On my first day as a line cook in a pastry kitchen, I was tasked with turning lemons into little bowls for housemade sorbet. I angled a sharp paring knife from the edge of a lemon half toward its center, then circled the knife to slice out a cone of seedy yellow flesh. Cupping that emptied half, I scooped out what remained with a metal spoon. Once the glassy sheets of membranes were gone, I had to keep going, gently running the spoon against the pith to create the thinnest possible shell without tearing the peel.
That continuous scraping, the gentle pressure to excavate everything inside: That’s what empty nesting has felt like. Somewhere behind my rib cage, some core is being hollowed out, and the rasping feels especially close on occasions like Mother’s Day.
When they were young, my kids felt pressure from relatives, teachers and the America around them to uphold the breakfast-in-bed tradition that started in the 1930s, about 15 years after Mother’s Day was declared a national holiday. Aside from the fact that I’m not a breakfast eater, I’m also uninterested in doing twice as many dishes and washing syrup stains out of the duvet cover.
I’m not alone — according to a 2017 Zagat poll, only 4 percent of mothers actually want breakfast in bed. But I may be alone in wanting to spend the day cooking.
When I was just a year out of college, I realized that I could turn a lifelong love of food into a career and began apprenticing with chefs and a food writer. But, shortly after, I found out I was pregnant with twins, a decade before I’d planned to have kids. For years, on the holiday honoring motherhood, I tried to reclaim the childless trajectory I lost, air-drying duck to roast, slow-simmering fruit into preserves, in a peaceful kitchen. It felt like a selfish act twisted with the perpetual selflessness of nurturing.
For the twins’ first birthday, I created my first original baking recipe, a layered cake crammed with grated carrot and sweetened more with applesauce than sugar since it was going to be their inaugural taste of the stuff. They shoved handfuls into their mouths, howled with happiness, and it was then that I understood the joy of motherhood.
Through the years of chasing toddlers with a newborn slung to my chest, playing their favorite yet impossibly boring board game (Life), driving to school, practices and play dates, I spent Mother’s Day laboring alone over the long, hard dishes I loved but couldn’t make for work or home.
Now that they’re all in college, all I want is to feed them again, to be crowded against the counter, hearing them laugh and bicker, wiping up mysterious sticky patches. But no one is clinging to my legs anymore, and, apparently, my long “welcome home” hugs come off as pretty desperate. So I try to play it cool, not showing too much excitement when my youngest described craving carrot cake for the cream cheese frosting because, isn’t that the best part?
That’s when I knew I’d taught them well and when I started plotting out a recipe that maximizes the frosting-to-cake ratio by baking the batter in a single half-sheet pan. Doing so eliminates the need for multiple cake pans and trying to slice tall rounds into flat layers. Instead, the big rectangle is easily cut into three smaller ones for easy stacking and an impressive tier with plenty of creamy frosting in every forkful.
When my (taller-than-me) youngest tasted the frosting and suggested more lemon juice and salt to amplify its tanginess, I tried to not visibly tear up with pride. I was happy, really I was, when they couldn’t stay to eat the cake but had just enough time to bring it to their classmates who “destroyed it.” It’s as it should be.
And as the older two graduate from college, now only a few years younger than I was when they were born, I feed them by giving them starter recipes, like this cake, to prepare on their own. Texting recipe links and receiving photos of finished dishes in return don’t fill the home’s new hush, but learning to experience that as progress is its own celebration of motherhood.
