Columnists
Peel, Wrangle, Write
March! It’s still Women’s History Month and I’m still on a journey to understand myself. I used to think life would be pretty simple once I found the “man of my dreams”, settled down and made a home for my own family. I don’t know where I got the idea that adult life was a piece-ofcake. I certainly didn’t look at my mom and say, “She’s got it pretty good. That’s what I’ll do.” Nope. If anything, I should have looked at how hard my mom (and dad) worked to keep things together. I should have run in the other direction once I was old enough to make my own way in this world. Life was never really easy for my mom, from childhood to adulthood. And she certainly didn’t suffer in silence. She was no martyr. But she did make life for her family pretty darn good. No, there won’t be books written about my mom. Maybe just a Times column, or two.
Cooking and baking. Well, cooking and baking for a family of nine took up a lot of my mom’s time. She certainly wasn’t afraid to get “us kids” involved in making a meal, especially dinner. If meal preparation wasn’t our thing, there was always a younger sibling who needed attention while the meal was being made. You either peeled potatoes and carrots, shucked peas and shredded cabbage or you were charged with babysitting whoever happened to be underfoot. I preferred the job of sous-chef to sibling-wrangler, although I often ended up doing the latter. The thing with infant siblings was they never stayed put and often needed attention in the diaper region. Diaper loads made me gag, almost as loudly as overcooked carrots did. In the fifties, disposable diapers weren’t on the market. If you changed a messy diaper, you also had to make sure that diaper was “flushed out”. Give me a bushel of potatoes to peel, anytime. Mom’s meal rules were pretty simple. She always served two vegetables, potatoes and meat. Any meal which didn’t follow that plan was considered a special treat meal. Those meals didn’t happen very often. Mom was pretty focused on how well we ate and wouldn’t have anyone suggest she didn’t feed her family properly. Two vegetables, potatoes and meat. End of discussion. Even if she served spaghetti with meatballs, she found a way to squeeze in two vegetables and potatoes. Sometimes, the vegetables and potatoes ended up in the red meat sauce. It’s funny how, so many years later, I feel as if I’m not serving a real meal unless I follow Mom’s rules. Two veg, potatoes and meat.
Did I mention baking? I did. My mom was a very creative person when it came to baking. She often tested recipes for a neighbour who contributed to cookbooks and magazines. If Mom couldn’t make the recipe work for her pal, it usually didn’t make it to print. The cookbooks and magazine recipes targeted the family cook and baker. As a result we, the Durning kids, were the envy of our friends at lunch time. We always had delicious cookies, cupcakes or squares in our lunchbox. Of course, we envied the kids who had Twinkies and Dads Cookies in their packed lunch and trades were often made, much to my mom’s chagrin. “You traded a Maids of Honour Tart for some packaged garbage. What the HE double hockey sticks is wrong with you kids?”
March! It roars in like the lion so many women are. In this, the month of Women’s History, encourage other women and listen to their stories. It took a long time for me to realize I am my mother’s daughter, and because of the strong woman she was, I can peel a potato or wrangle a toddler and write a column with the best of them.
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