In The Fourth Trimester, we ask parents: What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby? This month it’s blueberry oatmeal from Bon Appétit content director Hali Bey Ramdene.
It’s only later, when you begin to sleep again, that you come to accept the blur of time that takes place in the weeks after having a child. Once my daughter was born, I stopped looking at the clock. There was no need when her cries and coos told us what she needed. Although she is my only child, this experience of surrendering to time in the service of another was already familiar to me.
Just the year before, I was caring for my late mother. After seven challenging, magnificent years of gracefully facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, she left this life for a plane of consciousness beyond my reach. Time blurred then too, and I only remembered its relevance when an appointment needed to be attended, medication given, or when her hunger—this precious, elusive urge—would arise.
In the last weeks before her appetite disappeared altogether, she ate only one meal, over and over. Steel-cut oatmeal. I made countless bowls for her and myself, and eating together became part spell, cast so our bond would find a way to live on, and part prayer, for the blessing it was to have this woman as my mother and truest friend.
Each ingredient meant something to us. Steel-cut oats, a staple from our childhood breakfasts. Almond butter, an idea from my dear friend Alicia and a revelation to our morning porridge. Inky blueberries, homegrown and harvested by the couple who would become my daughter’s grandparents. And nutmeg, always freshly grated, in honor of my father who passed unexpectedly the year before.
This was the last food she ate, the last food I made her. And this was the first thing I made for myself after my baby girl was born.
It took me a long while to get back to cooking for myself. The first several weeks post birth were mostly spent in bed. Recovering from a surprise Cesarean, in a stupor of love and grief, made me uninterested in leaving the dark cocoon of my bedroom. I felt bliss for this tender soul in my arms, and a bottomless sorrow that I was experiencing this mystery of motherhood without my own mother to share it with. I wanted to tell her how much I suddenly understood! There were a million confidences, apologies, and secrets pressing at my seams, all intended for her alone. In her absence, I offered them to the endless nights, with a delirious hope that such thoughts would somehow find her.
But those nights gave way to serene mornings. I ate so well in those hours just after dawn. At some point, the warm body next to me would disappear and plates full of scrambled eggs, ripe avocado, buttered toast, and strips of crisp bacon would appear on the table next to my bed. My love took it upon himself to feed us—me and by extension our daughter—with an intense focus and care.
It only occurred to me later that this attendance was no different than the one I’d given to my mother. All of us—myself to my mother, my partner to me, me to my daughter—were providing nourishment. Food to sustain our bodies and tend to our spirits. As I slowly regained my strength, we began taking short walks, the baby bundled close to me as we shuffled to the end of the block in the early spring.
One late morning, I left the baby tucked into the crook of her father’s arm as they dozed after a long night of diaper changes and yelps of hunger, I drifted to the kitchen. I made oatmeal the way I did a year before, with the last of those fat blueberries still tucked in the recesses of the freezer. And I ate it quietly, without interruption, savoring the small victory, and the solitude.
That’s one of those things I would tell my mother. Thank you for showing me how to give nourishment to others. Thank you for showing me how to give it to myself.
