Cooking and Healing

Going through my poetry archives, I rediscovered two related poems about mothering that complement each other. The first one, “My Mother Cooks Pancit”, is about my mother’s ability to heal through cooking, how she helped my father conquer cancer by cooking pancit, a traditional Filipino noodle dish. The second poem, “Arroz Caldo”, is about me cooking a vegetarian version of another Filipino dish, arroz caldo, for my daughter when she was sick. Written at different times in my life, they reveal how my family and my past have influenced my present; they also express my reverence for cooking as an activity that is rich with meaning and history, as an essential element in my life as a mother, and a great comfort in a world of difficulty and uncertainty.


My Mother Cooks Pancit

She crushes cloves of garlic in a marble mortar
as if they were the cells spreading in my father’s throat.

Flame pulses beneath the wok.
She pours in oil, tests with a few pellets of her sweat.

Hot as his fever, the yellow liquid crackles, spits.
She stirs in roots, carrots, string beans and shrimp.

Green and orange scents color father’s frailness
(drain full of hair, days of chemo).

With kalamansi juice, patis, salt,
she seasons our sorrows, awakens our palates.

Rice noodles seeped in wooden bowl of jasmine water,
translucent, soft, drained then mixed in.

Her tenderness rises into the light,
thin white threads steaming into lace.

Kaen na she calls.

Stairs creak, slippers shuffle. We sit around the table,
eat to the hymn of silver forks and porcelain bowls.

Each forkful a surge of flavor:
my mother’s faithful hands.


Arroz Caldo

In my left arm, I am holding a hundred degree,
coughing child, head leaning against my shoulder.
In my right hand, steel knife
roughly cuts organic garlic, onion, and ginger.
Pieces scatter on the ground.

I am making my version of arroz caldo,
the rice soup my mother used to make
when we were fevered and ill:
golden broth from achuete, lumpy rice,
bite size pieces of tripe and chicken,
scallions, browned garlic, and lemon juice for garnish.

Now I am the mother in the kitchen.
Oil and salt, I sizzle the roots in wok.
I stir with wooden spoon,
adjust the child on my hip.
Add short grain brown rice,
firm tofu broken up with my right hand,
quarts of water and un-chicken bouillon cubes.

Cover. Simmer for an hour.

***

While we wait to eat,
sit in recliner in the living room,
Jazzy leaning against my torso
still in the arc of my left arm,
our legs under a black, tasseled Navajo blanket.

On the screen, two fish inside the cavernous mouth of the whale
hang on the cliff of its tongue:
-It’s time to let go
-How do you know something bad isn’t going to happen?
With trust and instinct, they let fall
into quaking pit, not knowing
if they will be food or free.

Outside the pot, the hallway, the windows, this chair,
inside our shifting bodies, there will be times
when we are swallowed. For now,
the scent and softening of simmering rice
and the certainty of this stew.

Being Home: A Prologue

It is January and the average temperatures have been in the twenty’s. The bare, pear tree branches sway vigorously outside the living room windows, whipping menacingly against the house. Longer, darker hours make the concrete paths less inviting.

Six weeks ago, I gave birth to my second child, Emerson. Months of expanding and rounding then reaching the zenith: contracting, gripping, moaning, shutting my eyes, wanting to escape from the sharp pain spreading from pelvis to back and thighs, waiting, pushing, bleeding, then finally meeting the being that had been in the niche of me.

Now I am at the denouement. Organs and muscles are retracting, finding their former places. I am ebbing with new life, using my body’s other functions, the magic fountains (as my husband and daughter call my breasts), to sustain my son. I marvel as his cheeks get rounder and puffier, his legs stretch and fill his pants and his feet begin to push past the bottoms of his one-pieces, his fingers begin to grip my fingers, and his eyes begin to focus on objects.

Yet sometimes I feel as if am going nowhere, that life is a prosaic tundra and I am an insignificant wanderer, less worthy than others because I am at home in pajamas and not receiving a pay check. I feel as if I am floating in an isolated world outside of collective time, unaware of and separate from other people and events around me. At the same time, I realize I am in the center of my own little universe within the warm walls of this Brooklyn apartment. And within my universe, there is a lot of subtle life and excitement, life that requires hard labor with few breaks.

Home abounds with unpredictable and unforgettable joys and challenges, emotionally charged moments, moments that can shake and test my sanity. Emerson keeps me up at three in the morning as he loudly slurps and gulps down milk from my breast and later spits up into the hood of my newly washed sweatshirt. Jacinta tells me I am the best mommy ever then later spits in my face as I give her a time out. I wake up to my husband’s banana walnut pancakes. Another time, I want to spit in his face after he tells me that I shouldn’t use sarcasm to discipline our children.

Because my physical boundaries are limited, I find myself focusing on the limitless, inner expanses. A newborn in winter and an extended maternity leave is giving me room to grow. As a mother, writer, thinker, cook, and in general, a sentient being who cares about the world around me. And being restricted to the neighborhood does not negate that what I do on a daily, hourly, minutely basis goes beyond the now. The feeding, disciplining, loving, cuddling, reading, hygiene-maintaining, etc. all extend into each child’s immediate and distant future.

Having to confront the inner life means learning to be at home with myself and my family, accepting myself for who I am, accepting my children and husband for who they are as individuals, trying to cultivate and nourish all of our strengths while acknowledging and improving our flaws. It also means making the transition from being a full-time middle school teacher to being a full-time parent and understanding the complicated emotions that go along with this new role, a role I am not entirely accustomed to. It also means learning to be more selfless, making the family’s needs and wants the priority over my own, letting go of certain minutia such as weekend matinees or happy hour specials that once were a large part of my life yet still trying to find time and space to be kind to myself and incorporate things that I enjoy.

Writing is an example of something I enjoy that helps me balance myself yet also involves my family since much of my writing reflects them. This necessary activity has lead me to this page, this space. In this on-going, open journal (I don’t like the word “blog”; it sounds like a rude expletive), I will be including poetry and prose on birth, motherhood, identity, family, country and culture, my Filipino ancestry, New York, poetry, literature, health, food, education, etc. Another basis for this writing space is to revive the numerous poems growing in my document folders and to write new work, to give them a home where they will not be too easily forgotten, where their existence goes beyond the diameter of my computer.

Ultimately, I hope to create dialogue about the topics I write about, share my poetry, get feedback on my work in progress, nourish my creative spirit, and simply be part of the vast community of writers and thinkers.