By Esther Lee

Kimchi stew is a beloved Korean dish requiring just three ingredients:

Well-fermented kimchi 
Your choice of meat
Tofu

Throw it all into a pot with just enough water to submerge the ingredients. Bring to a rolling boil and reduce the heat to simmer for at least half an hour. Arrange sliced tofu on top. Garnish with scallions and turn the heat back to high right before serving. 

The stew should still be bubbling when you set it on the table—the rhythmic rippling whetting the appetite, the steam transporting the aromas in a dream-like haze. Tasting it should feel just like home. 

***

Kimchi stew is my mother’s specialty—a fact made clear by the sheer number of times I saw it on the dining table growing up. 

A spoonful of fiery orange-red stew atop freshly steamed white rice was my favorite way to usher in the changing seasons. It was the greeting I hoped for when I came back home from camps, then college, and then the cities where I lived post-graduation. It quelled my all-consuming pregnancy nausea—four times over. It’s what I craved, sometimes, for no particular reason at all. 

As a child, I did not know that the stew’s deceptively simple recipe belied the labor that it requires; namely, the multi-day process that is making kimchi, and then the months-long wait for it to reach the right stage of fermentation for stew. I also didn’t know that this feeling of comfort wasn’t in the stew at all. It was in my mother’s hands. 

***

Kimchi stew embodies the quintessential ingredient inherent in every homemade Korean dish: sohn-maht (hand-taste). It’s baked into every unwritten recipe that calls for a handful of this and a pinch of that—the proportions wholly dependent on the cook’s one-of-a-kind hands and impossible to recreate by anyone else’s. It’s what makes a mother’s version of a food exclusively hers. 

No wonder every Korean’s favorite kimchi stew is their mother’s. The taste is indelibly written into your bones; immediately recognizable and yet profoundly unreplicable. No one else’s stew tastes as good, and you can never get your own stew to taste quite like hers. It’s why you’re always pining for the original. Nothing else compares. 

***

I met my husband in Chicago when he was in medical school and most of his meals were an assembly job of items from the pantry. It was also a time when he, in his own words, could eat Chipotle every single day without getting sick of it. 

He redeemed himself of his seemingly one-note flavor preferences when he expressed his love for kimchi at all stages of fermentation: freshly made when it tastes like a spicy salad, all the way to its most fermented state when the cabbage has lost most of its structural integrity and, in his words, you can really taste the alcohol. 

This illustrates my husband to a tee: his flexibility—his willingness to bend when life’s circumstances call for it. There were seasons when he lived to eat and others when he would eat to live; ironically, it’s in the latter season that our love first began and blossomed. 

***

My mother, like her kimchi stew, packs a straightforward punch of heat and spice. She dishes up her honesty in the same manner she serves her food—in extra large portions: Only a mother will tell you the whole truth, she says, before giving me a one-two blow of opinions I asked her for. And the ones I didn’t. 

On the blunt bangs I contemplate to alleviate my postpartum hair loss: A regressing hairline beats a curtain on your face. And on the importance of sunscreen: So you don’t get wrinkles and sun spots. A tan won’t suit you, anyway. 

And then there are my own blind spots that she sees with laser precision. Like a creeping selfishness and harshness towards my husband and children that is more often felt than seen: Reform while your marriage and children are both young—lest you give them scars.

She’s not mean about any of this, but she is matter-of-fact in a way that blows the wind out of my sails. I trust her implicitly, but I also know that I will see—even if it’s in hindsight—the wisdom in changing course. So, I scrap the bangs and go for long layers (the ability to pull all of my hair back into a ponytail is, indeed, priceless with a handsy baby and the daily buckling of young children into their carseats). I never forget to slather on sunscreen (a tan’s sun-kissed glow is temporary, skin damage is forever). I repent and seek forgiveness at her prompting (turns out that my character is a product of my mother’s sohn-maht, too).  

Like the pungent aroma of kimchi that permeates my entire being, her provisions were, and continue to be, all-encompassing, immediate, tangible. Her love preserves me in the same salty brine that sometimes stings (the truth can hurt!) and stifles me (boundaries? What boundaries?). I never question her love—forthright and unapologetic as it is. Instead, I instinctively question every love that looks different from hers—the same way I immediately wrinkle my nose at any kimchi stew that tastes different from my mother’s.

***

My husband is a man of strong convictions when it comes to biblical truths and scientifically-proven facts.

Bangs or no bangs? You are beautiful no matter what. On the importance of sunscreen: Sun protection is the best skin protection, no more and no less. And on all of my shortcomings as a wife and mother: God’s grace carries you at your worst and at your best. I love you unconditionally. 

There’s rarely anything wrong with what he says and yet my response is a perpetual: “And?! But what do you really think?!” In the back of my mind, I am also wondering: What would my mother say? 

***

A conversation with my mom usually begins with: “Did you eat?” (Hello!), followed by, “What did you eat?” (How are you?). These questions come from a place of care but come across as nagging. 

Meanwhile, I bristle with hurt any time my husband doesn’t think to ask these same questions. He trusts that I ate—without his questioning—yet his silence tastes like hints of neglect.

The truth is, I want an opportunity to explain that I ate the stale crusts off of our kids’ sandwiches and their leftover cold peas for lunch. That I practically skipped a whole meal. I want him to say—nay, exclaim—You poor thing! Let me make you some kimchi stew for dinner. 

I just want him to show me his love in the same way my mother does. 

The problem is: my husband’s kimchi stew would taste nothing like my mother’s. For one, he prefers pork to tuna—he's messing with the broth that I have known all my life. The one I had always believed is best. My mother’s love had been the most overt force for the majority of my life. I was unprepared to receive love in any other way—by any other hands. Adapting has always been his forte, not mine.

In my mind, their differences—in culinary preferences and otherwise—make it easy to pit my mother’s love against my husband’s, the way I would their kimchi stew. One is flavorful and the other underseasoned. One satiates and the other leaves me wanting. One is authentic, while the other sometimes doesn't feel like the real thing at all.

***

I’ve had four pregnancies, and my mom has been there for the end of every single one of them. This is no small feat. I’ve delivered my babies in four different cities; my mom has had to travel by car or plane for nearly all of them. 

But I was always her priority and the contents of her suitcases made it very plain. A small corner of one suitcase held her toiletries and clothing. The rest of her luggage brimmed with frozen blocks of homemade bone broth and packets of dried seaweed—the good stuff from the coasts of rural Korea with magical properties to heal my broken postpartum body. Of course, she always brought homemade kimchi strategically wrapped in layers of saran nestled into glass tupperware. She’d make her grand entrance ready to nourish my body and tend to my every need. And I’d think: this is love. 

***

Of all the pregnancies, my first one was the most memorable: it was our first baby and my mom’s first grandchild. He was also my most overdue baby (by a whole 10 days). All that waiting meant a whole lot of stewing, in every sense of the word. My mom made lots of stew—out of her kimchi, yes, but also out of me. She outwardly manifested all of my inner anxieties for me—so much so that I hardly felt the need to express them myself; I just boiled in her loving (s)mothering. 

My husband, though? He offered no commentary. Instead, he sketched me a bar graph depicting the percentage of women who delivered between 39 and 42 weeks. The result: the most lovely bell-shaped curve I’d seen. 

In that moment, my husband communicated two things. One, he saw me in my loneliness. And two, other pregnant women comprised that 41-week bar with me. I was, in fact, not at all alone. 

Who knew that a bar graph drawn by my husband’s hand could radiate such warmth? Or that probability and statistics could so effectively point me to the grounding peace of God?

His long-suffering may not always immediately satisfy my appetite for love. And his steadfast patience doesn’t always quench my thirst. Too often, I dismiss his bulwark of a presence—formed by countless small, faithful (and often overlooked) gestures as something less than what it actually is: a profound, abiding love. But it’s his love that has increased the depth of the bowl which receives all other love—including my mother’s.

***

My kimchi stew today features my mother’s kimchi, but I make it with my husband’s preferences in mind. I add thick chunks of fatty pork belly. I go rogue and also add a heaping spoonful of red pepper paste lending an unctuous, sweet-peppery thickness to the stew—something my mother would never do. 

But it’s delicious. After all, it is an amalgamation of my mother and husband that makes my stew uniquely mine. And it’s with this version that I most fondly infuse my mother’s indulgent love while savoring the quiet goodness of my husband’s. It’s comforting and restorative—just like home. 

Guest essay written by Esther Lee. Esther lives in the suburbs of Northern Virginia with her husband and spends her days discipling her four littles ages 7, 5, 4, and 1. Her children were each birthed in different cities as her growing family traveled across the country to complete her husband's medical training. She's collected many stories along the way and hopes to find the words to write them all down some day.