I’m getting ready to celebrate another holiday season without my mom, and it feels just as weird this year as it did last year.
I normally don’t write posts that are so personal, but more and more I’m thinking it’s important to see how other people experience grief, especially during times that are traditionally happy and full of cheer. Earlier in 2021, I read Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (who I got to know first as Japanese Breakfast). The memoir follows Zauner’s experiences with her mother as her she was dying from cancer, and explains a bit of the grief Zauner felt about losing her mom. Having lost my mom less than a year earlier when I read the book, it’s easy to understand how it resonated with me. Like Zauner, I had a weird relationship with my mom. We didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, and ultimately she was less than pleased with what I was doing with my life (she absolutely hated the education system). But she was proud of me, too, in her way. I have distinct memories of her not wanting to hug me when prompted, not wanting me to get married or have kids because those things didn’t ultimately bring her the joy she was looking for. In the middle of all those strange, bad memories, there are some truly good times, though, and the thing I remember most from my childhood was Christmas. More specifically, I remember how much my mom loved Christmas when I was a kid.
Every year, no matter where she was living, she’d put up at least two trees. On one tree she displayed all of our sentimental ornaments, like things I’d made in school or souvenirs from trips we’d taken together. We had a cheesy Fort Walton Beach ornament from visiting my aunt in Florida right next to Mickey Mouse from a trip to Walt Disney World. The traditional kindergarten popsicle stick ornaments were also there. I loved this tree, because seeing it every year made me remember lots of good times, even if the year at hand hadn’t been all that uplifting. Even when our relationship was strange, I could easily remember when things felt different with this tree. It always reminded me why we loved each other.
The second tree was full of Santas, or as I usually describe it, “Santas doing things.” There was a tiny surfing Santa, a teacher Santa, a Santa baking his own cookies. I’m not entirely sure why she had a tree full of Santas, or even where those Santas are now, and I guess I can’t ask her that now. Still, I have really fond memories of the Santa tree simply because it felt so weird. My mom presented very normal to others when I was a kid. She wore clothes that were as fashionable as they could be (it was a dark time for plus sized fashion in the 1990s), hosted parties for her Sunday School class, and felt very invested in how I looked, too (in retrospect, a lot of my aversions to wearing certain clothes were OCD behaviors my parents ignored, but that’s an entirely different story). But she was kind of weird, too, in a good way. She’d randomly burst out into songs about her dogs or whatever was going on. Once, she waxed my eyebrows while singing “Welcome to the Jungle,” which was hilarious to me but other people found it unnerving when I shared the story. There are a million weird, subtle moments that make up who a person is, and only a few people get to experience the full range of those moments. I probably didn’t know my mom as much as I could have. She didn’t always want to share details about her feelings, and she didn’t always want to talk about mine, but I still know we loved each other.
Zauner makes a connection to her mother through food, and specifically the Korean food of her mom’s childhood. In Crying in H Mart, Zauner talks about her mom’s kimchi fridge as a fixture of the house, and she details (beautifully, I should add) the culinary delights of visiting Korea with her mother. Like my mom, Zauner’s mother wasn’t overly affectionate in a physical way, but she remembered small details that would pop up at unexpected times to deliver Zauner the love she needed.
When her mother was especially sick, Zauner wanted to give her something to live for, essentially, so she decided to get married to her long-term boyfriend. They had a small wedding at her parents’ home and her mother seemed to genuinely enjoy the festivities, even though she felt too ill to fully participate in the reception. Reading this passage, I sobbed. My mom never got to see our wedding, which was similarly small for entirely different reasons. I cried because she couldn’t be there, but I also cried because I knew she probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it. My mom, who always told me to never let a man onto my bank account, to never depend on a man for anything. My mom who casually insinuated my now-husband and I would break up sooner or later.
For me, Crying in H Mart is a love letter to those who don’t have a picture-perfect relationship with their mothers, and for the mothers that don’t feel particularly maternal. I think Zauner’s mother, like my mom, didn’t really know how to show her love, and ultimately we, as daughters, have to be okay with that. The memoir also stood out because it spoke beautifully about my mom’s love language: food.
Without getting into too many details, my mom had a troubled relationship with food and her body, and that’s what led me to be so interested in the topic of fat studies in grad school. She had gastric bypass surgery and that changed how she ate food, but it didn’t change how she talked about it, or how she cooked. I have fond memories of my mom’s spaghetti and her Brunswick stew. Her dressing is top tier—simple and yet so delicious—and she always made a big deal about how the recipe had been in our family for generations. I recently learned that it’s essentially a doctored-up version of what’s on the back of the Pepperidge Farm bag, but that doesn’t really make it less special to me. I still make it every holiday, even if it’s just for myself.
In the spirit of the holidays, and to honor my mom and her traditions, here’s her famous cornbread dressing recipe. Share it with your family and think of good memories.
Do I look like her? I wonder this a lot.
Mary Frances’ Cornbread Dressing
Ingredients:
1 box Jiffy cornbread (or cornbread of choice)
1 box Jiffy biscuits (or biscuits of choice; I like Alison Roman’s Luckiest Biscuits in America)
1 onion
2 celery stalks
4 c. chicken broth or more (how much you use will vary; can sub in vegetable broth for vegetarians!)
1 stick of unsalted butter
12 oz of seasoned breadcrumbs from Pepperidge Farm
Salt and pepper
2 eggs
Sage
Poultry seasoning
Directions:
-Cook biscuits and cornbread according to package directions (or recipe instructions). Let cool, then crumble into tiny bits. Think sand.
-Dice and saute onion and celery in the stick of butter. Yes, the whole stick of butter. Saute until the onions are translucent and the celery is soft.
-Pour the butter and vegetables into your casserole dish along with the crumbled-up bread. Add in the seasoned bread crumbs. Mix it all up, and let it cool a bit.
-Add in your seasoning, which you should measure with your heart. I like a lot of seasoning in my dressing, so I usually use between 1-2 tablespoons of sage, a hefty shake of poultry seasoning, and a few dashes of salt and pepper. If you’re using low sodium broth, or salted butter, or whatever, you can adjust the seasonings to your own taste. This probably isn’t helpful since this is a recipe and you’re looking to me for guidance, but seasoning is done with your heart.
-Mix in your two eggs and your broth. This part is all about texture, and you might need more or less broth depending on your bread consistency and what you want in a dressing. For me, I like it to get a little soupy, with everything sloshing around, that way the dressing won’t be dry when you pull it out of the oven. If you like a drier dressing, add less broth! I typically use about 4 cups of broth, but can use more or less depending on the year, the temperature, the feeling.
-Cook at 350 degrees F for 45-60 minutes.
Best served with The Grit’s nutritional yeast gravy.
If it’s not clear, I really loved Crying in H Mart. I’d even say that it’s one of my top books of the year, and it definitely helped me with my own grieving process. I’m thankful that Zauner dared to be so vulnerable with her audience and give voice to the people who miss their moms, no matter how complicated the feelings.
Thanks for a great year, readers and listeners. See you in 2022.