Sarah sat on the overstuffed orange gingham chair and stared at the phone. She had just hung up with Abigail, and Abby had filled her in on Miriam's latest mission: fixing up Sarah and Jeff. Ever since their dinner at The Urban Appetite, Miriam had been consumed with the idea that Sarah should become involved with Jeff. It didn't seem to phase Miriam at all that Jeff was reeling from a bad divorce and commuting back and forth from Seattle where his ex still lived with their fourteen year old twin daughters.
Sarah had shared all of this information with Miriam, on multiple occasions. Abby confirmed that she had also tried, without success, to steer Miriam clear of the Sarah + Jeff matchmaking mission.
"You know mom," Abby had said a few minutes earlier on the phone. "Once she gets an idea in her head, she's like a dog with a bone."
The sisters had laughed about it, but the truth was that at 42, Sarah was more than ready for Miriam to butt out of her love life. Sarah had always had a little secret crush on Jeff, but they lived in different states most of their adult lives and then she'd heard that he had married and started a family.
Besides, when they reconnected a few months ago when he came back to town to open the restaurant, he seemed like the walking wounded, barely functioning on auto-pilot. He was energized about his new venture, but he seemed incredibly depressed otherwise. He missed his daughters terribly and bemoaned the fact that his business partners wanted a Chicago restaurant rather than one in Seattle. On the one hand, Chicago was home, and he was happy to return to the city he'd grown up in. But, on the other hand, he was devastated about moving away from Kelly and Kate. The twins were old enough to fly back and forth to spend time with their dad when he couldn't get back to Seattle, but he knew it was a poor substitute for being together every day. When he showed her the site of the new restaurant, Jeff had confided in Sarah that, besides being a chef, parenting was the only thing he believed he really excelled at.
Sarah tried to get her mind to switch gears; she needed to work out the kinks in her new mini-bundt cake recipes. Her troubled lovelife would still be there waiting whenever she had a free minute to obsess about it. When Rara had come to the store to help her with the taste-testing, the Orange Creamsicle cake with the Basil-Orange Glaze had tasted sort of medicinal, definitely NOT the taste Sarah had been aiming for. That would need some tweaking before it could be given a test-drive at Sarah's Sweet Cakes. The other problem recipe was the Chocolate Surprise Cake with Mocha Ganache. The "surprise" was a mocha cream filling, but the one Rara tested was super sweet and she suggested that Sarah decrease the sugar in it by half.
Then, of course, there was also her monthly appointment with Dr. L. which was scheduled for later that afternoon. What lovely topic would she bring to Dr. L's office today? Sarah sometimes joked that her appointments felt like making a monthly pilgrimage to the Oracle at Delphi. With her waist-length gray hair piled in a neat and luxurious bun on top of her head and her red reading glassed perched there as well as if adding ornamentation, Dr. L. looked like Woody Allen's cinematic version of a shrink. Her tone of voice did not dispel that image either. She spoke with a fairly subtle British accent suffused with
warmth. She could be stern when she needed to be, especially when one of her beloved patients needed a reality check, but she was also capable of the most profound and genuine degree of empathy.
Sarah sometimes thought that Dr. L. was the mother she would have created for herself if she ran the universe, but she also knew that that thought was not entirely fair to Miriam. After all, Miriam was really not the maternal sort in the classic sense. She loved her daughters fiercely and loyally, but they
challenged her need to control her world, and she found that unsettling. Abby had done more of the things that Miriam had expected her daughters to do. She'd met and married a good man. She'd had three children who went to private school and took ballet lessons and played team sports and got good grades. Abby and her husband had also taken over the family clothing business when Miriam's brother, Leo needed to retire, and they had made Kahn's Menswear a greater success than its original owners could ever have dreamed.
Sarah had chosen a career that Miriam felt was too stereotypically female. Once, in a fit of anger, she had yelled at Sarah, "I didn't push my way past the glass ceiling to have my daughter settle down comfortably beneath it. Why would you waste your enormous intellect doing a task that anyone with a sixth grade education could do?"
That had hurt Sarah much more than she'd ever admitted, and she had been wary around Miriam for several years after that awful incident. Once Sarah's Sweet Cakes became a financial success, Miriam had backed down a bit. Lately, she had even been caught driving by to show off Sarah's shop to her new acquaintances. Sarah never acknowledged that she'd seen one of Miriam's drive-bys, but it made her feel good to know that her mother was proud of what she'd accomplished. That reminded her of one of Dr. L's favorite lines, "No honest human being will ever say that they are too old to seek their parents' approval. We want it. We need it. And when we don't get it, we feel incomplete."
Maybe that should be the topic of today's session, Sarah thought. Incompleteness. The feeling one has of living their life at 80%. Sarah wondered if it was common. Perhaps, it was even an epidemic. She remembered reading Betty Friedan's iconic book, The Feminine Mystique, in college and being fascinated by what Friedan called, "the problem that has no name." For generations of women, the nameless problem was an overwhelming sense of sadness, of being stuck in a life that did not fulfill them. Sarah's life was filled with choices and options, but there were things that she wanted that she couldn't have. Yes, they would talk about that today. She and the Oracle would discuss the missing 20%.
No comments:
Post a Comment