She was also the mother my friends wanted advice from; many of them didn’t have their own parents handy since they were away at boarding school, but she was more than a convenient replacement. She never judged anyone, no matter what they admitted to her. Despite the fact that I had two siblings and a father, I believed that her life was, entirely and exclusively, devoted to me.

I could not live up to her example. I couldn’t give my life over so completely to the need — the greed — of little children. Children would want peanut butter in the middle of the night and scream until it was either them or me flying out the window. It wouldn’t be their fault — they were children, after all, and they must have been modeled on me, for who else’s childhood did I know so intimately? — but that didn’t mean I could handle it, nor that I should want to. In my early 30s, I had finally created my life with my husband exactly as I wanted it. And even though my mother laughed at me and told me, “Life changes. That’s what living is. It won’t stay the same even if you want it to,” I didn’t believe her.

But my husband wanted children. He convinced me that my fears of being taken over and subsumed by small humans might be just that: only fears. My mother also seemed to be imparting a coded wisdom when she counseled me to have kids: “I would hate to see you miss out,” she often told me. It was unfathomable, this thing she thought I would miss, but also, in the end, intriguing. I knew, since my mother had always been there for me and we still spoke on the phone once a week even though we lived across the country, that she would not leave me to grapple with it alone. But just when I agreed to motherhood and gave my own mother, gratefully, back to herself to play tennis, travel the world or do whatever I believed she might want to do now that I was no longer a child, we began to lose her.

She began a long, slow, early slide into dementia.

My mother was too ill to help me negotiate my own motherhood. She couldn’t warn me when I threw myself into it, losing myself just as I had worried I would, though more happily. Then I went to Japan, living apart from my husband and two children for four months, and when they arrived with their happy, shrieking preschool energy to join me, I found myself living the nightmares I had been afraid of: my little boys standing on their seats in the shinkansen from Tokyo to Hiroshima, bouncing up and down, singing the soundtrack from “Shrek” at the top of their lungs and throwing food as polite Japanese travelers left their assigned seats to get away. I was without words in a foreign country and an uncharted space, but at least I only stared out the window; I did not launch myself out of it.

I missed my mother the most when my marriage to my childhood sweetheart failed and I had to chart my own path as a non-custodial mother. Then, I became her antithesis. I moved down the block, where there are no role models for motherhood. When my sons come home from school, they come to me every other day and we spend hours of quality time together, but I do not tuck them in at night or hound them to brush their teeth in the morning. In that, I am only a part-time mother — not even a poor imitation of what she showed me a mother should be. But I have held onto her gift to me — the rock solid love she protected me with — and that’s what I give, every day, to my children. Navigating with the home cooking, home haircuts and the long, cuddled talks on the sofa that were my inheritance, I am carrying my children through divorce with the same blinders that convinced me, as a child, that I was my mother’s greatest priority. I thought I would have to work twice as hard to make up for half the time, but it turns out that love cannot be divided or multiplied. It either is or it isn’t.

My mother died a few months ago, just before Thanksgiving. After she was gone, she gave me her greatest gift. Or rather, my father did: He told me who my mother was.

She struggled, he told me.

As a young bride and mother, barely 20 when I was born, she wanted to see the world, but instead she found herself suffocating in the roles of mother, wife, sister, daughter. Our nuclear family moved to New England, where it got worse: There were many winter days when she gave up trying to leave the house entirely because as soon as she finally got three toddlers into their snow clothes, one of us would have to pee. She spent her days alone with us, and even ate with us alone because my father had to supervise the dining room at the boarding school where he taught. She tried, and failed, and kept trying to find herself; my father recounted a litany of her attempts: correspondence course, school plays, ceramics, weaving. I remember these: my mother’s hobbies. I remember the floor loom she had when we were older, and the wall hangings woven with driftwood came to hang on every wall. The palm-size milk and sugar bowls she hand-pinched and glazed that I still have in my cupboard did not save her. Nothing helped, until we were finally all in school and she began writing for the local newspaper.

I have never been happier than I was when my father revealed that we depressed my mother and suffocated her. She was not the embodiment of the myth of the perfect mother I failed to be. In photographs new and old, people always comment on how alike my mother and I are and now, more than ever, I can see the resemblance. She did the best she could, and if I could wish for more happiness for her in her early motherhood, she has shown me that you don’t even have to like your children every minute to love them absolutely. 

For days on end as Billy and John and I had raced our bikes in the cul-de-sac with the neighbor kids or gone swimming with Mary Anne or to movie matinees chaperoned by one of the other moms, my mother had been packing up in preparation for the moving van and driving us across the country by herself. When we reached Ohio, she would leave us for a couple of weeks with relatives we knew only by name, my father’s younger brother Don and his family, while she and our dad found us a new place to live in Pennsylvania.

My father had already taken an airplane to Philadelphia, where he had a new job working for the government in the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. He’d sent us presents made by the tribes he was working for: I got a beaded doll without a face, which was hard to love though I tried. I’d asked my mother why he didn’t want his little adobe office on the Plaza anymore, with its crackly leather chair and the enticing hot cinnamon from the bakery wafting through the open windows. She’d answered in terms that she must have thought were appropriately concrete but free of confusing details: His job in Sonoma made him sad. Years later I learned that most of his private practice work had been filing divorces.

—–

My mom had been promoting our trip across America as a great adventure. Since she was about to drive 3,000 miles by herself with three children, two dogs, and three cats, one of whom was going to give birth again any day, her only hope for survival was to whip us into an enthusiastic frenzy and pray the spirit of fun would carry us through.

I couldn’t wait. Seven solid days of McDonald’s, A&W, Kentucky Fried, Shakey’s Pizza, International House of Pancakes, Arby’s, Foster’s Freeze — nothing could be better. And every night in a new motel: My mother, I knew, had left room in her suitcase for all the hotel towels we would be collecting for our new house in Pennsylvania. Holiday Inn’s bath linens had a better color scheme, but by dint of some carefully timed wheedling I’d extracted the promise that we’d stay at a Howard Johnson’s whenever we had the chance. If there was anything that could beat McDonald’s Filet-o-Fish it was HoJo’s crispy fried clams, and I saw the entire cross-country trip as an opportunity for reunion with Howard Johnson’s coconut cake.

In those innocent days before car seats and seat belt laws, kids could roll all over a car unrestricted, so my mother put the back seat down in the station wagon and made our car into a big playroom. She padded the floor with a chenille bedspread, and she lined the edges with board games and coloring books and pillows and the camping cooler. Jean-Tom and Robespierre yowled in one mesh-sided cat carrier and pregnant Musette had a second to her preoccupied self, but the dogs were free to wander the interior, on the lookout for unattended sandwiches, ready to press their damp noses against my mom’s neck as she drove. Our suitcases and an enormous bag of dog food were strapped onto the luggage rack under a canvas dropcloth.

“Your tail is riding kind of low,” one of the teenage Verboten boys snickered from the curb when we’d gotten into the car. My mom sat in front by herself in her red bandanna, the Triple A Triptiks sharing the passenger seat with her purse and files of important papers and boxes of breakables she hadn’t trusted to the movers. She checked her lipstick in the rearview mirror and beamed at us over her shoulder.

“This is going to be fun!” she cried, and we all hooted and waved as she laid on the horn and pulled away, the younger neighborhood kids racing after us on their bikes, handlebar tassels flying, to the end of the street.

That first day out, somewhere near the high-desert town of Winnemucca, Nevada, a freak flash flood washed out the highway. We turned back to the only motel we could reach; the proprietor put us in an upstairs room, as the creek we were on was expected to keep rising.

We sat on the lumpy beds and ate the rest of the baloney for dinner, listening to the endless surge of water pouring down the creek, the bar’s neon sign throbbing red all night through the curtains.

“A flash flood — now, that’s exciting!” my mom said, peering out the motel’s window at the churning creek. “This’ll be something you can write on a postcard to your friends. I bet they’ve never been in a flash flood before!”

On the second day, a salt storm kicked up while we were crossing the Great Salt Lake Desert. We waited it out for hours, pulled to the shoulder of the highway like every other vehicle on the road, visibility nil as the storm continued to hiss at the windows, sandblasting the paint off our car. The wind blew so hard it knocked a livestock truck on its side, and giant hogs came bursting out of the opacity, lifting their pink snouts and squealing in panic as they trotted past us on either side of the station wagon, men chasing after them wearing their shirts tied over their faces.

“A salt storm!” my mother marveled, gazing out the blind white windshield as Billy and John and I played checkers in the back. “What are the chances we’d be lucky enough to see something like this?”

On the third day, after arriving in Denver long after dark, too late and too tired to look for a Howard Johnson’s or any other cheap motel, my mother awoke in the middle of the night in our expensive downtown hotel room to discover that Musette was having her kittens inside my mom’s open suitcase — on top of all of her clothes, except for the grubby outfit she’d dropped on the carpet after wearing it for two days straight. Two kittens, three kittens, a fourth; then the fifth kitten started to be born breech. My mother went into veterinary midwife action. She tried to help Musette ease that kitten out, but it was stuck.

“What’s going to happen, Mommy?” we asked, creeping out from under the covers to lean across the end of the bed, where our mother was hunched in front of her suitcase, muttering “geez louise, geez louise” over and over, telling us to stay back, the hotel’s towels bloody all around her.

“I don’t know — ” she said, her response unusually curt, then softening, as if she suddenly remembered us. “But it’s going to be okay, don’t you worry …”

Throwing on her dirty clothes, a smear of blood across her cheek from pushing her hair off her face, my mother loaded us back into the car with Musette and the kittens. She drove up and down Denver’s deserted streets in a futile search for a veterinarian’s office, enlisting us all in a joint prayer to Saint Jude. Finally she was able to flag down a policeman, who escorted us to the only emergency vet in the city. We got back to our hotel and the other animals as the sun was rising behind the bright sharp edges of the downtown buildings. Musette survived, and the first four kittens. My mom’s hands trembled as she packed us all into the station wagon to head for Kansas.

“That was the worst of it,” she said, shooting us a weak smile in the rearview mirror and starting the engine.

After we’d passed through Topeka, the midday sky closed up and went black. As the local radio station we were listening to announced the tornado warning, the cars in the opposite lane of the highway pulled squealing onto the shoulder, the entire lane of traffic turning around and merging into ours, all of us heading east at increasing speed. Behind us, we could see the tornado’s funnel sucking all the blackness toward itself.

“Put the leashes on the dogs now, Billy,” my mom said, her voice brittle with false calm as she outlined detailed instructions for each of us in case she decided to pull into a ditch. The speedometer was showing 90 miles per hour, both lanes of the highway bumper-to-bumper with vehicles racing eastward, some cars and trucks passing us neatly by along the shoulders. “Not until I tell you to, okay? But here ‘s the plan — Billy, you take the dogs. Cissy, you take the boy cats in their carrier. John — John, you sit right by the door, Mommy will hold your hand and bring Musette. If I stop, we’ll all crawl under the car, got it? Billy, tell me what it looks like now.”

“It’s closer, Mommy. It looks bigger.” The radio had stopped working, broadcasting only a deafening spray of static.

My mom gunned the engine and drove. One hundred miles an hour, 110.

“That’s fast, isn’t it, Mommy?” John piped up.

“Yeah, that’s fast,” Billy and I confirmed, nodding our heads up and down.

When we rattled to a halt in Lawrence, Kansas, a couple of hours later, our engine was blowing billows of smoke almost as black as the tornado, which my mother had outrun at a sustained 115 miles an hour.

We spent the next day splashing in the pool of a motel in Lawrence while the station wagon was being serviced, my mother lying prone on a lounge chair in the shade, a wet washcloth draped over her face.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said when we came over and poked her shoulder to see if she was still breathing, “I just outran a tornado. Wait until Sally Verboten hears about this.”

On the last day of our trip, we were finally closing in on our cousins in Dayton, my brothers and I campaigned heavily for McDonald’s. Again. There’d been exactly one HoJo’s on our entire route, and pancakes with blueberry syrup at IHOP had launched us every morning; otherwise we ‘d stayed in whatever motels we could find and eaten every meal courtesy of McDonald’s.

Not again, my mother said, but finally we wore her down. It didn’t hurt that she realized we would reach Dayton well after dinnertime and a McDonald’s sign appeared up the highway, beckoning in the distance like a mirage oasis in the desert, as we’d all begun to whine.

“Okay,” she said wearily, flicking on her turn signal for the exit ramp, “but we ‘re not sitting inside. We’ll go to the drive-through.”

If you had a strawberry milkshake and a packet of fresh french fries, the best way to eat them, to my eight-year-old mind, was to munch a few fries, drink a bit of the milkshake, and dip the rest of the fries into the milkshake to taste the thick icy sweetness of the shake against the hot salt of the fries. The straw and the plastic lid on the shake, therefore, were impediments to complete satisfaction.

I was enjoying my first handful of fries and just prying the lid off my strawberry shake, humming noisily and perched cross-legged right behind the driver’s seat, when my mother swung around to face me, her unwashed hair flying out from under her sweaty bandanna, which she’d worn every day since my dad left for his new job.

“DON’T –” she started to threaten through clenched teeth, her face contorted with menace, too exhausted and ground down to pretend anymore, this close to the finish line. “Don’tyoudare,” she warned me, pointing a long, skinny finger at me, “takethetopoffthatmilkshakeit’llspillallover.”

Chastened, I snapped the milkshake lid back onto the waxed cup. I sucked demurely on the straw. But after a while I just sort of forgot. As I started to pry the lid off my milkshake a second time, the cup somehow exploded in my hand, sending a pink tsunami of milkshake toward the back of my mother’s head. In the rearview mirror I watched her eyes grow wide and black when the cold sting of milkshake splashed over her neck and started dripping down her dirty, five-days-worn collar, down her back between her shoulder blades.

For an hour she raved. “I hate this goddamned family — nobody helps me — I have to do everything myself — I wish I could run away –” She wept and swore, her hands shaking with rage on the steering wheel. We were blown back by the force of her fury and frustration, huddled together at the tailgate of the station wagon, hugging the dogs. We escaped the car as if it were on fire as soon as we pulled to a stop in front of Uncle Don and Aunt Virginia’s house, and I peeped through a window curtain in their living room and watched my mother continue to stammer and weep as she stood on the driveway rinsing herself off with the garden hose, holding the gushing end down the back of her filthy shirt.

“C’mon, kids,” my aunt Virginia said cheerfully, luring me away from the window, rounding my brothers up from the couch where they sat next to each other, mute and paralyzed and white-faced. Her own two toddlers were already asleep in their bedrooms. She’d started running a bath for our mom; we could hear the water pounding into the tub. “Let’s go in the kitchen,” she said. “We can make popcorn balls.”

—–

Ohio rained.

The only thing for us to do in the inclement weather was to sit in the living room while our little cousins took their endless naps, eating popcorn and watching soap operas with Aunt Virginia as she ironed her clean laundry.

Some days we made popcorn balls with corn syrup that seeped at its own slow pace out of the bottle, and I paid attention as Aunt Virginia buttered the inside of the saucepan so the boiling sugar concoction wouldn’t stick.

Sometimes we colored them red or green or blue. Sometimes we made caramel corn with brown sugar and salted nuts and it was better than Cracker Jack. Other times we made popcorn à la Rice Krispie Treats, glued together with marshmallows and margarine melted into a stretchy goo. We buttered our hands, too, when we helped shape the popcorn into balls big enough to last through an entire episode of “General Hospital” or “Guiding Light.”

“Maybe tomorrow we’ll go outside,” Aunt Virginia would say hopefully, gazing out the kitchen window at the perpetually unpromising sky, even-tempered and patient though she undoubtedly had not anticipated being stuck inside with five bored children for two weeks when she agreed to watch us while my mom and dad house-hunted.

At last we were escorted to our new house in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in a rural township of gently sloping fields and Amish dairy farms that was the last stop on the Main Line. What had my mother done without us? Though my father had disappeared every day for as long as I could remember, doing his job or going to the dump with carloads of grass clippings, my mother had always been close by.

This was the first time my brothers and I had ever been truly away from her. She’d found us a place to live, Uncle Don and Aunt Virginia had told us, but how long could that take? I pictured her with my dad driving up to unknown but comfortingly familiar motel rooms with HoJos towels on the bathroom rack, eating fried clams in the restaurant with no one to share them with, packing the HoJos towels into her suitcase all by herself, with no one to help her squeeze them down while she zipped the suitcase shut. Beyond that I had no idea how she might have spent her time.

Now I wonder if she might have taken a walk alone, or an uninterrupted bath. Maybe she read a book. Maybe she finished the thoughts in her head, or lost track of where she was altogether. Maybe she spent every minute going from bank to phone booth to hardware store, unpacking, organizing, cleaning a kitchen and bathrooms that weren’t left quite clean enough by the people who’d lived there before. Maybe she found herself sitting in the middle of a wide green lawn in Pennsylvania, watching shadows bend the fading light under a vast old black walnut tree, and in the distance her three children were shambling out of a car and approaching her, shyly, and she didn’t look back to how beleaguered she felt the last time she saw them but, instead, without thinking, she swung her arms out to hold her sweet bumbling kids, her skinny blond boys and her newly tubby, graceless little girl — who made her feel lucky to wake up every morning, who were running toward her across a vast space, relying on her to show them what it felt like to be home.

—–

RECIPE: CARAMEL CORN

6 cups freshly popped corn
2 cups roasted, salted mixed nuts: a combination of peanuts, almonds, pecans, cashews, macadamias, and/or walnuts, to your taste
½ cup unsalted butter
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
¼ cup light corn syrup
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon vanilla

• Generously butter a baking sheet and set aside. Combine the popcorn and nuts, spread them on the baking sheet, and place in a low oven (200°) to warm while you make the caramel.

• In a heavy- bottomed, medium saucepan, melt the butter over low heat, then stir in the brown sugar, corn syrup, and salt. Turn the heat to medium and bring to a boil, stirring, then clip on a candy thermometer. Continue to cook, stirring frequently, until the temperature reaches hard-ball stage, or 250° to 260°. Turn off the heat, stir in the baking soda and vanilla, and quickly pour over the popcorn, tossing with wooden spoons to coat evenly. Return the caramel corn to the oven to further crisp the caramel, about 30 to 45 minutes (it will still feel soft when warm, but it will become crisp as it cools). Remove from the oven and allow to cool completely before eating. The caramel corn will keep, stored in an airtight container, for about a week.

Makes about 8 cups of caramel corn. The recipe can easily be doubled for a crowd. 

Kate Moses is the author of “Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath” (St. Martin’s.) She was the co-founder, with Camille Peri, of Salon’s “Mothers Who Think” site, and she and Peri also co-edited the award-winning book “Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenting.” She lives in San Francisco. This was excerpted from her new book, “Cakewalk: A Memoir.” 

But Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.

The illusion is that mothers are automatically happier, more fulfilled and complete. But the craziest, grimmest people this Sunday will be the mothers themselves, stuck herding their own mothers and weeping children and husbands’ mothers into seats at restaurants. These mothers do not want a box of chocolate. These mothers are on a diet.

I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or severely damaged children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark and See’s. There is no refuge — not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums. Even the turn-off-your-cellphone announcer is going to open by saying, “Happy Mother’s Day!” You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose. Or an ER.

It should go without saying that I also hate Valentine’s Day.

Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother’s Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents. (Meanwhile, we know the worst, skeeviest, most evil people in the world are CEOs and politicians who are proud parents.)

Don’t get me wrong: There were times I could have literally died of love for my son, and I’ve felt stoned on his rich, desperate love for me. But I bristle at the whispered lie that you can know this level of love and self-sacrifice only if you are a parent. We talk about “loving one’s child” as if a child were a mystical unicorn. Ninety-eight percent of American parents secretly feel that if you have not had and raised a child, your capacity for love is somehow diminished. Ninety-eight percent of American parents secretly believe that non-parents cannot possibly know what it is to love unconditionally, to be selfless, to put yourself at risk for the gravest loss. But in my experience, it’s parents who are prone to exhibit terrible self-satisfaction and selfishness, who can raise children as adjuncts, like rooms added on in a remodel. Their children’s value and achievements in the world are reflected glory, necessary for these parents’ self-esteem, and sometimes, for the family’s survival. This is how children’s souls are destroyed.

But my main gripe about Mother’s Day is that it feels incomplete and imprecise. The main thing that ever helped mothers was other people mothering them; a chain of mothering that keeps the whole shebang afloat. I am the woman I grew to be partly in spite of my mother, and partly because of the extraordinary love of her best friends, and my own best friends’ mothers, and from surrogates, many of whom were not women at all but gay men. I have loved them my entire life, even after their passing.

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother’s Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture’s bad people and behavior. You want to give me chocolate and flowers? That would be great. I love them both. I just don’t want them out of guilt, and I don’t want them if you’re not going to give them to all the people who helped mother our children. But if you are going to include everyone, then make mine something like M&M’s, and maybe flowers you picked yourself, even from my own garden, the cut stems wrapped in wet paper towels, then tin foil and a waxed-paper bag from my kitchen drawers. I don’t want something special. I want something beautifully plain. Like everything else, it can fill me only if it is ordinary and available to all.

Anne Lamott’s latest novel is “Imperfect Birds.”

But it’s not going to be that story, because it turned into something else when I asked my mother if she knew how to make it.

“I thought she just bought coffee Jello and put bananas in it! But I’ll call her up and ask her!” she replied perkily in an e-mail. (Mom is the world’s perkiest replier of e-mails, averaging more exclamation points than sentences.)

It wasn’t easy for Mom to do that, probably. To this day, she can’t get on the phone with her mother without enduring an hour of haranguing on a wide range of subjects, starting from the terrible way the beds were made for her last visit and usually leading back to her complete failure as a daughter, mother, sister and human being. When Mom is with her siblings and the phone rings, they look at each other and laugh nervously. “You pick it up,” they say, men and women in their 60s tossing a cellphone back and forth like a game of hot potato.

But there Mom was, intrepidly calling the woman who’s always treated her in a way that I won’t write about in public, to ask for my pudding. I suddenly remembered being 17 — long too big for Grandma to hit, too dismissive to let her insult me — casually saying how I still hated her. “You shouldn’t hate her,” Mom said gently. “Without her you wouldn’t have your own mother. Whatever she did, she still gave birth to me, and she still raised me. So we should respect her.”

Over the next week, I got daily e-mails from Mom, reporting on what Grandma told her about the pudding, telling me her own memories in her mother’s kitchen:

When we were small, she made a lot of cakes to entertain her mah-jongg friends, and I was the poor kid having to mix it. So I got all the calluses on my right hand! Then when we were young, she constantly made ma-tai-go (horse shoe cake) and when she lived with us in New Jersey, she liked making the coffee pudding, every time to an extent we were afraid of them. Now we MISS them!

She volunteered to test the recipe she gleaned from her mother’s shaky memory, describing her process — in the poetry of immigrant English — as “try an error.” She wrote me the next day, describing in hundreds of words how she did it (now you see where I get it from), and finishing her e-mail with a section titled “What boo-boos I made.” Naturally, she forgot to use half of this and tried to add in twice of that, and it was all boo-booed up. So she offered to make it again, and again.

“Mom! I forgot to tell you I need pictures to run with the story!” I texted her yesterday. And last night, at 4:30 in the morning, she texted back, “I found some, from around the time she like to make that pudding. We look so much younger!” And at 5:30 I got another text telling me that she can’t figure out how to use the scanner, and so she’ll have to try again in the morning.

And at some point, while I was mixing up my own batch of my grandmother’s coffee and banana pudding, getting another e-mail from Mom about how hers was turning out, I remembered being in sixth grade, up until midnight for the first time doing my homework and crying from tiredness, when my mother came in to sit by me and urge me on. And it occurred to me: This story is not about my grandmother, and it’s not about this dessert. It’s about my mom, and how she will still, to this day, drop everything and give up sleep to help her kid out with his homework.

So thank you, Ma. I love you. Happy Mother’s Day.

And thank you, too, Grandma, for giving her to me.

Grandma Lee’s Coffee and Banana “Pudding”

Serves 4-6; recipe easily doubles for a party with aunties and uncles

This probably isn’t much like any pudding you have ever made, but rather, a “pudding” style popular in Hong Kong that’s set with gelatin, much more like a panna cotta than a soft custard. My grandmother would make this in a bundt cake pan or jello mold. It’s firm enough to just barely be sliceable, but melts deliciously on the tongue, rich but not heavy.

You may well want to add more coffee — and especially sugar — than I have here, but this is more like what my grandmother would serve. As my Mom puts it, this “suits the Orientals’ tastes.”

1 envelope powdered unflavored gelatin (measure it to make sure it’s 7 grams by weight, or 2 teaspoons)
9 ounces cold water (that’s 1 cup + 2 tablespoons)
9 ounces evaporated milk (the stuff in cans; not sweetened condensed milk)
3 ounces heavy cream
1 tablespoon instant coffee, or more to taste (forgive me, Barista, for I have sinned)
3 tablespoons sugar, or more to taste
Pinch salt
1 medium banana

Special equipment: A cute jello mold is nice (silicone is easiest), but a wide, flat bowl or even a baking dish works fine as a mold. Or chill in individual molds or bowls.

1. Measure your gelatin, and make sure you have 7 grams or 2 teaspoons of the stuff. I know I already mentioned this in the ingredients. Just make sure you do it, because they have a habit of filling the envelopes inconsistently.
2. Pour about half the water into a large bowl, and sprinkle in the gelatin; it’ll clump if you just dump it in. You can whisk it out if that happens, but then you’d have to smell it. You don’t really want to smell it. For a tasteless, odorless thing, gelatin has a habit of being rather animal-smelling when it hits water at first. Give the mixture a stir or two to get all the powder hydrating and “blooming.”
3. Heat evaporated milk, remaining water, sugar and a pinch of salt over moderate heat, stirring constantly. I like to use a heat-proof rubber spatula, making sure to get all the sides and the bottom. Keep heating and stirring until a pale froth of tiny bubbles coats the surface, and the liquid trembles as if afraid when the spatula moves through it. It should be steaming fairly vigorously, and there may be tiny bubbles threatening to boil around the edges.
4. Take the milk mixture off the heat and stir in the instant coffee. The reason not to heat the coffee in the milk directly is that coffee that reaches the boiling point can release a substance that can actually destroy gelatin. Black magic!
5. Stir the hot coffee milk into the bloomed gelatin. Adjust with sugar and coffee to taste, remembering that sugar tastes less intense in cold things, so you may want to sweeten it just a little beyond what you think tastes perfect.
6. Whisk in heavy cream, and whisk it in good, for a few solid seconds. You’ll kick up some froth, but don’t worry about it.
7. Let cool to room temperature. If there’s still froth from the whisking floating, use your spatula to gather and smear it against the sides of the bowl to pop all the bubbles.
8. Slice banana into ¼-inch coins, stir them into the cooled coffee mixture and pour into mold. If you want to be fancy, lay the bananas down decoratively at the bottom of your mold, pour in a very thin layer of the pudding and chill in the freezer until set, then gently pour in the rest over the back of a spoon. (Otherwise, the bananas will float all willy-nilly.) Wrap tightly in plastic, and chill at least 4 hours.

Serve straight from the mold or turned out onto a dish (careful!). For help turning it out, run a thin knife around the edges. If it still doesn’t want to come out quickly, dip the whole mold in hot water for a few seconds, turn the dessert out, and then chill again in fridge for 20 minutes before serving. Best served within a day, but will keep for several. 

On the heels of that era, feminism went largely underground and did not reappear on the mass landscape until the mythologized bra burnings of the 1960s. With their “sisterhood is power” slogans, according to Faludi, the second wave rejected “mom” altogether. “[The] inability to deal directly and handle confrontation between mothers and daughters slops over into so-called sisterhood. It’s not like by saying sisterhood is powerful you get away from that dynamic. That’s where you learn to deal with women.”

This has given rise to the current generation of women who denounce feminism altogether, as in, “I’m not a feminist, but … .” Faludi sees the same culprit: “A lot of what’s behind [the idea] that feminism has been ‘settled’ [are these] commercial and consumer terms. It’s all about personal development and individual satisfaction. The political dimensions have been leeched out.”

As Faludi herself exemplifies though, it’s a tough pattern to break. Back in 1997, she had her own very public argument with third-waver Karen Lehrman on Slate. It was anything but a graceful transfer of power. ”I’m in a weird, limbo land,” Faludi said. “I’m sort of an elder daughter of the second wave, but I’m not really a daughter. I was born in 1959 so I’m on the very tail end of the baby boom.”

It certainly points to a problem larger than feminism. As a culture, our obsession with youth and beauty is intertwined with our fear of aging, a phenomenon well encapsulated by the Clinton/Palin media debacle. Think what you will of either candidate, their media smackdown has been the best thing to happen to feminism in decades. It’s left most of us desperate to at least expand the range of viable archetypes. Surely there must be options for women besides the mean, old and undesirable bitch versus the sexually appealing and vacant bimbo.

Faludi thinks it’s time to redefine the terms of power. “It’s not simply I get mine, or women get to individually climb up the ladder. It’s about having real authority in the world.” She continues with a laugh, “Given that the ladder is collapsing in these horrible economic times, now may be a good time to be exploring all this.”