Just a Few Bites

Last week would have been my mom’s 65th birthday.

Last week would have been my mom’s 65th birthday, and something kind of magical happened to me that day: I remembered that she loved cheesecake.

I used to agonize endlessly about where I would spread my mom’s ashes when she died. It didn’t matter in the end; someone else made that decision. But I worried about it for most of my adult life because I simply could not remember a place where she was ever actually happy. Which isn’t to say she didn’t experience joy sometimes. She loved stuff very much. Getting expensive gifts was her favorite thing. Christmas mornings were her best times. Jewelry and designer handbags, especially, would have her in raptures. I can’t say she loved watching me play sports, but she did love being the very vocal mother of a superstar basketball player. She loved for people to look at my skill and think of her.

My mom loved being on vacation, if it meant she could sit by the pool and drink bottomless margaritas, or go shopping. She hated sightseeing, history, nature, museums, stuff like that. She didn’t even much like being with our family, not really. If she could drive out with us and then we’d leave her alone with a frozen drink on a float in the sunshine, those were the times she was truly at ease. But, I mean, what was I going to do? Contact the Hyatt Regency Hill Country Resort and Spa in San Antonio and ask to scatter her remains in their lazy river?

As the years have gone by, it’s become harder and harder for me to even remember things my mom liked. She was not a happy person. Every interaction was some slight against her, from servers in restaurants to co-workers to her kids. Every food anyone made her was too salty or too sweet or too dry or whatever. I tried to cook spaghetti once, in the fourth grade, when she was working late so she wouldn’t have to make dinner when she got home, and when I asked her if it was good, she just straight up said, “No.” (Same the first time I tried on makeup and asked if it looked good.) She never got a single haircut that she liked. Other women, especially, were her mortal enemies. My aunts, my friends’ moms, any lady within ten years of her age in any direction at church. She was on perpetual lookout for people doing her dirty, and she was deeply paranoid and thin-skinned, so everyone was always doing her dirty.

I guess that’s not really the only reason I can’t remember good things about my mom. Part of it is my very underdeveloped self-preservation instinct doing overtime. I had to work so hard to get away from her, and then to keep her away from me, to keep her from even being able to find me, to keep myself safe. Every single smidgen of evolutionary biology working inside a human body will fight you every step of the way when you try to break away from a parent, especially a mom. It’s just not how we’re wired! We’re wired to stay with our moms as long as we possibly can! Because nothing’s safer than being with a mom, right? A mom will fight a freakin’ saltwater crocodile for her children! A mom will lift a whole entire train car off of her kid if they’re trapped underneath! A mom will stay awake so her kids can sleep, give up her food so her kids can eat, build them up and make them believe they can fly to the moon!

But not my mom. My mom was the opposite. I had to get as far away from her as I could if I had any chance of actually living — and no human brain in the world is built to reward that kind of decision. So I had to be careful to parse out my tenderness when it came to memories of my mom. I had to be precise. I had to make sure my affection was extremely tempered by the memory of all the ways she put me in danger.

My mom grew up incredibly poor. Like, dirt poor. Mayonnaise sandwiches for dinner poor. No cheese or buns for the burgers poor. One little heater in the whole house, and plastic stapled to the windows in the winter poor. And she was so young when I was born. Too young. So when I was growing up, a lot of things that I was trying for the first time, she was trying for the first time too.

That’s how come I remembered the cheesecake. On her birthday last week, Stacy coincidentally ordered me a piece of Nutella cheesecake, just as a random Monday treat. It’s been a billion years since I had cheesecake. And when I bit into it, I was transported to the first time I tried Chicago’s prized dessert, in my grandparents’ kitchen; my dad’s mom, my Mamaw, she made it from scratch. It was everything good in the world, smushed into a single bite. Graham crackers, butter, sugar, cream cheese, strawberries. Smooth as a Smoky Mountain river rock.

My mom poked at her first piece of cheesecake skeptically. She scooped a piece onto her fork. She put it in her mouth. And then she closed her eyes and sighed, and then opened her eyes and laughed. She said it was delicious. Delicious! After that, she sometimes made this kind of cheesecake that came in a Jell-O box. And sometimes she’d get a whole one at Sam’s Club. Very occasionally, if we were flush with wealth and out for some fancy celebration, she’d order it for dessert from a restaurant. Every time, she’d close her eyes when she had her first taste.

I was so happy to remember something my mom loved, and on her birthday. I was so happy to remember that sometimes, even for just a few bites, she was happy too.

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