Chicken Soup And Growing Up
My kitchen is filled with the nostalgic aroma of homemade chicken stock—cozy and comforting, with undertones of childhood innocence and naivety. I stand at the counter, picking meat from a boiled chicken carcass while the kids play at my feet. My green cast iron soup pot sits on the burner beside me, the stock simmering slightly, and I add bits of chicken back in as I pull them off the bone.
The distinctive two-part harmony of an Indigo Girls’ song fills the room and combines with the soup smell to transport me to my parents’ kitchen. I close my eyes and see my mom standing at the island, a boiled chicken carcass on the pull-out cutting board in front of her. Her blue apron, her signature hair clip, and the sound of Indigo Girls or Eva Cassidy playing from the wall-mounted speakers.
I’ve watched her make chicken soup at least a thousand times. Watched her confident, construction-worn hands stripping the small bones of every last morsel of meat, her handmade gold wedding band catching the light from time-to-time. Her soup is just like her—all bold flavors and nontraditional ingredients—and varies a little every time she makes it, depending on what she has on hand. Sometimes she adds beans, or rice, or stewed tomatoes and pasta. She uses fresh carrots dug from her garden and herbs I don’t know the names of. But no matter how she alters it, it’s the ultimate comfort food, though I have to admit I didn’t always find it comforting.
I grew up in a small town in South-Central Washington State. (If you’re from Washington you always have to add the “state.”) It’s the kind of place where almost everyone is related, where hundred-year-old barns and corrals dot the cow pasture and wheat field landscape—and your last name matters. A lot. But I didn’t have one of those last names. My parents were transplants. They dressed different, voted different, and ate Thai food and chicken soup instead of casseroles and steaks.
As a teenager, I used to joke that the only thing my mom could cook was soup. But it wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t about the soup. I meant: I wish you dyed your salt-and-pepper hair, had a normal job, and voted Republican. I wish you wouldn’t drive your VW Camper Van into the pickup-filled parking lot at school. I wish … you were more like everybody else’s mom.
But my mom didn’t care that she was different. She played guitar in a bluegrass band, wore exotic embroidered shirts, and worked on a fishing weir in the Alaskan Bush in her early twenties. She built houses alongside my dad, painted gecko stencils on our living room floor, and waited to get pregnant until she was thirty-five and finally ready to settle down.
My son drives a Hot Wheels car over my bare foot, tickling my toes, and I step over him to rinse my hands in the sink. I wipe them on my pink and purple floral apron, and my finger catches on the red stitching along its edge where my mom mended a tear for me. My daughter hugs my leg and I ruffle her hair, wondering as I do how she’ll feel about me in a few years. Will she be ashamed of me the way I so often was of my own mom?
As I toss the carcass into the garbage can under the sink, I notice bits of meat still on the bone and can’t help but think my mom would have done a better job. But the digital clock on the stove tells me my kids will fall apart in about 15 minutes if I don’t get some food in their bellies.
I rinse and dry my cutting board, and my son pulls at my apron to get my attention (which is how it got torn in the first place).
“I want to help, Mom,” he says.
I nod, and he runs to the pantry to get the step stool my dad built for his second Christmas. Its sturdy legs screech across the tile as he pushes it toward the island where I’m waiting with a butter knife, a store-bought carrot, and a cutting board. He grins at me, climbs onto his stool, and immediately stabs the carrot with the dull-edged knife. I turn to my cutting board, and as I dice carrots, celery, and onions, I think about how, unlike my mom, I use the same ingredients every time, unconsciously matching my personality with my soup the way she does with hers.
I’ve spent my whole life focusing on the differences between my mom and me. From our coloring, to our decorating styles, to the way we interact with the world, we are opposites in almost every way. But I’ve been too busy distancing myself from her to notice or appreciate her many positive qualities, choosing instead to spend all my time and energy being embarrassed by her differences and her refusal to blend in with the crowd.
As an immature, self-conscious child and teenager, I agonized over my mom’s self-assurance. With every fiber of my being I wished for a different, more normal mom. A mom who didn’t expect so much uniqueness out of me—who would let me follow the crowd she so actively resisted.
But maybe that’s the way mother-daughter relationships work, and in order to figure out who I was in the world I had to first define myself in opposition to my mom. Maybe I had to figure out the parts of me that aren’t like her to see the parts of me that are.
I slide the soup pot to the back of the stove and ignite the burner under a frying pan. I add olive oil and wait for it to heat up. The chopped onion, celery, garlic, and carrots sizzle as they hit the pan, filling the kitchen with their familiar smell and making my stomach rumble.
Turning around, I put my hands on my hips and watch my son chop carrots. He sticks his tongue out when he concentrates, and I can’t help but smile.
He feels my eyes and looks up. “What?” he asks.
“I love you,” I say.
His whole face lights up as he says, “I yuv you, too.”
I add the softened vegetables to the soup pot and stir it a few times, mesmerized by the swirling colors. I remember how the sight of my mom picking a carcass used to turn my stomach. The thought of my fingers on bone and slimy meat “grossed me out.” Now, my queasiness dulled by motherhood, it feels like second nature, and I can easily answer the thousandth ‘but why?’ for the day as I make the soup my family loves.
My daughter hugs my leg, and whimpers a little, interrupting my thoughts.
“Mommmmmmm.” My son whines, the magic of “helping” beginning to fade. “I’m hun-gy. When will the soup be reawy?”
I dump egg noodles into the pot, put on the lid with a loud clang!, and turn the burner up as high as it will go.
My husband jokes that I could feed our family for a week on one chicken. Unlike my teenage soup jokes, he means it as a compliment. He’s right, too. From roast chicken, to pasta, to enchiladas, to soup, I can stretch the meat of a four-pound chicken to last the better part of a week. It’s a skill I learned from my mom. A skill that most women, with the kind of ordinary, “normal” mom I longed for growing up, may not have. Where most look at a chicken carcass and see garbage, my mom taught me to see the key ingredient for soup.
I lift the lid to check the noodles and inhale. The soup’s aroma swirls around me, smelling almost exactly like the soup of my childhood despite the subtle difference in ingredients, and it occurs to me: I’ve been so focused on the ways my soup differs from my mom’s (and looking for evidence that one is better than the other) that I’ve entirely missed the ways they are similar—the stock, the smell, the adaptability, the resourcefulness.
Maybe the soup we serve isn’t so different after all, and maybe my mom and I aren’t so different, either. I’m less adventurous, more reserved, and more image conscious than she is, but I have her eyebrows, her nose, and inherited her love of the outdoors and long-winded conversations. And with the confidence and independence I once resented, she gave me the freedom to become the woman I am today.
I lift my daughter to my hip and lean in to kiss her forehead. She inherited my mom’s nose and eyebrows too, and everyone says she is the spitting image of me as a child—a likeness she’ll probably hate as a teenager. She leans her head against my shoulder and I can’t help but wonder about the woman she’ll become.
In thirty years, will she feed her own family a version of my mom’s chicken soup?
My husband’s boots sound on the porch as I ladle soup into bowls, and the kids stampede to the door with squeals of “daddy!” He kisses their cheeks and ruffles their hair and calls, “smells good, what’s for dinner?”
“Toup!” my son shouts. “I helped!”
I hear my husband’s sock-clad feet, and feel his arms wrap around me from behind. “Mmmm,” he says, kissing my cheek. “Your chicken soup is my favorite.”
Closing my eyes, I lean against him. “Mine, too.” I say. Mine too.
Guest essay written by Cara Stolen. Cara is a ranch wife and work-at-home mama of two living in rural Washington state. She loves exceptionally early mornings, strong black coffee, and listening to her children giggle. You can find her hiding in her pantry sneaking chocolate chips by the handful, or on Instagram. She also blogs occasionally.
Photo by Sarah Hauser.