Today I’m writing about lentils & disappointment. Both get stronger if you let them sit a while, but maybe not in the way you
expect.
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| From Mary Berry’s Foolproof Cooking. |
A couple of days ago, my younger Sis & I got tagged by a
Rogue Sibling into a group email sent by another sib I’ll call Bro.
Bro’s an old hat at excluding us. I don’t know why he does this to Sis, but he’s
ghosted me since a minor disagreement we had about 8 or 10 years ago.
I could see in Rogue Sib’s reply that Bro’s original email
was about a phone call he’d had with our mother’s nursing home. It shocked me that Bro’s grudge now eclipsed
my access to our mother’s health issues.
I needed to think about my reaction to all this, so decided to try a new
recipe full of stuff I love – red lentils with chilli & ginger.
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| Heating the oil for the strong stuff. |
I get all my ingredients together, convinced this’ll be
great. As always, I added more of the
strong stuff to the recipe – a couple of chillis, 4 or so garlic cloves & about
3 inches of ginger. Chopping & grating
& flinging into the pan, should I or shouldn’t I confront Bro for throwing
his weight around?
After heating all those colourful things for a few minutes in a
little itty bit of oil, I tossed in a tablespoon of cumin & cooked those
numscious things a bit longer. With
500g of red lentils, that was all the official dry ingredients, but in
deference to my Hag Improv tradition, I threw in some spring onions that looked
a bit lonely sitting in the crisper.
Once all these bad boys got coated in oil, next came ladling
in 2 pints of veg stock. I’d seen Mary Berry do this on one of her
cooking shows, maybe even the Foolproof
Cooking series itself. She found it soothing, this slow ritualistic ladling of stock, spoonful by spoonful. It did nothing for my mental state. Maybe when you’re thinking about a Bro like
mine, there isn’t anything short of drink or drugs that’ll calm you.
I didn’t time it, but Mary Berry says this ladling craic takes
around 20 minutes, during which the lentils get nice & tender. And that’s it, Fort Pitt. Can’t get a recipe simpler than that, can you?
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| A mint garnish. |
Talk about disappointment.
I’d never tasted anything so bland in my life. All that ginger, all that garlic, all those
chillis to no avail. Bummer. I stuck the rest into the fridge, resigned to
using it as bulk in soup.
On top of that, I hadn’t decided how to react to Bro’s email. To be honest, it’s not like I killed his dog
all those long years ago. I’d apologised
back then. He got abusive. I walked away. Electronically, at least. The entire exchange had occurred from
separate continents via email.
Nobody called Bro on shunning me. Not back then, not now when he hoarded info
about my mother. Nothing more than a Rogue Sib quietly tagging me into group emails. That disappointed me,
but it didn’t surprise me.
Bro has a lot
of power in our family. I have
none. I used to comment on the various power imbalances in our family, but was
told the act of pointing it out showed what a hostile shit I was. Which is
obviously why the family couldn’t give me any power. Now there’s a mind fuck if I ever had one.
But this present situation wasn’t about who did dishes &
who watched the game after Thanksgiving dinner.
I decided to sleep on it.
Next day, I got the lentils out, but before slapping them
into the soup bowl, I gave them a taste.
Oh my good golly, the ginger & garlic & chillis . . . I cannot
even begin to tell you how wonderful those lentils were after stewing in their
own juices. I chowed down, contemplating
the wondrous way disappointment changes if it’s let to sit overnight.
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| Therapeutic ladling. |
Nothing like a full belly to make me think I could take on
Bro gently enough to not bruise his gossamer ego. Flip open the computer, there’s 8 email exchanges between Sis & Bro.
The sheer volume made me glad I slept on it. Yup, I’m 60 goddam years old & yet I
thought those emails were going to be about vital mama-related
information.
Well, they started out that way. Sis is the only sib who lives in our mother’s
community. She went to the nursing home to
flesh out what the staff’d told Bro over the phone. In her first email, she included some funny
little stories about our mother’s carers who are doing a bang up job but have a
couple of idiosyncrasies between them.
Sis made the mistake of saying she was on the list of people who had
access to info about our mother’s care.
Bro writes back that there’s no ‘list’. He & no one else has legal power of
whatever, so he’ll make any decision he thinks best, based on what the doctors
say after he forwards Sis’s email to them.
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| Homegrown mint. |
With the dignity that only sisters who have no power ever
have to muster, Sis asks him not to embarrass her by sharing her emails with
the very people she’s making fun of – she’ll see them when visiting our mother,
when she goes to church or the grocery store.
She asks that she be included in discussions about our mother’s care.
Bro says he’s already forwarded her email, & in terms of
including people in future, he shares info about our mother with people who pay
for her care.
That confused me.
When had paying for our mother’s care been discussed? Then it sinks in. Bro has legal power of whatever, which
probably means he gets the bills, which perhaps means that if he doesn’t share
that information with us, he can be angry that Sis & I don’t
participate.
It was also the last in a long line of slaps to the face about
our earning power. Both Sis & I took
on student loans while our parents paid for everyone else’s tertiary education,
including Bro’s tuition at one of the New Ivies. Our adult lives started thousands of dollars
in debt to schools we could afford, not ones run by Jesuits. Little remarks at family gatherings about how
much food we could afford to bring, how much money we owed our sibs for what we subsequently ate. We shared the same DNA, but it was never meant to be a level
playing field here. Sis & I had been
set up for this moment decades ago.
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| Lonely spring onion. |
Something inside me shifted in a direction I really didn’t
want to take. A direction that alarmed
me. I decided to let the time difference move us through a second night, just in case anyone wanted to support Sis &
me while I slept.
And no one did.
Nobody. Not one person said Bro,
it ain’t cool to exclude your sisters because of money. Not a one.
I’m Appalachian. Family
is huge for me. But no getting around
it, the deal had always been that in order for me to have a family, in order to
be part of what I’d been taught was sacrosanct, I had to allow myself to be
treated less than. I’d done that for 60
years as my duty. To breathe the same
air as people whose mores had me gritting my teeth every time we met.
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| These flavours are mine. |
Whatever it was that tied me to them, the
thing that said you have my mother’s hair & I have your father’s mouth, I
am yours and you are mine – it fell away like there’d never been anything
between us. I could no longer cast my figurative
lentils & chillis & ginger before blood strangers.
And that, my dear, is what disappointment tastes like when
you let it sit overnight.
