I'm feeling daring

I have finally learned how to use the espresso machine that Brandon chased down on eBay and gave me for Christmas in 2011!  The best part of this development, however, is not the double espresso that I can now enjoy each morning while sitting on the living room floor with June, reading Madeline or singing along (poorly, loudly) to our favorite song, “On the Road Again.” No, no, the best part is that while I make said double espresso, I get to recite aloud for June and Alice, in my best/worst Italian accent, the molto gag-worthy slogan written in loopy script on the side of the machine:

For Music ~ Puccini

For Art ~ Bernini 

For Espresso ~ Pasquini

In other news, do you know what goes nicely with espresso? Cream cheese pound cake. CREAM CHEESE POUND CAKE! (Holy holy holy, finally. Delancey and Essex have been needy lately, heedlessly gobbling up my time. Stupid restaurants. My sincerest apologies.)

Listen: I’m not normally pound cake person.  Not a real pound cake person. I may have gotten riled up about a pistachio pound cake last year, and there was that sweet potato pound cake a few years ago, and I may have put a berry pound cake recipe in my first book, and I may have even found my way around a few Sara Lee frozen pound cakes as a teenager - remember the crust on top? The way it was soft and spongy and eerily uniform in its brownness? I loved that part - but those were all special cases. I don’t get wildly excited about pound cake as a general concept.  I can get behind a nice, plain cake, maybe a busy-day cake, but pound cakes are often too plain, too heavy, too doorstoppy.  Pound cake, in the classic sense, strikes me mostly as a vehicle for transporting strawberries (or other fruits) and whipped cream from a plate into my mouth. I know that, in the eyes of many, there’s all kinds of sacrilege in this paragraph, but I’m feeling daring.

All that said, this pound cake is exceptional. It caught me off guard. I was looking for a way to use up some cream cheese that I had lying around, and I came upon the recipe in the excellent book Southern Cakes, by Nancie McDermott. That’s the same book that gave us the sweet potato pound cake, so it’s not surprising that this cream cheese version is spot-on. But really, it’s a keeper. Lovely is the right word for it. There’s nothing revolutionary about the ingredients - just your basic pound cake building blocks, plus a pack of cream cheese - but it’s unusually moist and even-crumbed, with a top crust that crackles like a wafer. And as you begin to chew, here comes the cream cheese, a gentle tang kicking through the sweetness. I love the way McDermott describes it: she says that the cream cheese makes a “quiet little sensation.” Am I alone in being unable to use the word sensation without thinking of INXS, and then having to listen to this song a few times, feeling mopey about Michael Hutchence’s untimely death 16 years ago? Probably?

Anyway, I baked two loaves and froze one of them, and both Brandon and I noticed that the frozen cake, once thawed, was even better than the fresh one had been. This discovery makes me want to bake a half-dozen of these cakes and stash them away for future occasions that demand sweets on short notice. Like tomorrow’s breakfast.


Cream Cheese Pound Cake
Adapted from Southern Cakes, by Nancie McDermott

This recipe was shared with McDermott by one Suzanne O’Hara of Burlington, North Carolina, and it comes together with remarkable speed and ease. I think I’ll be making it often.

3 cups (420 g) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon fine salt
2 sticks (226 g) unsalted butter, at room temperature
One 8-ounce (226 g) package cream cheese, at room temperature
3 cups (600 g) sugar
6 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-by-5-inch loaf pans. (I also lined my pans with parchment, because it makes the cakes so easy to remove.)

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the butter and cream cheese, and beat on medium speed until soft and fluffy. Add the sugar, and continue to beat for about 2 minutes more, stopping once to scrape down the sides. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla. Reduce the mixer speed to low, and add the flour mixture in three doses, beating only until the flour is absorbed and scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Scrape the batter into the prepared pan or pans.

Bake for about 1 hour and 15 minutes (for a tube pan) or 55 to 60 minutes (for loaf pans), or until the cake is golden brown, pulling away from the sides of the pan, and a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Transfer the cake to a wire rack, and cool completely before loosening the sides with a thin knife and removing the cake from the pan.

April 7

I’ve been feeling a little under the weather for the past few days, but I wanted to pop in. I promise not to breathe on you.

June is going to be seven months old on April 9, this Tuesday, which would have been my dad’s 84th birthday. Brandon says that she has my eyes, and if it’s true, then she has my dad’s eyes, because that’s where I got mine.

She and I are flying to Oklahoma City on Wednesday, to visit my mother. June’s first trip to my hometown, to the house where I grew up! It feels like a big deal. But if you’re on our plane, I would like to apologize in advance: June is chatty, and by chatty, I actually mean screechy, shrieky, chirpy, gargly, and generally deafening. It’s totally adorable, and then you lose your hearing.

In any case, we were roughhousing in the living room this afternoon, before Brandon went to work, and I took these pictures. I don’t know how to explain it, but June is developing a real sense of humor. She’s a very funny person. Or maybe I’m just amused because I am her mother. Probably. I’m going soft.

I have a cream cheese pound cake recipe to share with you shortly, as soon as I can type it up - before I leave, I hope! - but in the meantime, some nice things for your Monday:

I always appreciate what Sarah has to say.

Mr. Rogers + a rad breakdancing kid = yesssssss (via Youngna).

I would like to someday cook like Margot Henderson, and I’d like to live in her house, while I’m at it. 

Sarah Farr of Harbor Herbalist blends excellent teas, and her monthly tea subscription is brilliant.

Back soon.

We have a rhythm

June is six months old. She has two teeth, monstrous thighs, and is my favorite person in the world. Totally predictable, I know, but I really never thought I would say that about someone who spends most of the day drooling and pulling my hair.  Sometimes she looks at me tenderly, places a dimpled hand on either side of my face, and then lunges forward, giggling, and savagely bites my nose.  She suits me so well.  Really, she’s perfect for me.  We have a rhythm.

I sent my revised manuscript to my editor in the final days of February. A few days later, we lost our manager at Delancey and Essex. Though losing a staff member always makes me and Brandon feel mopey for a while, the timing was eerily right.  I hadn’t been involved in the day-to-day operation of the restaurants since last summer, shortly before June was born, but suddenly, with the book out the door, I had some time on my hands. And anyway, I’m not very good at not having a project. So I’m back to managing Delancey and Essex. My job isn’t the kind of thing that most people fantasize about when they think about opening a restaurant; it doesn’t involve a chef’s coat, gleaming copper pots, copious booze, or anything that could remotely be described as badass.  I do payroll, front-of-house scheduling, organizing, filing, e-mail tending, and polite whip-cracking.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I like it. I like the quiet aspect of it, the behind-the-scenes-ness of it, the tangibility of it, the fact that I get to make things work better.  It brings a kind of satisfaction that’s very different from writing.

So the days are full. I’m at the restaurant during the daytime hours on Wednesdays and Fridays, and June and I also stop in most evenings, before she goes to bed. June drools on everyone within a ten-foot radius and, when she’s feeling sporting, lets me dance her along the bar like a marionette.  I know she will see in us the many stresses and frustrations that come with owning a small business, but when I think about her growing up there, in that community, with so many people who care about her and have known her since she was born, I feel glad in a way that I don’t have words for.

In any case, it’s true what they say: there’s never a dull moment.  On Thursday, I got a splinter in my tongue while using chopsticks to eat bibimbap. On Friday, I dreamt that my mother confessed that she doesn’t like my bangs, something I have long suspected. A few nights before that, I read a New Yorker article about Ruth Bader Ginsburg while taking a hot bath. I don’t like to make a big deal of it, but yes, the rumors you’ve heard are real: my lifestyle was the inspiration behind Katy Perry’s hit song "Last Friday Night." Tonight I might throw caution to the wind and mix up the dry ingredients for tomorrow morning’s baked oatmeal.

If you’ve been in a bookstore or on the Internet anytime in the past couple of years, you’ve no doubt heard of Heidi Swanson’s wonderful Super Natural Every Day, and you’ve probably also heard of her wonderful baked oatmeal.  I first tasted it shortly after Heidi’s book came out, when Jess came to visit and made a batch, and then Lecia brought some over one morning when we met for a walk, and now, for the past few months, I’ve been making it nearly every other week.  Maybe you’ve been making it, too, but I wanted to mention it, in case you haven’t.  Because you should.

There’s a tiny chance that some of my love for this oatmeal has to do with the fact that I can assemble most of it the night before.  (I am not so great at making a hot breakfast with Tiny Nose-Biter around, or not unless it’s mostly done when I climb out of bed.)  There’s also a tiny chance that I love this recipe because I will eat anything that involves oats.  (The only way I would probably not eat oats is if I found them in my coat pocket, tangled in lint.  Probably.)  But mostly, I love this oatmeal because it pushes all the buttons that I like breakfast to push: it’s sweet but not too sweet and filling but not too filling, and it makes you feel totally virtuous about eating maple syrup and butter.  Plus: the leftovers might be my favorite snack, whether hot, room temperature, or cold.

Happy week! Go forth.


Baked Oatmeal
Adapted from Heidi Swanson’s Super Natural Every Day

I’ve made this oatmeal a few times with walnuts, as described below, but I also like to make it with almonds or pecans, either whole or coarsely chopped. It’s nice to toast the nuts beforehand – and it’s easy: just a few minutes on a sheet pan in a 350°F oven, until they smell fragrant – but I often skip it. No harm done.

I’m a big believer in whole milk, and I think this recipe needs its fat and richness. (I’ve had it with 1% and was disappointed in the result.) Actually, the next time I make this oatmeal, I might try replacing a cup of the milk with coconut milk.  That could be exciting.  I might also throw in a half-cup of unsweetened shredded coconut.  I’ve added coconut before - about a quarter-cup, or 25 grams - and though I can’t say that I was aware of its presence, Brandon and I both agreed that the baked oatmeal was especially good that morning.

As for the fruit, you could use any berry, including frozen ones. I don’t even worry about thawing them first.  I suggest a range of amounts for the berries below, one that’s very berry-y and one that’s less so.

2 cups (200 grams) rolled oats
½ cup (60 g) walnut halves, toasted and chopped
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
¾ to 1 ½ cups (90 to 185 g) blueberries
2 cups (475 ml) whole milk
1/3 cup (80 ml) maple syrup
1 large egg
3 tablespoons (45 grams) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 375°F with a rack in the top third of the oven.

In an 8-inch square baking dish, mix together the oats, the nuts, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt. (This part can be done the night before, if you like, to make things easier in the morning.) Scatter the berries evenly over the oat mixture.

In another bowl, whisk together the milk, maple syrup, egg, about half of the butter, and vanilla. Slowly drizzle the milk mixture over the oats. Gently give the baking dish a couple of thwacks on the countertop to make sure the liquid moves down through the oats.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the top is golden and the oat mixture has set. Remove from the oven, and allow to cool for a few minutes. If the remaining butter has solidified, rewarm it slightly; then drizzle it over the top of the oatmeal. Serve.

Yield: about 6 servings

The usual

In the time since we last spoke, I’ve revised the manuscript for my next book! I’ve traveled alone with my five-month-old baby to a family wedding on the other side of the country! I’ve felt like an Olympic gold medalist for having survived traveling alone with my five-month-old baby to a family wedding on the other side of the country! I’ve consumed biscuits and dark chocolate milkshakes and fingers and cheeks, listened to Fugazi and almost remembered what it felt like to be 15 and have a crush on Guy Picciotto, tried two recipes for healthy cookies, decided that I’m not into healthy cookies, made my daughter wear a pair of sunglasses that were intended for a doll, and rekindled my love for farro. The usual.

I don’t know what made me think of farro again, but I’m glad I did. A few years ago, I went through a period of cooking it regularly, but then I forgot about it. I’m good at that. Farro went the way of this apple cake, these oatmeal popovers, this egg salad, this broccoli soup, and this boiled kale, foods that I love but almost never think to eat. But: yesterday I bought farro for the third time in less than a month. The third time! LOOK OUT.

A billion (or five and a half) years ago, when Brandon and I got married, one of the dishes that our caterer made for the reception was farro with caramelized onions, carrots, celery, and feta, with a red wine vinaigrette. I didn’t have much experience with farro, but I liked the sound of it when they suggested it, and it was, in fact, terrific: chewy, nutty, and complex. In its uncooked state, it looks a little like barley, and once cooked, it looks a lot like brown rice, but its flavor is more interesting and lighter somehow than either.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been cooking big batches of farro and stashing it in the fridge, scooping out a few spoonfuls at lunch or dinner as the base for a hearty salad. I’ll bet a lot of you do this, too, with some grain or other? At first, I threw in whatever I found in the crisper drawer and any leftovers that were lying around, but slowly, over a number of days, I settled on a few ingredients that got along especially well. The flavors in my salad are not unlike the farro salad from our wedding, but mine is quicker to make, more of a bang-it-together thing. I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, wondering if this recipe - if you can even call it a recipe - was too simple to write about, but then I decided that if I like it enough to eat it a few times a week, well, you know, what the hell, why not.

Let’s call it a warm farro salad with chickpeas, feta, and spicy dressing.  You’ll need a good-sized bowl - maybe the kind they call a pasta bowl?  I use a medium-sized mixing bowl, because I’m a classy lady. Whatever you’re using, put a nice amount of warm farro in the bottom of it, and then pile on a spoonful of chickpeas, maybe half of a sliced carrot, a handful each of chopped escarole and radicchio, and a generous hunk of feta, crumbled. You could also add some small pieces of cooked chicken, if you want, or leftover steak or braised pork, and other raw or roasted vegetables. Everything is negotiable, except the feta. DO NOT SKIP THE FETA. Then you douse your salad with a dressing that’s essentially nuoc cham: fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, water, garlic, and a chile. You are now ready to sit down with your mixing bowl and eat.  There’s something very special, I think, about the union of farro and feta, and then the chickpeas, the bitter chicories, the sweet carrots, and the salty-hot dressing: it’s crunchy and juicy, now warm, now cold. It was my dinner yesterday and my lunch the day before, and if I’m lucky, it’ll be my dinner tonight.

P.S. My friend and Spilled Milk co-host Matthew Amster-Burton has written a new book, and he’s just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund it. It’s called Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo, and like everything Matthew writes, it’s funny, insightful, and very smart. (...Annnnnnd now he is blushing.)


Warm Farro Salad with Chickpeas, Feta, and Spicy Dressing

I’ve found farro in Seattle at Whole Foods, PCC, and some grocery stores, or you can get it from ChefShop. I like the farro grown by Bluebird Grain Farms of Winthrop, Washington. Farro should be soaked briefly before cooking, although Matthew often uses Trader Joe’s quick-cooking farro – done in 10 minutes! – and says that it’s great. In any case, I give instructions below for cooking standard farro, and hey, feel free to scale up and cook an even bigger batch, if you’d like. From one cup of uncooked farro, I wind up with enough cooked farro for three or four servings of this salad.

Also: among types of feta, I like French feta best.

For the farro:
1 cup farro
½ tsp. salt

For the dressing:
3 Tbsp. fish sauce
3 Tbsp. lime juice
2 to 3 Tbsp. (25 to 35 g) brown sugar
6 to 8 Tbsp. water, to taste
1 medium garlic clove, minced or pressed
1 Thai chile, very thinly sliced

For the salad:
Chickpeas, either canned (drained and rinsed) or cooked from dried
Escarole, coarsely chopped or sliced
Radicchio, coarsely sliced
Carrots, sliced into rounds
Feta, coarsely crumbled

Put the farro in a medium (2 ½- to 3-quart) saucepan, add cold water to cover, and set it aside to soak for 30 minutes. Then drain the farro, put it back into the saucepan, and add 3 cups of cold water and ½ teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil; then reduce the heat to maintain a gentle simmer and cook until tender but still a little chewy, about 45 minutes. It’s up to you, really, how “done” you want your farro. At 30 minutes, mine is usually too tough, but a few minutes later, it’s just right: al dente, but not exhausting to chew. When it’s ready, drain it, and either use it while it’s warm or transfer it to a storage container for later use. (Covered and chilled, cooked farro will keep for a few days, easy.)

To make the dressing, combine the fish sauce, lime juice, 2 tablespoons of the brown sugar, 6 tablespoons of the water, the garlic, and chile in a small bowl. Whisk well. Taste: if it’s too pungent, add more water 1 tablespoon at a time. If you’d like a little more sweetness, add more brown sugar ½ tablespoon at a time. (Covered and chilled, the dressing will keep for three days to a week.)

To assemble a portion of salad, scoop out a couple of large spoonfuls of farro – maybe 1/3 to ½ cup – and put it in a wide bowl. If the farro is cold, you might want to microwave it for 45 seconds or so, to warm it. That’s what I do. Or you could put it in a small ovenproof dish, covered, and bake it for a few minutes to warm it. Or you can just leave it cold. Add a large spoonful of chickpeas, a good handful each of escarole and radicchio, and maybe half of a carrot, sliced. Top with a generous amount of feta, and then drizzle some dressing – maybe a tablespoon? Or to taste – over the whole thing. Toss, and eat.

A small revolution

You good, good people. Before I say another word, I want to thank you for your many comments, your e-mails, and the incredibly kind card - a real, three-dimensional paper card - that one of you sent to me at Delancey. Your kindness blew me away. I thought for a long time before deciding to write that last post, and I want to thank you for making me feel not only safe in deciding to do it, but very, very glad. I remember my doctor saying to me, one day in mid-December, that I would not only recover, but that someday soon, I might even have a hard time remembering exactly what postpartum depression felt like. Though he’s been my doctor for years, and though he knows us very well - he’s Brandon’s doctor, too, and June’s doctor, and he delivered June - in the privacy of my mind, I thought, Riiiiiiiiiiiight. Suuuuuuuure. Well! Turns out, being wrong is my new favorite thing.

In other news, June is a champion. She’s my new favorite person. She sleeps with her arms straight up by her ears, like she’s cheering very, very quietly about something, or like a gymnast who’s just stuck her landing. She thrashes around like a rodeo bronc when in the nude, and if you sing "Katy Too," by Johnny Cash, with the words "Baby June" subbed in for "Katy too," she will grin and stick her tongue out. This is because she has just discovered that she has a tongue. Every day is a small revolution.

I’ve been cooking more regularly, which is a great development, except that I haven’t been cooking particularly well. I have long had a special talent for making bland soups, and I guess it should be some kind of consolation that, with so much change in my life in the past year, this, at least, has remained consistent? On the upside, I’ve been roasting a lot of rutabagas, and I highly recommend that. And the other day, I made braised endive with prosciutto for the millionth time, and for the millionth time, it was excellent. And last night, after dinner, I fell down a rabbit hole of Bon Jovi videos, which has nothing to do with food but was also excellent. When I was eight years old, I had a Bop magazine poster of Jon Bon Jovi, shirtless and wearing a fringed scarf, on my bedroom wall. I think that explains everything.

I have a recipe for you today. Not the best photographs, but a recipe.

For years now, I’ve followed the site 3191 Miles Apart and the work of its co-creators Maria and Stephanie. Two years ago, they began publishing a quarterly, which is filled with photographs, recipes, projects, travel guides, and anything else they feel excited about, and it’s always beautiful and beautifully produced, printed on matte paper that feels nice in your hand. One night last weekend, while June was sleeping and Brandon was working, I climbed into bed with 3191 Quarterly No. 9 and promptly fell onto Stephanie’s recipe for oatcakes.

I should say that oatcakes are not actually cakes.  As Stephanie explains, they’re sort of a cross between a cookie, a cracker, and maybe a biscuit - a small, crunchy, nubbly thing that you could eat at pretty much any time of day.  The concept is Scottish, although I’m going to be totally blasphemous and uncouth and American and admit that I like Stephanie’s version better than the oatcakes I tried in Edinburgh. In my defense, my friends who live in Scotland - and one of them is Scottish by birth - didn’t love the oatcakes we ate that day either. No idea what the brand was, although I can tell you that we bought them at Mellis. Anyway.

I like to eat oatcakes with sharp cheddar, though you could also treat them more like a cookie and dunk them in a cup of tea.  This week I’ve been eating them with peanut butter and slices of apple, as a second breakfast. (I eat my first breakfast around 6:30 am, while sitting next to June on a blanket on the kitchen floor, singing "Baby June / Katy Too," and it’s gone long before lunchtime comes around.) They’re a little sweet and a little salty, and they somehow manage to come across as both wholesome and tempting.  Do any of you remember Carr’s Wheatolos?  Oatcakes don’t really taste like Wheatolos - maybe a cousin of the Wheatolo - but for me, they push the same buttons. God, I miss Wheatolos.


Oatcakes
Adapted slightly from Stephanie Congdon Barnes and 3191 Quarterly No. 9

1 ½ cups (150 grams) rolled oats
1 cup (140 grams) all-purpose flour
1/3 cup (60 grams) packed brown sugar
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. fine salt
1 stick (113 grams) cold unsalted butter, diced
¼ cup (60 ml) full-fat plain yogurt
Whole milk, if needed

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment.

In a large bowl, combine the oats, flour, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt, whisking to blend. Add the butter, and use your fingers, pressing and squeezing, to work it into the oat mixture until it resembles a coarse meal. Stir in the yogurt until a soft dough forms. (If your yogurt is on the thick side, you may need to add a tablespoon or so of milk, just enough to bring the dough together.) The dough should be a little crumbly. Lightly flour a work surface, and turn the dough out onto it, rolling or patting it to a ¼-inch thickness. (I found that the dough was a little too sticky to roll cleanly, but it worked out alright.) Using a 2-inch round cookie cutter, stamp out oatcakes, and transfer them to the prepared sheet pans. (A bench scraper comes in handy for transferring the oatcakes to the sheet pans and cleaning the counter afterward. I found that I could comfortably fit about 15 oatcakes on one pan and the remainder on the second.) (I am really into parentheses today.) It’s okay to gather and re-roll any scraps of dough.

Bake the oatcakes for about 15 minutes, or until they are golden brown around the edges. Transfer to a wire rack to cool completely, and then store in an airtight container at room temperature.

Yield: about 25 oatcakes

P.S. Thank you, Stephanie, for allowing me to reprint your recipe. It’s a keeper.
P.P.S. This essay by Zadie Smith is wonderful (via Brian Ferry).

Ah ha

My father wasn’t a writer, or not in the vocational sense, but he liked to play with words, and I grew up thinking of him as someone who wrote. He never made a big deal of it; writing was just something he did sometimes, a few quick lines on one of the index cards that he always kept in his shirt pocket. I haven’t seen a lot of his work - only a goofy poem he once jotted for me on a notepad from a medical conference he went to, and some haikus that we found in his bathroom drawer after he died. Many years ago, in a context that I now don’t remember, my mother told me that Burg tended to write most when he was feeling down, and not so much when he was happy. I don’t know if he would explain it that way, and I can’t ask him, but it resonated with me at the time. Probably because I was a teenager then, and I was doing my own share of mopey writing - mostly about the tall, long-haired kid who was a senior in my high school when I was a freshman, who played in a moody band with a clever name and reportedly smoked a truly staggering amount of weed but, I was certain, could be reformed into a fine, upstanding boyfriend if only, if only, IF ONLY I could manage to open my mouth and try speaking to him. There was a lot of woe going on, a lot of longing. I had a lot of feelings. In any case, I remember that conversation with my mother, and I remember thinking, Ah ha! That’s it! I too write the most, and the best, when I’m unhappy. That’s the trick...

Of course, that was sort of an unhelpful realization, and after some years passed and I stopped being a teenager (FINALLY), I began to see that it was not only unhelpful, but also untrue.  I discovered other ways to approach writing and other things to write about. I think we can all be grateful for that. Though I do wonder what happened to the tall, long-haired kid.  He’s totally unGoogleable, and you know I’ve tried. He’s also now almost forty.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say, and I swear that I really am going somewhere here, is: I don’t like being unhappy, and I don’t like writing about being unhappy. It’s boring, and it makes me tired. But about three weeks ago, I was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and I don’t see a way to not write about it. It began in the form of insomnia, and it took me a while to recognize it, because it was more complicated than I thought depression would be: I wasn’t sad so much as I was overwhelmed. Statistically, something like one in ten mothers get postpartum depression, but few seem to talk about it - or at least, few that I’ve found. When I was diagnosed, and when I was first trying to make sense of it, what I wanted most was to talk with another woman who had been through it and come out the other side, someone who could reassure me with full confidence that it wouldn’t be a permanent condition. I knew that logically, intellectually, but THE HORMONES, they pull the wool over your eyes, and the wool, whoa, it is heavy. You spend nine months growing a real live human baby in your abdomen, and then you push that baby out, and then you feed that baby milk that your body somehow makes, and though we mammals have been doing it for as long as we mammals have existed, it is big, weird, screwy stuff. It makes you have more feelings than you did when you were fifteen, and they feel very real. And in my case, the case of postpartum depression, they don’t go away when they should, and instead, they build.

I am grateful to have been able to ask for help, and I’m relieved that the help is actually helping. I am grateful for Brandon, and I am grateful for June. And though I would certainly rather just la la la pretend that it never happened, I want to write this down, on the off chance that you or someone you know needs to hear it. I am grateful that I can now reassure myself that this isn’t a permanent condition, that I now believe it.

Whew.

As loud as I wanted

Ah. Okay. Where were we?

Everything is happening at lightning speed. I have to get back to writing it down, or I’ll forget.  One morning, you wake up and you’re 33 years old, with two dogs and a spouse and a refrigerator full of esoteric vermouths and amari, and the next morning, you wake up and you’re 34 years old, with two dogs, a spouse, and a 12-week-old child in a bouncy chair on the floor in front of the refrigerator.  The other day at a doctor’s checkup, I actually told the nurse that I was 33, because I forgot that I’d had a birthday. 33, 34, same thing. In any case, I’m still a baby when I get a shot.

We are beginning to find moments of normalcy. On Monday, we put June in the car and drove to Vancouver to see Bruce Springsteen in concert.  He played "Cover Me," and it was sufficiently deafening that I could sing along as loud as I wanted without worrying that anyone would hear. I also ate a hot dog with yellow mustard.  It was outstanding. June stayed back at the hotel with our friends Katie and Kyle and slept through the entire show.  Someday, when she’s moaning about how ancient and uncool and deaf we are, I’ll tell her about the days when we were seeing Springsteen and sacrificing our hearing and she was drooling shamelessly all over a borrowed hotel playpen.

Twice now, Brandon and I have gone on dates. Real dates, without a small person around.  Of course, these dates are on Sundays, at lunchtime, and Brandon goes to work afterward.  The first time, we went out to lunch at The Whale Wins. (The sardine toast with curried tomato mayonnaise and shaved fennel! The whole roasted trout with brown butter and walnut sauce!  The brownie!  Eric Bordelet’s pear cider!) Then we went to see the new James Bond movie, which was exciting, except that we failed to note that the movie would end after the babysitter was expecting us home, and that meant that we were those people, the ones who trip on your purse while climbing over you and tiptoe sheepishly out of the theater with twenty minutes left. The second time, we went out to lunch again, and after having three-quarters of a glass of Champagne, I fell asleep in the car on the way back to our neighborhood. When I woke up, we were parked in the lot outside the grocery store, where we were supposed to be doing our Thanksgiving shopping, and over in the driver’s seat, Brandon was now sleeping.  We are pros at sleeping in parked cars.  Who knew? This past Tuesday, I had a fabulous nap in a parking lot on Granville Island, with cars roaring across the bridge over my head, while Brandon and June explored the market.

June looks exactly like Brandon when she smiles, and the rest of the time, or most of it, she looks like me. Early the other morning, in our hotel room in Vancouver, I heard her start to fuss in her playpen-slash-crib, and when I bent down to pick her up, she let out a tiny gleeful scream and I could see, even in the dark, that she was grinning at me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the fact that she exists - except when she’s having a flamboyant meltdown like she did yesterday afternoon while we attempted to take a walk, and then I am pretty sure that I will definitely, without a doubt, never ever get over it.

When we were first thinking about having a baby, I read Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions - there’s an Anne Lamott book for every phase of my life!  Such a consolation! - and a couple of days ago, I decided to reread it.  There’s so much that she gets right. "Before I got pregnant with Sam," she writes on page 60, "I felt there wasn’t anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me. . . .  Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time, I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I didn’t used to care all that much."

Sometimes when I’m driving, because I do all of my thinking (and now, sleeping) in the car, I think about Tina and my dad, all the people June will never meet. You’d think I’d be used to it, now that Burg has been gone for ten years next week, but grief always catches me off guard.  I can’t believe that June will never know my dad; that she’ll never get one of his scratchy, bracing, beard-forward kisses; that he will never have the opportunity to forget her birthday, something he was always so good at.  And then I think about the fact that June will never really think of my mother as a twin.  I just can’t believe she’ll never know The Twins.  Brandon tells me almost every day that he sees them in her, and that makes it a little better.

It feels good to come back to this space.  It never fails me.  Thank you, always, always, for reading.

P.S.  This song. (With thanks to my friend Brian for pointing it out.)  Stevie wins again.