this day, I’m not sure how this qualified as counseling. But at the time, it seemed to work. I was digging in and something was happening. I asked questions about what kind of person I wanted to be, what kind of mother, what I didn’t like about how I was parented, why I was so angry. I journaled all the time, writing whatever morning pages led me to. I also made the bed each day, taught myself to sew, and settled on a simple granola recipe.

I figured out that if I stripped down all the dizzying recipes with too many ingredients, granola consists of just a few things: oats, nuts, and oil. Too much more than that is just getting fancy. Too much more is unnecessary. As my daughter grew into a toddler, I made granola again and again, tinkering with the recipe, memorizing it. The thing about granola is, you can’t just make it and walk away. You have to keep returning to the oven to stir the granola so it bakes evenly and doesn’t burn. Even distilled down to a few ingredients, the granola needs attention.

So, of course, I burned it. I burned granola a lot. I got caught up in my writing and burned the granola. I got distracted by my toddler and burned the granola. I stepped outside to feel the sunshine on my face or chase the dog out of the garden. The granola burned, and I learned that these things take time. Just like unpacking your childhood takes time, and learning to write well and figure out your faith and be a better wife and mother than you think you had and finally being able to forgive.    

And today, as I started tossing ingredients into a bowl, distracted by my children’s questions and my desire to sip my coffee and write, I forgot to set the timer and stepped away from the granola. It hasn’t happened in more than five years, and it didn’t occur to me that today would be the day. I didn’t know that I would open the oven door to a giant cloud and hear the charred oats and nuts sizzling in the pan. The smoke alarm went off and the kids shrieked. My husband turned it off and I said, “I thought I had this figured out by now.”

“It’s okay,” he said, and my daughter, now seven, came over and gave me a hug. “Do you want to play cards?” she asked. I felt foolish for my mistake and realized she didn’t care. She doesn’t care if I can make granola or bake bread or cook a magnificent feast. She never did. I put the scorched granola outside to cool off before throwing it away. The morning was chilly and I wasn’t wearing a coat. But for a moment, the sun was shining on my face and I drew in a deep breath before heading in to play cards.