Wrangler Dani

I loved baking with my mom as a kid. She is a real baker, the kind of precise person who measures exactly and sets timers and separates yolks from whites. I, on the other hand, have lost all of my measuring cups except the 2/3, which I use to dubiously eyeball all amounts. I also lost my teaspoons, which causes me to shrug and eyeball that too. So maybe it makes sense that my mom made legendary yeast rolls and chiffon cakes while I barely succeed at edible blueberry muffins.

Anyway, the other day, Addy and I made a peach-pear custard tart in a cast iron skillet. I showed her how to cut the butter with a sharp knife, through the paper, like my mom taught me. She was amazed, and I also remember that feeling: how does my mom know these things? This is incredible!

But after we’ve cut butter and made a pleasingly yellow liquid to mix with our cream and eggs and flour and sugar, after the pan is in the oven and she’s back to coloring pictures of Minnie Mouse, I worry. I worry as I put the dishes in the sink, as I heat up my cup of coffee, as I decide if I should pursue my own dreams or shelve them for now, for the sake of my family.

I fear that I won’t be enough, that I won’t love my kids well enough or make the right choices or teach them the right things or be the right example or or or or or. Maybe we’ve always had this fear as parents, or maybe today’s simultaneously judgmental and laissez faire culture has made me more concerned about everyday decisions. But I remember that my mom taught herself to grind wheat and bake bread in my sentient childhood, a time that I remember. This was not a skill she’d always known, nor a generational tradition handed down from a bygone era. Maybe I also should teach my kids how to grow and learn as I grow and learn – that we’ll go to museums together because I am also endlessly curious, not because I have answers and want to bequeath my vast knowledge to them. Maybe watching me pursue my passions will teach them courage, maybe as I learn balance and self-sacrifice they will too.

Perhaps this is the truth of motherhood, that it has grown from my desire to have children to my desires for my children. Now I’m teaching my daughter to cut butter, and I hope she uses this for something beautiful someday, that this translates to art or beauty or precision or hope in her life, a piece of home that she gets to carry no matter where life takes her.