Crazy Cake Revisited

Do you remember long ago, when I posted a venting post about the Crazy Cake that is so beloved in Paul’s family? It is a Depression Era cake, and so it contains no eggs, no butter, and only one tablespoon of baking cocoa per entire layer of “chocolate” cake. (Those quotation marks are just as bitchy as you imagine.)

Trust me that I know and understand that a Beloved Family Recipe can taste DELICIOUS to a person, even if it has no butter and no eggs and features a Depression-Era skimp on cocoa. (And of course it is LOVELY to have a cake option like this if you are looking for a dairy/egg-free cake for allergy reasons, though I’d advise DRAMATICALLY INCREASING the cocoa.) We have similar recipes in my own family, including a cherished delight that has come down through the generations and is nothing more than pork sausage seasoned with salt and pepper and baked into rolls of white bread dough, then dipped into ketchup; this is our HUGE SPECIAL OCCASION meal. We also have a green Jell-o salad that has cottage cheese in it, so please don’t think I don’t understand sentimental family recipes.

But I also understand that my sentimental family recipes are not OBJECTIVELY good to people who didn’t grow up with them and so have neither the “family” nor the “sentimental” elements. I expect Paul to eat the white-bread-wrapped sausage rolls on my family’s special occasions, but I don’t expect him to talk about how AMAZING and EXCEPTIONAL the recipe is, which is what his family does about this cake. It’s so MOIST! It’s so DELICIOUS! It’s the BEST CAKE EVER! Not like those inferior “BOX” mixes! (They say their quotes all bitchy-like, too.)

So if this cake is cherished to you because of you grew up with it and your grandma baked it whenever you visited or whatever, and your family always brings it out on special occasions, I DO get where you are coming from. But I think in order to discuss the cake further, we need to remember and agree that it is a DEPRESSION ERA cake. It was meant to substitute for the real thing when essential ingredients were not available. It’s like a diet recipe that uses fat-free “cream” and artificial sweetener and cottage cheese and applesauce to simulate a dessert. It is a MAKE-DO dessert, a SURVIVAL dessert. We now have ACCESS to the butter and eggs and cream and sugar and cocoa, so GOD KNOWS why we would continue to make do with the survival cake. On the other hand, I now have the option to eat filet mignon on Christmas Eve but I would greatly prefer my salt/pepper sausage wrapped in white bread and dipped in ketchup, and I would resent any attempts to tell me the filet mignon was “better,” so I DO get it. (But if our recipe had been made from inferior ingredients during the Depression, like suet and tongue-end mixed with stale bread crumbs to simulate meat, you can bet I’d substitute the better ingredients now that we had them, rather than preserving The Original Recipe.)

In short, I have feelings and opinions about this cake, and yet I am committed to making this cake for Paul every year on his birthday, and I am committed to doing it with as good an attitude as I can muster: I will tell YOU how frustrating I find it, but I will not vent to HIM. (Much.) (Anymore.) And also, I have a certain percentage of self-identity invested in my baking, and food/gifts are my love language, and so I want it to be as good as possible: I take no pleasure (very little pleasure) in having it come out terrible. I have re-copied his mother’s recipe onto my own index card in my own handwriting, to reduce the resentment I feel and hopefully improve the results by not making me feel as if her grating, critical, bossy voice is in my ear. I have committed to NOT trying to substitute butter/eggs/etc. to make it taste “better,” remembering that I would not want Paul to substitute any ingredients in one of my cherished family recipes, if he ever made one of my cherished family recipes for me.

But here is the thing: for at least the last half-dozen years, and possibly longer, the cake has come out IMPOSSIBLY BADLY. It NEVER came out of the pan easily, but it used to come out in no more than two to three pieces per layer, and I could paste those together with frosting and resentment—but the last half-dozen years, it has had to be SPOONED out of the pan in chunks. I am not exaggerating when I say I have cried and screamed, literally cried and screamed, after carefully carefully carefully applying Crisco and flour to the cake pans, carefully following the recipe, and still getting oily pale-brown chunks that can’t be formed into a cake. Paul has had to spend more than one Birthday Eve reassuring me that it’s okay and it doesn’t matter and that he’ll have something else as his birthday dessert, and no one should have to do that on their Birthday Eve and/or on the topic of their once-per-year special sentimental dessert. THIS CANNOT CONTINUE.

Here is where you come in, I HOPE: If you make this recipe as a Cherished Family Cake and you like it, can you tell me anything you do that HAS to be done to make it come out right? Maybe I copied it wrong from my mother-in-law’s stupid picky bossy recipe card. Or maybe it literally requires two tablespoons of actual vanilla extract (that’s the same as the amount of cocoa), at the current non-Depression-Era price of roughly six dollars, and maybe everything is going wrong because I substituted imitation vanilla or because I made the assumption that 2 T. was a transcription error and it should have been 2 t. Maybe my attempt to add more cocoa is the problem, though I have tried going back to the original two tablespoons, with no improvement. Maybe there was an instruction about removal-from-the-pans that I thought I could do without. Or maybe when I rolled my eyes at instructions such as “Beat exactly two minutes BY THE CLOCK!!!!,” I was rolling my eyes at actual essential elements of the magic spell. I may have worked in a bakery, but that doesn’t mean I understand MAGICAL SPELLS. I will accept the magical spell from YOUR family’s recipe, even as I resisted it from Paul’s family recipe. I will accept YOUR gentle guidance even though I rejected Paul’s mother’s bossy fist. (Gah, that woman was the WORST with recipes. All of them were either “Oh, I don’t really use measurements or instructions” with a merry little laugh, or else SUPER DUPER EXCESSIVELY PICKY AND DETAILED WITH LOTS OF ALL-CAPS.)

And I’m not above some fussy prissiness in a recipe. When I was on Weight Watchers, if you had told me I needed to whip a mixture for two full minutes, or use the fat-free sugar-free version of an item, or use ground oatmeal instead of flour, I would absolutely have done it without blinking or flinching. And now that I’m on keto, if you told me to use a particular kind of meat, or use more butter, or use a specific weird expensive sugar substitute, I would be similarly all-in. “Doing it the right way” is not a problem as long as it is not my mother-in-law telling me what is right. (And if you’ve never had a single problem and it’s the easiest/best cake in the world and you don’t know what I could be talking about, you know that’s not helpful and you can keep it.)

 

Follow-up: After writing this post, I impulsively decided to make the cake in a no-birthday-pressure environment, just to see what happened, and maybe to get some good photos of it sticking to the pan. And instead it came out beautifully, and did not fall apart into any chunks. Here are the things I did that may or may not have been important:

• A wet-ingredients bowl and a dry-ingredients bowl, and not combining until the last minute. Which I have done before, because see also: I like to bake and have worked in a bakery.

• Then mixing them for EXACTLY TWO MINUTES BY THE CLOCK (with one pause to scrape the bowl), which I have done before, because see also: really trying to get this right, even if it means allowing end results to take priority over irritations and resentments.

• Letting the cakes cool for 15 minutes, then using a soft spatula to go around the edges before de-panning, which I have done before, because see also: I like to bake and have worked in a bakery.

• I did, however, QUADRUPLE the cocoa powder, because 1 T. per cake layer is nothing more than FOOD COLORING. Even a QUADRUPLE amount is not really enough, but I don’t want to ruin Paul’s childhood memories. But I have increased the cocoa before without him noticing/minding.

 

Second follow-up: Wait. Wait wait wait. THE OVEN. Our oven was gradually failing for a number of years, then we recently replaced it, but then we moved so I never tried the cake in the new oven. The new house has an oven that we have noticed is very good: some things that were troublesome to bake before are now non-troublesome. And “oven” is the only answer I can think of that explains why I USED to be able to make the cake come out right, but then couldn’t anymore.

Snow Discouragement

The existence of snow is enough to defeat me this year. On a day when it does NOT snow, and when the previous snow has been handled/melted/dried to the point that the roads/driveways are clear and dry, I can just barely make myself do the absolutely required tasks of my life: I can shower and dress, I can go for groceries, I can take the children to their appointments, I can keep us in clean laundry. I can’t unpack any more boxes, but that genuinely can wait, and also I tell myself that with every week that goes by without needing the contents of those boxes, I am another week closer to knowing if I can get rid of that stuff entirely. (This does not work when, for example, I buy another box of envelopes because I can’t face digging out the stationery/office box. But it works for SOME things.)

But the snow! It’s a giant mess that just DROPS on us! Just drops EVERYWHERE! And we have to go outside and CLEAN IT ALL UP. And we CAN’T really clean it all up, so then we have dirty slush everywhere, and we track it everywhere, and it falls off the bottom of our cars into our nice clean garages, and our terrible children walk across our nice clean floors without taking their shoes off and then say “Oh whoops” like it’s not the end of the world!

And when it snows, it makes a mess of SCHEDULES, too. Appointments that are now difficult and dangerous to get to! Errands that need to be delayed until we can shovel out! Driveways that MUST be shoveled by 8:00 a.m. because someone is coming to clean/deliver! Trips to the grocery store that have to be done earlier than planned (along with half the town) or else later (when the milk/eggs/bread/cheese situation is getting dire, and slush gets tracked inside with every load).

Moving during winter was a terrible idea. We have this new giant steep depressing driveway that I already hated before shoveling was a factor, plus we have to keep going over to the old house to shovel THAT driveway TOO. And we discovered something new for me to resent about the new house: the roof is set up so that it dumps snow directly in front of the two doors. The last time it snowed, I carefully shoveled that whole entire area (walking a distance with each shovelful, because there’s nowhere to PUT the snow)—and a couple of hours later, it was as if I hadn’t been out there at all: over a foot of snow, blocking the doors, with a nice clear clean roof shining in the sun. We shoveled it again, and soon there was an ice slick there instead: the dripping from the roof made what was basically an icicle puddle. There were ice stalagmites that explain why the threshold of one doorway is chipped weirdly so that it lets in drafts: the ice forms in lumps so that the door won’t open, so then you have to hack at it with a shovel, and damage occurs. And that area gets no sun, so even with salt and sand and time, there is still a nice little welcome mat of ice to menace anyone who comes to the house.

Paul says helpfully that there are “things that can be done,” but it is not clear to me that that is the case. There’s already something built into the roof over each door, something that looks as if it’s supposed to divert snow/rain, but does not manage to do that at all: when it rains, rain pours down off the roof directly where you’re standing as you struggle to unlock the door; when snow is melting, it drips right in front of the door to make ice RIGHT THERE. Paul said something vague about a canopy, but I don’t know; the problem seems bigger than that to me. It’s a Total Design issue: the driveway was built to go right up to the house, and to go all along one side of the house, and the snow from the roof is GOING to fall off right there; if it doesn’t fall directly in front of the door, it will fall directly to the left of the door and still need to be shoveled, and we’ll still have to walk a distance to find a place to put each shovelful. It’s a bad design, and now it’s our responsibility.

I try to be optimistic: spring is coming! Just because the daffodil stems I bought at the grocery store earlier this week dried up without opening, that’s not an omen! There can only be so much more snow, and tomorrow is March! MARCH! But winter will come back next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that. “And this is just our lives now,” said Elizabeth while helping me shovel an area we had shoveled earlier, capturing my exact sentiment. At this point I have to think bigger picture: Just think what a relief it will be when we move out of this house someday in the distant future!

Daffodils; Songs from the ’80s/’90s We’re Not Sick of Yet

This is the time of year my grocery store offers little bundles of ten closed daffodils for $1.79, and if your grocery store does something similar I highly recommend finding a vase in the back of your highest cabinet and taking it down and putting some daffodils into it. I go to the grocery store twice a week, so if I buy a bunch each time, I maintain a nice full bouquet even when I have to take out the wilted ones. It bolsters my late-winter mood SO SURPRISINGLY MUCH, just having some yellow spring flowers in the house. If you don’t have a vase but you do have a Goodwill, check there: ours has TONS of vases for like a dollar each, and I would think their supply would be especially high right after Valentine’s Day.

Speaking of mood-bolstering, it was so fun to talk about music with you guys on Twitter the other day.

I sat at my computer while replies came in, listening to option after option on YouTube. So many good songs! I went with Kiss (Prince), Owner of a Lonely Heart (Yes), Everybody Wants You (Billy Squier), Call It Love (Poco), and The Cure (Lady Gaga). (That last one doesn’t at all match what I was looking for but I wanted to hear it so I put it in.) There were a ton of other suggestions that were exactly the kind of song I like, and the only reason I didn’t choose them was that I’d already chosen them on previous occasions. Here are some of those, mixed with others I’ve brought before, in case you are looking for similar songs:

Time After Time (Cyndi Lauper)
Footloose (Kenny Loggins)
Take On Me (A-ha)
Venus (Bananarama)
Joking (Indigo Girls)
Least Complicated (Indigo Girls)
Hearts of the World Will Understand (Starship)
We Built This City (Starship)
Love Walks In (Van Halan)
Dancing in the Dark (Bruce Springsteen)
Dancer in a Daydream (Ace of Base)
All Out of Love (Air Supply)
Can’t Fight This Feeling (REO Speedwagon)
Walking on Sunshine (Katrina and the Waves)
Jump for My Love (Pointer Sisters)
Straight Up (Paula Abdul)
Love and Affection (Nelson)
Free Your Mind (En Vogue)
I Remember You (Skid Row)
Just Can’t Get Enough (Depeche Mode)
Invisible Touch (Genesis)
Edge of a Broken Heart (Vixen)
Pictures of You (The Cure)
So Alive (Love and Rockets)
Mystify (INXS)
Slide (Goo Goo Dolls)
Name (Goo Goo Dolls)
Walk Like an Egyptian (The Bangles)
Just What I Needed (The Cars)
Magic (The Cars)
Best Friend (Queen)
Wait (White Lion)
Don’t You Forget About Me (Simple Minds)
Closing Time (Semisonic)
Good Riddance (Green Day)
Wonderwall (Oasis)
I Want You (Savage Garden)
Against All Odds (Phil Collins)
Take a Chance on Me (Erasure)
Bizarre Love Triangle (New Order)
Birdhouse in Your Soul (They Might Be Giants)
For the Longest Time (Billy Joel)
Obsession (Animotion)
Forever Young (Alphaville)
To Be With You (Mr. Big)
The Power of Love (Huey Lewis and the News)
Glory of Love (Peter Cetera)
Jimmy Olsen’s Blues (Spin Doctors)
Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong (Spin Doctors)
You Spin Me Round (Dead or Alive)

(I realize some of these came out in the 1970s, but we were still listening to them later on. There was a big Queen fad after Wayne’s World came out, for example. And in high school I found a Cars Greatest Hits album on a clearance rack and listened to it a million times.)

A Morning of Parenting Teenagers

This morning Elizabeth, age 13, got mad at me because after I agreed that nine of the ten things she told me about one of her classes sounded annoying, I mildly countered the tenth thing, saying I thought it was a reasonable thing for the teacher to assume. She argued back, near tears, then lashed out that she would just go complain to the teacher about things 1-9, then!

Then 17-year-old William said, as I was walking out the door to bring the other kids to school, that no one told him we were going to a movie tonight, so he hadn’t changed his work schedule, so he couldn’t go. We have been talking about this movie all week. It’s true it’s not like I said to him, “William: remember, we are going to the movie on Wednesday, so be sure to change your work schedule”—but the original plan was to go last Wednesday and I DID say that very thing to him then, so when it was postponed a week I guess I assumed he would realize he would need to do the same thing again? He says we never indicated that the movie was going to be tonight, just sometime in the future. But since it did come up numerous times in other ways throughout the week, I don’t see how he can not have known. My guess is that he didn’t think of the work implications until this morning, then suddenly did think of it and felt dumb, and then panicked and tried to make it our fault so he could huff around the kitchen huffily instead of saying “Oh no, I screwed up the plan!”

All of this was before 7:15 in the morning.

It’s so discouraging to do SO MANY THINGS for kids: listening and supporting what they say, acquiring for them the things they need for projects, keeping a supply of their favorite foods, keeping them supplied with clothing, seeing things they’ll like and impulsively buying them, keeping track of their appointments and writing their notes for school and remembering to pick them up, reminding them about so many things—and then have them be upset over the tiny percentage of things I don’t do. It’s especially annoying when it’s not something I got wrong or made a mistake on (though occasional human error should ALSO be understandable): it would be one thing if I said I would be sure to get X and then I forgot, but in a lot of these cases it’s NO ONE PUT IT ON THE LIST SO I DIDN’T KNOW WE WERE OUT OF IT or YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE HANDLING YOUR OWN WORK SCHEDULE or I’M NOT GOING TO SIDE WITH YOU AGAINST A TOTALLY REASONABLE THING YOUR TEACHER THINKS.

Reading this over, I think this comes across like I’m the meek martyred mother figure, rushing around in everyone’s service, allowing the family to walk all over me, wincing and apologizing—but that is not how it is and not how I mean to convey it. I say those all-caps parts LOUDLY and TO THE FAMILY, not just in my head after they’re all gone to school/work and I’m alone in my housewife apron. I say “NO ONE PUT IT ON THE LIST!” when there’s a complaint about being out of something, and “We have been talking about this for a WEEK!” when someone claims ignorance of the schedule, and “You are supposed to be thinking ahead about your schedule and handling it WITHOUT me reminding you” when there is a conflict. (Okay, I didn’t say “I’m not going to side with you against a totally reasonable thing your teacher thinks!” But I did re-assert, mildly and kindly, that I really did think the teacher was reasonable to assume the students would know what time class ended.) It’s just, I’m feeling irritable-sad-cranky-resentful that their first impulse is to blame me, and that they don’t seem to compare the things they see as my failings to all the things I DO do for them, not that any child ever HAS made that comparison, not in all the history of time.

This morning I think I was getting some misdirected blame for stuff going on in other areas. Elizabeth is probably upset about something about that class, so when I disagreed with something she said, she took it as a chance to redirect the upset at me. William is probably overwhelmed with senior year and work and waiting for college decisions, and so when something slipped through the cracks, he found a chance to blame someone else for it this time. And I know a parent is supposed to be a safe place for that, but don’t you get sick of it sometimes? I get sick of it sometimes.

Anticipating Our Own Era as Mothers-in-Law

Hi Swistle,

I know you sometimes post reader questions, and this came to mind while reading your post about Rob coming home from college and the dynamics between an older child and parents. I also know you had a hard time with your mother-in-law.

I commented that, as the mother of all boys, I have a huge fear—my biggest parenting fear, in fact—that my boys will all marry women who dislike me or don’t care about having a relationship with me, and I will end up not having a close or satisfying relationship with my adult sons (or grandkids, for that matter.). Right now, my boys are all still little enough that they worship me and I am the center of their world, and I know that all goes away and that’s natural, but I hate to think that someday these little boys will end up like my husband is with his mother: frequently annoyed and rather distant.

Let me explain: I have a very annoying mother-in-law. I won’t go into the many, many examples I could share (which are endlessly entertaining to my friends), but she is a strong mix of passive-aggressive and undermining. She also possesses some of my most disliked personality flaws, including being braggy and two-faced. She certainly doesn’t think I worship my husband enough, and that he is above and beyond what I could ever deserve. We are very different in pretty much every way.

As a result, I’m sure I have complained and griped about her to my husband more than my fair share, but he agrees with me on all points and now feels much closer to my family. (I am biased, but I do think my parents and siblings are pretty darn great.) He has actually told me that he feels closer to my siblings than his, that he respects my parents opinions more and prefers to get their advice on things instead, and so on. Which is great for me now, but I fear that karma is going to bite me and I’m going to end up living the rhyme, “A son is a son till he marries his wife, but a daughter’s a daughter for the rest of my life.” It certainly feels true to me now.

So, for debate—this is long, please feel free to cut out all the backstory—what makes for a bad or good mother-in-law? What can we moms do to avoid those strained relationships with our future in-laws? I am heartened to know that my mom had a wonderful relationship with my paternal grandma, and I know there are other cases like that. But—what makes for those good and bad relationships? To be fair, my MIL was not a bad mom—very affectionate and fawning and permissive and special snow-flakey, but not a bad mom. She loves her kids a lot. I feel certain that my MIL believes she is actually an *excellent* mother and mother-in-law, and would be absolutely baffled to hear anything to the contrary. Is being self-aware enough?? How do I know whether I am self-aware? Maybe I, too, am actually a super annoying person?!

Thanks!

 

I am RIGHT THERE WITH YOU. The discussion has come up often with various of my friends, as our children approach the era of bringing new people legally into our families. How can we avoid being Bad Mothers-in-Law, when surely the bad mothers-in-law we know did not SET OUT to be terrible, and yet they STILL ARE?

(A digression already, when we have hardly even gotten started: I am going to be talking primarily about mothers-in-law, because in our society the mother-in-law relationship is considered the fraught one, and the father-in-law relationship is not. An individual father-in-law can have serious faults, but we don’t talk about fathers-in-law as a group the way we talk about mothers-in-law. This could be yet another area where women are held to a different/higher standard—like when female politicians must be likeable and have pleasant voices and answer questions about how they’re taking care of their children, while male politicians needn’t do any of those things. Or it could be that women in general really do act differently in this role than men do, and/or that fathers-in-law are just as problematic but in ways our society doesn’t criticize/punish them for. It is worth noting that in my first marriage, my father-in-law was difficult and manipulative, and my mother-in-law was pleasant and friendly—and yet at the time, I blamed her for the issues. In my second marriage, my mother-in-law drove me up a wall but on the other hand my father-in-law had almost nothing to do with us or his grandchildren, except to call every couple of years and try to get us to make him feel better about how bad he felt about being so terrible, so I’d say he was actually much worse. Anyway. Back to the post. I had just finished asking how on earth we were going to avoid being bad mothers-in-law, when presumably no one SET OUT to be a bad mother-in-law and yet many of them WERE.)

I was particularly perplexed by the way my mother-in-law considered herself to be an EXCELLENT mother-in-law. She would tell me about her sister-in-law and what a dreadful time her daughters-in-law had with her, and how lucky I was. How LUCKY I was. Meanwhile I was spending huge portions of her visits DAYDREAMING ABOUT UNTRACEABLE POISONS. When she died unexpectedly (NOT FROM UNTRACEABLE POISON), I was SUFFUSED WITH HAPPINESS!! and I still think of it now from time to time, with happy feelings of relief and luckiness at having been spared. We do not want our sons- and daughters-in-law SUFFUSED WITH HAPPINESS and FEELING RELIEVED AND LUCKY when we die! How how how can we avoid this??

(Well, and it’s not as scary as what I’m working myself up to, here. In-laws are for the most part non-chosen family members, and so it’s normal for them to be, er, not what we’d choose. And yet many of us accept that and adjust to it and cope with it and stay polite and everything is basically fine, and everyone is doing their best to get along, and no one is swooning with delight but also no one is daydreaming about untraceable poisons. I had a particularly bad experience with my mother-in-law, but that’s not the usual. Some in-laws feel friendly toward each other! Some of them even love each other devotedly! Some prefer their in-laws to their own actual family members! But it’s understandable that we would worry about the less-favorable outcomes and hope to do what we can to prevent them.)

One problem is that the whole situation is EXTREMELY DEPENDENT on the personality combinations involved. That is, I am willing to conceive of a person who might have married Paul and found his mother delightful. His mother did not like me very much, and our personalities were not a good match; some of her most aggravating qualities might not have been brought out at all if she’d had a different sort of daughter-in-law, or might have been brought out but not perceived as aggravating, or might have been perceived as aggravating but then swiftly and decisively dealt with. There could be areas where neither of us were at fault: our personalities just didn’t work out well together.

But also, my mother-in-law really was an oblivious and difficult person. That is, I can write some of this off as personality conflicts, no one’s fault, etc., but she was the kind of person who, with a topic as minor as “how to cook taco meat,” thought of there as being one Right Way (her way) and a whole bunch of Stupid Ways—not DIFFERENT ways but STUPID ways. She would tell stories about other people (often they were pointed stories about how those people did something I happened to also do), and she’d roll her eyes and make scoffing sounds about any decisions that were different than hers, and she’d say “It was just so STUPID!,” and make closing remarks like “Well, but they didn’t ask me!” as if that made her a reasonable, accepting person resigned to her fate as Cassandra, always right but never consulted/believed.

My hope is that we are starting from a place where we already know not to do this. And that as we get older, we will remain aware that there are many different right ways to live a life, and that those ways suit different people, and that two people can live very differently indeed (even including the way they cook taco meat) and still both be living the Right Way for them. And that we will able to apply that point of view to our daughters- and sons-in-laws as broadly and lovingly and supportively as we would want our mothers- and fathers-in-law to apply it to us. And that we can try not to be actively difficult people. And that our children will not bring actively difficult people into our lives. This is a lot of hopes.

I share your worry about getting a son-in-law or daughter-in-law who actively badmouths me to my child and turns my child against me. Basically I am worried I will get the same thing in a daughter/son-in-law that I had in a mother-in-law: someone who thinks there is one Right way to do things and all the other ways (definitely including mine) are Stupid, and that this should be regularly and scoffingly pointed out to my child until he/she agrees and scorns me for it. I guess this means I am hoping I have children who grow up understanding that just because they prefer to do things a certain way doesn’t mean preferring to do things a different way is stupid/wrong/gross/bad. And that if my children DO understand that, they will not be as likely to link their lives to people who think otherwise. Though attraction is a marvel, and makes all kinds of combinations happen.

Another concern I have is that the very ways we consider ourselves delightfully Not Difficult could be THE VERY THINGS that drive our children and their partners up a wall. My mother-in-law considered herself SUCH an easy houseguest, because unlike her parents she didn’t expect us to give up our bed for her—but “giving the guest the best bed in the house” was not a concept I was familiar with in my extended family, so I failed to appreciate her graciousness in not demanding to sleep in my bed. (Also, she mentioned it every time she visited, which made it seem like maybe she DID want us to give up our bed.) And there was a whole interesting category of things where she would say proudly that she didn’t need to be entertained, she didn’t need special meals cooked—but then she did need to be entertained and she did need special meals cooked, it’s just that her idea of entertainment and special cooking were not the same as mine, so what she saw as low-maintenance (she thought everyone should be eating salt-free and low-fat, so it was not special that she needed those kinds of meals) I saw as high-maintenance, and I don’t know if there was any way around that. Or wait, actually I do know the way around that: I think the key may be to avoid bragging about how easy we are, and to avoid assuming we’re easy and delightful.

I worry too because sometimes I see “Can’t Win” talk going on with relationships like these: it’s easy to do it when we don’t like someone or find the relationship difficult (see also: Bitch Eating Crackers). Like, if a mother-in-law visits, she’s a burden and an intrusion; but if she doesn’t, she doesn’t care about her grandchildren and she’s wrong for expecting people to travel to her. If she sends gifts, she’s sending things no one wants, and/or spending either too much or too little, and/or buying things WE wanted to buy the children, and/or buying things we didn’t want the children to have, and so on; if she doesn’t, she doesn’t even care enough to send gifts to her own grandchildren / doesn’t even care enough to mark their special occasions. If she asks for updates/photos, she’s demanding and needy; if she doesn’t, she doesn’t care and isn’t involved. Can’t win. I tried to correct that with my attitude toward my own mother-in-law: if she did something I didn’t like, I’d think “Would I be any happier if she did something else instead, or would I find a way to criticize her no matter what?” This led me to give credit where credit was due: she visited often and was involved with her grandchildren, which was GOOD; she sent gifts and cards and letters, which was GOOD; she was interested in updates and photos, which was GOOD. I’m going to try to remember to apply this also to my future sons- and daughters-in-law, and avoid thinking of them in Can’t Win ways if we don’t happen to like each other very much.

 

Okay, do we have a rough plan here?

1. We can emphasize to our children (and model it in the way we speak of others) that there are different Right Ways to live for different people: that two people can live differently and yet both be living exactly the right way for their own lives.

2. We can try to remember this ourselves as we get older, and not fall into the trap of thinking that younger people need us to tell them how to live exactly like we did/do.

3. We can be aware of the odd dynamics inherent to the whole “building family out of people who didn’t used to be family” concept, and expect to need to do our share to make these relationships go smoothly, and not panic if the relationships aren’t all great ones. We can hope that our children will bring dear good nice people into our lives, but we can focus on hoping our children will find the people who are right for THEM, not right for US.

4. We can try to be Not Difficult, and to avoid the common pitfalls (being critical, being intrusive, giving too much unasked-for input, scoffing at new developments and saying “We didn’t do things like that in MY day and we all survived!”), but not assume that we are succeeding, and not brag that we are succeeding.

5. In situations where personalities are not a delightful fit, we can do our part to make sure we are not putting our sons- and daughters-in-law into Can’t Win situations where we manage to think of them poorly no matter what they do. We can hope they will do the same for us.

6. We can hope that our fretfulness and anxiety on this topic already puts us ahead of the people who plow into this assuming they’re the best mothers-in-law ever and that their daughters- and son-in-law can’t WAIT to hear wise instructions on how they should run their lives in every detail.

 

More things to add to the list? Some of you are mothers-in-law already, and I hope you will tell us everything you know, everything you’ve learned, everything you’re doing. Some of you may have active mother-in-law situations going on right now, situations that are giving you lots of ideas of things to do differently when it’s your turn, and I hope you will tell us all of those ideas.

Commenting Problems Update (Personal Blog Edition)

An update on the commenting problem is that it’s not fixed and it looks as if it never will be—unless it suddenly and unexpectedly resolves because of some software update or whatever. If you’re having trouble commenting, either persistently or intermittently, know that you’re not alone: I am still getting plenty of emails and Twitter comments about it. We can’t seem to fix it. (I still can’t comment on MY OWN BLOGS unless I’m replying to someone else’s comment from the dashboard.) We have repeatedly contacted the web host. Paul is a computer guy and has repeatedly investigated/tinkered. I have gone into the commenting settings and tried to change things that might help.

Nothing helps, and we can’t even find a pattern: last time I wrote about this, I asked for feedback that Paul could use to diagnose the issue or to help the web host diagnose it—but there was no pattern. Some people could comment from their desktop computers but not from their phones; other people had the opposite issue. Some people could comment as long as they went to the site directly, but not if they followed a link (like from Twitter/Facebook); other people had the opposite issue. Some people could comment on the regular blog but not on the baby names blog; other people had the opposite issue. Some people could comment before, but now can’t; others couldn’t comment before, but now can.

It is discouraging and disheartening and maddening. All I can do is advise you to try what is working for other people: a different browser, phone/desktop instead of desktop/phone, link/direct instead of direct/link. I really am holding out hope that there will be some update on the host or on WordPress or something, and that’ll turn out to be the missing piece that fixes it all.

Dishwashers

This house has TWO dishwashers, which is fortunate because one of them has already broken.

There kept being a lot of grit on the dishes, so Paul looked up the dishwasher manual online and found out how to remove the filters, and I was halfway through cleaning the disgusting-but-not-as-bad-as-feared filters in the sink when he discovered a crumbling plastic tube toward the back of the dishwasher. Looking into THAT, he found that it’s a part you can order and replace; all you have to do is turn the dishwasher upside down to get at it. Hm. And if you do it wrong, that’s the part that lets water pour all over the kitchen floor, or else lets it leak slowly for years until the floor rots away.

So. It’s a fairly old dishwasher and we haven’t been particularly happy with it (I STILL haven’t figured out how to load it efficiently), so we’re NOT going to test out our dishwasher-flipping abilities or our new homeowner insurance, and instead we’ll use the other dishwasher (a pain since it’s not in the kitchen, but certainly less of a pain than not having a dishwasher) while we look into replacing this one.

Paul did some research and was all set to order the top-recommended Bosch (not the super expensive one but a more mid-range one) from Consumer Reports when he noticed the reviews were basically split between 5s and 1s: some people love it and others just HATE it. The main complaint from the people who hated it seemed to be related to the racks not fitting dishes well. But the racks are adjustable, and so we’re wondering if the difference could be “people who figured out how to adjust the racks” vs. “people who did not”? And there was also one review that said something about the racks being made for “European-style dishes,” whatever that means, and another that said you really have to read the instruction manual because loading is not intuitive.

Well. I am wondering if you would like to tell me what dishwasher you have and whether or not you like it. I will tell you the one thing I want in a dishwasher: filters that are EASILY-ACCESSED and easy to clean. In our old house, the dishwasher drained into a garbage disposal; in this house, I have no idea where it drains but not through the garbage disposal.

Follow-up: the second dishwasher ran one load of dishes perfectly. Then, with the second load of dishes, it broke.

Rainbow Flatware

I wish I could give you a link to my new flatware; I love it so, so much but can’t find it online, and it’s so difficult to get a good photo of it. It’s by Cambridge and claims to be the Celeste pattern, but I couldn’t find it on the Cambridge site. (I bought it at HomeGoods.) Here it is tucked lovingly into its own separate tray:

And here are is the set of six small spoons (I give them to the kids for things like yogurt, when a big spoon would tip over the container), in a heap with their small-spoon-and-spatula-and-chopsticks-and-whatnot siblings; they’re a different brand but look very similar except with more of a matte look:

 

Here’s the best I could find for shopping links:

Cambridge Logan, which is the same colorful kind of flatware but a different shape
Cambridge Beacon, also rainbow but even less similar in shape
Cambridge Cortney, again also rainbow but different shape
set that looks exactly like mine but is suspiciously unbranded and inexpensive (the 20-piece set I bought was $39.99)
Berglander, which is a different brand and a lower price than mine, but looks similar
Kadina, which I’m all but certain was the brand of my set of six small spoons
another insufficiently-branded set that looks just like mine; I wonder if the Cambridge packaging on mine was fake?

Also, I am almost certainly going to be taking a chance and ordering these suspiciously unbranded but darling tiny little flower coffee spoons:

(image from Amazon.com)

Infrequent Keto Diet Update

I am taking a day off from my voluntarily restricted eating plan, and that combined with writing about the chocolates reminds me that it’s a good time for an infrequent-as-promised (I haaaaaaate constant diet talk, but I like periodic check-ins) diet update.

I have been on the keto eating plan (very very low carbohydrates, plenty of everything else) since July 2017. I have not increased exercise; it’s been an eating change only. Here are previous posts on the topic:

Keto Grocery Shopping List (not just a shopping list, but also telling you about the diet for the first time, and talking about Diet Talk in general)
What I Eat on the Keto Diet
Cholesterol Report After a Year on the Keto Diet

I have never before stayed on a restricted food plan for this long. I lost about 60 pounds in about a year plus a month or two, and since then I’ve been maintaining. With experimentation, I have found that I can take one to two days off per week and still maintain my current weight.

It was odd to get to a point where I felt like I was done losing weight. That has never happened before with a diet: I always go off a diet before I’ve lost as much as I want to. I’ve never been in maintenance mode before. I’ve heard it can be way harder to maintain than to diet, because it’s still most of the work of dieting but without the motivating thrill/reward of seeing the numbers go down. I will say more about this in a minute.

It is also odd to realize that my chosen stopping-point would be a Nightmare Weight/Size for someone else—in fact, for many, MANY someone elses. It is impossible to escape the culture: we thoroughly receive the message that thinner is always better, and certainly if you CAN be thinner you SHOULD be thinner—and even if you CAN’T be thinner, you should STILL be thinner. People much, much thinner than I am are struggling hard to lose more weight. Much-thinner friends talk about how they hate their bodies and feel like they’re wearing a fat suit, and I can be sympathetic even knowing that at my current size (the smallest I’ve been in over a decade) I still outweigh the friends by fifty pounds or more. I know that weight gain/loss is relative (on the way up, my current weight appalled me, whereas now it contents me), and I know how it feels to get away from what feels like your own normal weight; and I know we tend to look more forgivingly/lovingly at other people’s bodies than at our own; and I know that when people talk about their own weight they’re rarely talking about anyone else’s. (I originally put “they’re not talking about anyone else’s,” but sadly I think we all know of people who drop hints about other people’s weight by talking about their own weight. It’s just that I am fortunate not to have any in my regular circle.)

I wasn’t sure, when I started out, how much weight I was trying to lose. For one thing, I had very little hope of accomplishing any stated goal: I’ve been on so many failed diets, it felt stupid to have hopes/goals. For another thing, I didn’t know how much I COULD lose, even if the diet did work. But what it came down to eventually was figuring out where did I feel RIGHT, and I wasn’t going to know that until I got there. And sure enough, there was a point where I just started to feel Right, and I gave it some time to see if I would get restless to lose more weight, but I didn’t, and so I decided to attempt to stay there.

I am just barely out of plus sizes. According to the BMI chart (may it rot in hell where it belongs), I am obese (may that word, too, rot in hell where it belongs). I feel cute, and most of the time I like the way I look now, and I don’t mind as much having my picture taken, and I have a much easier time buying clothes. It’s much, much easier to walk, and to cross my legs, and to get down on the floor and back up again, and to sit comfortably, and to climb stairs, and to do things like crawl into the back of the minivan to vacuum it. There has been a significant uptick in Male Attention, which is so irritating/infuriating I can hardly express how much it makes me want to start screaming and strangling, while at the same time it’s queasily gratifying in a way I hope you just immediately understand without me having to unpick it further, because I realize it’s gross and yet I feel like you will nod cringingly, knowing what I mean even as your hands form the strangling position and a scream rises in your throat.

Do you remember that 80%/20% thing, usually applied to grades, about how you can get 80% of the result with 20% effort, but getting the last 20% result will take the remaining 80% effort? (A professor once used this as, apparently, a way to motivate us to work much harder to get an A; my absolute take-away was that it was obviously way more sensible/efficient to get the B.) I feel as if I’ve applied that concept nicely to this diet, though I wouldn’t say I put in only 20% effort. But still: same KIND of thing. I did not want to get to the point where I was working hard all the time to lose another half-pound or whatever. I didn’t want to have to exercise hard for hours a day, or think about calories constantly, or be hungry all the time, or feel wrong for eating food. I wanted to be happy at a place that was easy to maintain, not stuck feeling like I’d stretched the slingshot as far as I could and would be rocketed back to my old weight if I relaxed at all. I didn’t want to have to put in constant, unrelenting effort to achieve/maintain small results.

I was worried that maintenance mode would be too hard: as I said above, I’d heard it was difficult to stay motivated without the reward of decreasing numbers. But I have found that the reward of increased treats is plenty for now. We’ll see how long that lasts, but right now I find “numbers staying within a certain range on the scale” plus “yay, one to two days of non-dieting per week!” is plenty motivating, and more pleasantly peaceful than when I was hoping for the numbers to go down. I like the feeling that it’s no big deal if I need to take a day off for a get-together or special occasion. I like the feeling of coasting instead of pedaling. I like the feeling of looking at the scale just to check, as opposed to hoping and/or feeling disappointed.

It also helps that I am now completely acclimated to the keto eating. When I started, everything felt so upside-down from what I was used to, and sometimes I would get stuck, feeling like there was NOTHING I could eat, NOTHING! and that this was IMPOSSIBLE! I vented about this to a friend who had been on keto longer than I had, and he told me he didn’t feel that way anymore: that he felt like keto was Just How He Eats Now. I found that news dismaying: I didn’t WANT it to be normal, I wanted it to be a weird fad diet that then I could go OFF of when I was done losing weight. But then more time passed, and now on my diet-following days my food feels normal/familiar. And then on my days off, I eat everything I want, and it’s like a holiday. Everything tastes so good, and there are so many choices! On my on-diet days, if things feel rough, I just think ahead to my next day off. And now that I’m maintaining, that day is never very far away, so I’m never telling myself “No,” I’m always telling myself “Yes, just wait a little longer.”

And I want to make sure you understand that a “day off” or “day of non-dieting” is not a day of Sensible Non-Keto Eating. Like, it’s not as if it’s five or six days of keto weirdness, and then one to two days of eating grilled chicken and fruits/vegetables and milk and a piece of whole-grain bread, maybe a half-cup of vanilla ice cream. No. The days off involve things like pizza, french fries, potato soup, bagels, doughnuts, ice cream, candy, fast food, snack-cakes. Whatever I pine for on the keto days, I eat on the non-keto days. Candy/chocolate used to be the most important thing to me, so it’s interesting to me that what I most want on days off are things like breads, rice, potatoes, and cakey things. I think it’s the texture as well as the flavor: keto doesn’t have much with the texture of bread/potatoes/cake. I also want grapes, grapefruit, and those little Dove Mini ice cream bars. My long-term goal is to have more days off but with less extreme party-food eating on those days, or maybe to be off the keto thing entirely and just be eating well with reasonable treats, but we’ll see if that ever happens. The current “all on or else all off” seems to work with my temperament better than moderation.

Anyway, that’s how it’s going. I realize this story could still end in me ditching the diet and gaining the weight back. That is true of a statistically enormously large percentage of diets. But FOR NOW, this diet is working better for me than any diet ever has, and also it feels sustainable for now.

Okay, that’s enough diet talk for awhile. (I mean, YOU can talk in the comments section, though I recommend re-reading this post first; it’s hard to talk about diets. But I mean that I will now wait a fairly long time before doing another post about diets/dieting.)

Tipsy Swistle and the Heart-Shaped Box of Chocolates

I have mentioned before that Tipsy Swistle is a cheery little chore-doing house elf. Another thing I have mentioned before (I should just cut-and-paste today’s post out of snippets from old posts, or make it a series of links to other posts) is that what I would really like for Valentine’s Day every year is a heart-shaped box of nice chocolates, and that for whatever reason that does not seem to be something Paul can/will do, and so over the years I have come up with a work-around to reduce resentment and increase happiness: we go out to dinner (but not ON Valentine’s Day, because of crowds) for our joint Valentine’s Day gift (with cocktails and dessert, so it’s fancy), and I buy myself the box of chocolates (often after Valentine’s Day, to get them at 50% off).

I’m not saying this is a great solution, or entirely free of hard feelings (is it really SO VERY DIFFICULT to go into a store and buy a heart-shaped box of chocolates once a year??) but it means there ARE chocolates in a heart-shaped box and there IS some sort of Valentine’s Day acknowledgement, which I DO want, and I realize many people DON’T want that, and that’s fine too and maybe one of those people should have married Paul and spent many happy years calling it a Hallmark holiday or whatever.

This year I wanted a box of See’s chocolates: the keto diet means I eat less candy than I used to, and so when I DO eat candy I like it to be Ultimate Candy. But I dithered with it in my cart. Even with the current shipping deal, shipping was still $5 on top of what was already some very expensive chocolate; and it cost another $6 extra to get the heart-shaped box, and is that REALLY worth it for something I will likely end up throwing away after keeping it for way too long because it seems as if I really ought to be able to find another use for such a pretty box? And probably I should just get the usual 50%-off box of non-See’s from Target.

Well. Tipsy Swistle did not think these were reasonable concerns and just went ahead and hit “Complete order” (after adding a box of the peanut brittle chocolate bars I love) and then cycled the laundry and cleaned out a pitcher and gave the kitchen floor a quick touch-up mopping. This morning I am very grateful for all of those things: the nearly-empty laundry baskets; the floor, which yesterday afternoon was making me crabby with its smudges; but especially for the order confirmation from See’s in my inbox.