Sunday, June 28, 2015

Scrubbing a Roasting Pan: Chaos and Doubt in Motherhood

It sat beside the kitchen sink for awhile.  I'd like the definition of "awhile" to be a respectable two days or even a not-so-respectable-but-understandable four days.  However, honesty is all I have, Dear Reader.  Therefore I must confess: the roasting pan sat next to the kitchen sink for over two weeks.


I roasted the turkey quite late on a Wednesday night, but that doesn't excuse the two weekends I let go by before washing it.  I started roasting around midnight and took it out of the oven around 3:00 or 3:30 a.m.  I then tented it dutifully with foil, turned off my 325 degree oven, and returned to sleeping on the couch until my 5:00 a.m. alarm.

Roasting a turkey in April may seem strange to you.  Even stranger may be buttering the bird and seasoning him with salt, pepper, and various poultry-friendly seasonings after eleven-thirty in the evening.  I also shoved some limp celery and half an onion inside.  I have no earthly idea if that actually makes any difference, but I heard somewhere it's what one does when roasting a turkey.  I didn't baste.  The Butterball hotline in late November may encourage basting every half hour, but I had to work in the morning.

Sometimes in my life strange events occur-- roasting a turkey at midnight, for example.   Or sharing a twin bed on the floor with a five year old who still pees the bed.  He doesn't care that it's my bed.

My Mondays are probably not "normal" either.  Every Monday I race on my lunch hour to pick up my two elementary aged children.  Since I am a teacher "lunch hour" should be understood as forty-eight minutes from last bell of fifth period to tardy bell for sixth period. For some reason their school thought it would be a good idea to have Monday minimum days. Not occasional minimum days. Every. Single. Monday. Perhaps they thought it was cute alliteration. Each Monday I write "personal" in the "Reason" column on the green sign out sheet. I want to scrawl "because this school sucks," but that's just displaced frustration. No one needs that. I take them home. I admonish them to start homework, have a snack, lock the doors, and stay inside. Then I return to work until my day ends some time after 3:00 p.m.

Why don't I just let my daughters finish their day? They could ride the bus to me, and be in my classroom or wandering the halls for that hour and a half every Monday. I do not mind the occasional teenage F bomb they might overhear.  I don't even really mind my seven year old seeing gruesome videos on trench rats in WWI or the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps. I probably should, but my life is complicated, and I don't have the luxury of being a perfect mom.

The real reason I go every Monday to pick them up is because after allowing them to come to my campus the first couple of Mondays, I realized in the event of a campus shooter, in the event of any kind of lock down situation at my school, my own children would be there. They might be wandering down to the library or swinging on the railing at the top of the stairs. Perhaps they would happen to be in my room, safely inside while my students and I slip the pin on my door to lock it and crouch down silently away from all doors and windows. But then perhaps not.

I am just superstitious enough that having the thought about a possible shooter on campus is enough to force me to make the Manic Monday trip every week. A brief aside:  that Bangles song is way too cheery to be considered "manic."


Susanna Hoffs is having a sex dream at 6:00 a.m.  If I'm even sleeping at 6:00 a.m. all hope is lost. "These are the days when you wish your bed was already made"? She stops to make her bed? I haven't made my bed in twelve years.

Mondays are a hassle, but I can't fall apart. I'm it. I'm mom. When I was in high school people started putting those lame bumper stickers on their cars that said "Mom's Taxi".  I found them annoying.  I still do not have one, but at least now I can empathize with Moms who want to advertise this particular frustration.

Technically it's not a taxi because no one pays a fare, and you are expected to know when and where all the drop offs should be before they take place. Soccer practice. Meeting friends at Cool Bean Cafe. Giving their friends rides home. Going to their job twenty minutes over a mountain, down the mountain, and around a lake. School dances (both drop off and pick up). Doctor's appointments. Physical therapy appointments. Rare visits with their Dad at the local counseling center because said visits must be supervised by an adult who doesn't think pot smoking and drinking are acceptable habits for a forty-six year old father of five.

I have strayed, Dear Reader. Let me return. This is all to explain that my roasting a turkey while the children slept with visions of Honey Nut Cheerios dancing in their heads is not as strange to me as it might be to you. Someone gave us the turkey last Thanksgiving. We do not turn down generous offers of free food in our house.  My paycheck often (usually) does not stretch to the end of the month. We live paycheck to almost paycheck, so two free turkeys at Thanksgiving were gratefully accepted.

We roasted one on the annual Thursday festival of Thanks. The other was put in the freezer. I don't know how long a turkey lasts in the freezer, but as April was ending, and we were in need of protein sources for dinner, I decided to put it in the refrigerator to thaw. The slick, colorful packaging said it should thaw for 3-4 days. I put Thomas in the fridge on Sunday...or it may have been Saturday. I could not remember which was part of the problem.  I waited a few days, but my salmonella fears would not allow me to wait another day, so the roasting commenced after the kids were in bed on Wednesday.

I probably should have skipped that Frontline episode about poultry.  Did you see it?  Misery loves company, so go look it up at PBS.org and watch. After watching that show and knowing I am writing about turkey, I am impressed if you are still here. You are a less fearful, more rational soul than I am, Dear Reader. Either that or you were just fooled by Will Lyman, who was described by Rolling Stone as "the-world-is-ending-but-please-remain-calm narrator" of the PBS staple.  I just hear his voice and know PBS is about to scare the BeJesus out of me.  Yet still I watch.

This time it's chicken. Last time it was ISIS fighters cutting a swath across Iraq and Syria. That one was during my last period American Government class. Luckily it was not a Monday, so my children were safely at school learning about fractions and howler monkeys that day. Unfortunately that also meant I enjoyed a lunch break, so the Caesar chicken salad did not pair well with footage of Sunnis in Hawija mowed down by the government forces of Nouri al-Maliki. Come to think of it, that was probably easier than chicken salad while watching "The Trouble with Chicken," so I guess things could have been worse.

This post is beginning to resemble too closely the interior monologue I suffer under each day, and you don't need to see that, so I apologize for the digression into PBS television and my lunch habits. Let's get back to the really important things like why my children had Thanksgiving breakfast on an early morning in late April.

It is a testimony to the said chaos of the life we lead, that my children did not express surprise when they awoke on a school day to the smell of roasted turkey.  At least it was a Thursday--a clever homage to Thanksgiving, right? No, I didn't think you would buy that. I already confessed that I was just trying to avoid a turkey who stayed too long in my fridge.

My thirteen year old vegetarian came out asking "What [insert disgusted teenager pause] is that smell?" Clearly she did not want a slice, but when I explained I was worried it would go bad, her natural tendency to be afraid of germs and bacteria trumped her adamant position that "Meat is Murder."  She offered an understanding shrug that seemed to say, "That's legit," and walked away to rummage through our laundry basket of perpetually mismatched socks. This morning sock ritual shames me, but I am somewhat resigned to its continuance.
Occasionally I solve it by just throwing away said socks, but they always return. This is a story for another time; we were talking turkey.

My eleven and seven year olds were bewildered but quite happy to accept proffered slices of my poultry bounty once I explained that I was afraid the bird would go bad, and we need food.  Joey, the five year old, bounded into the kitchen. I expected he might be the one most confused by the presence of a thirteen pound roasted bird on the stove where muffins or dipping eggs or oatmeal should reside. Instead, he joyfully grabbed a slice of freshly cut turkey from the plate beside the stove declaring "Turkey for Breakfast? Awesome!" It was as if I had planned this unusually delicious breakfast just to amuse him.
God bless him. He doesn't even know that grown ups sometimes have beds that aren't on the floor.

Once everyone had sampled some turkey, I threw it back in the fridge, roasting pan and all, because it was now safe from bacteria growth, at least for a few days. Plus, we had to make our usual morning run from home at 7:00 a.m. to the middle school to the day care center back to the elementary school, and finally to the high school. Five children. Four schools. Forty minutes. Priceless. My first period seniors have no idea what a miracle it is that I have a lesson plan every day, nor that on one fine Thursday my yawning was from two hours of sleep and the effects of the turkey's tryptophan.

Here I must digress again.  Does turkey really make you sleepy? I did some research. By research I mean I googled the question:  "Does turkey make you sleepy?" and I clicked on the Web MD entry rather than the unreliable but tempting first hit from Wikipedia. It was a stunning act of scholarship, I know. Why has Stanford not called me? It just confirmed what I already knew. It's not the amino acid that makes us sleepy on Thanksgiving; it's the over eating. Do not blame the humble turkey while you're nodding off as the Detroit Lions kick the extra point.  Blame the pile of mashed potatoes and stuffing and your inability to choose between pumpkin and mince meat pie. Covering both in a sheet of whipped cream doesn't change the fact that there are two pieces there. You are not tryptophan-tired and you know it. Notice my pronoun usage there?  Second person.  I am attempting to distance myself from the double pie incident through pronouns.  Pathetic, I know.

Some other single mom probably came home that April Thursday and dutifully cleaned the carcass of all its meat. She then scrubbed the roasting pan and rack and replaced them on the high shelf of the pantry for next fall. Afterward she packaged the extra turkey in freezer bags, dating each one. The bird bones were thrown into a pot with various vegetables and spices to simmer for hours, resulting in a homemade turkey broth for use in countless Pinterest recipes.

I do not even know how to make turkey stock. The vague reference to "vegetables" and "spices" was not lazy writing; I actually have nothing more specific to offer. Whoever that mom is, she is amazing and probably has thousands of followers for her blog and a book deal in the works that will make the rest of us feel inferior. Well, I don't need your smug treatise on having it all and doing it all with Martha Stewart-like perfection. Enjoy your upcoming Food Network pilot and your perfect turkey stock, Madam; I cannot compete.

I came home that day and ripped off the breast meat for dinner. Then I severed the wings, thighs, and legs from the carcass trying not to think about the fact that they are actual bird parts. My five year old always likes to discuss exactly which part of the animal he is eating.  "So, Mom, is hamburger really a cow?  Is it the cow's leg or belly or what?" I think my thirteen year old may be right to live on fruit and scrambled eggs with avocado. Because let's be honest, Meat is Killing, even if it isn't murder.

Anyway, I set the roasting pan next to the sink. It was really close to where it could be cleaned, but I didn't clean it. I probably chose to read aloud to my children, listen patiently to their delightful school day stories, do a thirty minute Pilates workout, and then grade color coded maps of Hitler's march across Europe. That sounds good. Except I promised honesty earlier, and if for no other reason than structural integrity, I must confess. Again. I probably collapsed on the couch after dinner and fell asleep watching reruns of "Parks and Recreation" on Netflix.

The roasting pan sat next to the sink.

Awhile [many days] later, some awful smell developed in the kitchen. In trying to identify the disgusting smell I cleaned out the fridge. I took out the garbage and scrubbed down the can. I mopped the floor. Then I turned and realized that under the dishes piled high next to the sink was the roasting pan. This would be the moment when Joey inserts a dramatic "Bum, bum buuuuummmm!" sound effect. I had found the fowl source of the foul smell.  After the kids were in bed I tackled the job. As I stood scrubbing rancid turkey fat from the pan and hoping there wouldn't be a residual rotten smell permanently seared into the metal, I felt like crying.

What kind of mother am I? Why didn't I just wash the stupid pan the day I roasted the turkey? Then my self-doubt began to have doubts.  Why is it solely my responsibility to clean the roasting pan?  I have a fifteen and thirteen year old, don't I?  Even the eleven year old could have cleaned this pan. They could have at least offered!

Maybe I need to set up a chore chart again. I've tried them in the past and they never work. I never follow through. Remember, I'm the woman who didn't wash a roasting pan for two weeks.

I can't afford to offer any allowance.  I've done the math. The amount of money I would have to offer to get my children to regularly keep the house clean is a bigger sum than my monthly budget could ever afford.

I returned to blaming the kids. How many Mother's Days and birthdays in a row do I have to say I only want one thing: "A clean house." I never get it. To be fair, it is a silly request because with five children "a clean house" is a moving target.  It happens briefly in different places in the house--almost never all at once--and is quickly replaced by dirty laundry piles, full garbage cans, toothpaste sinks, half-finished bowls of cereal, and mismatched socks. Promptly clean roasting pans come from discipline, routine, and follow through--qualities I do not possess.

Perhaps I demonstrate those qualities at work. I have them when talking with my kids about important ideas like which boys they shouldn't date and why homework, while tedious, is a necessary evil, and life is filled with these, so just get used to it and finish your math problems. I follow through on Sunday Mass...mostly...unless someone is sick or I don't have enough gas money.  Jesus understands, but my students won't, so the gas gets saved for school days.

Is that okay?  I don't always know. A friend of mine who is also a single mom recently shared that she misses having a sounding board, a person with whom you share all decisions. Some decisions are trivial but many--so many--decisions in parenting are profound. Inadequacy and mental bickering inside my head abound.  Sometimes inside my head is a game of table tennis where I both condemn and defend every choice I make.

As I continued to scrub and add powder cleanser with bleach to get out the smell, I realized I will never have a clean house.  It is just not in my nature to organize my children into an army of cleaners with matched socks. What would that life look like? I'm fairly certain I wouldn't recognize us, and I suspect I would not like that family very much. I sometimes see photos from friends with big families, and instead of making me feel guilty, it kind of creeps me out. How much time did it take to coordinate your outfits? How do you afford a photographer for your Christmas card every year? How do you remember to send Christmas cards? There's a Duggar-like cultish element to families who are too perfect. I just know they are hiding a filthy roasting pan somewhere in their house. Perhaps the mother is a secret alcoholic, or the father is having an affair.

I realize these are petty, even cruel, speculations, but it's all I have to stave off my own feelings of inadequacy. I need to be okay with my chaos, my shortcomings, even my weeknight collapses into the couch, but often I am not. I need to own it.  Good God, why do you let me utter these phrases, Dear Reader?  Someone needs to invent a way for you to reach through the screen and stop me before I write something so Pop-Psychology awful.

For now it is all I can muster.  Have you not been paying attention to the roasting pan story?  I suck.

Some days I feel like an enlightened, relaxed mother who is okay with being imperfect. I know talking with my kids about how ISIS evolved and why under cooked chicken is dangerous are much more important than a clean house. However, the day I was scrubbing that roasting pan, I felt like a failure. Why didn't I thaw and roast the turkey months ago? Why didn't I start roasting it before midnight so I might have had the energy to wash the pan post roast? Why didn't I choose a more lucrative profession, so my paycheck could make it until the end of the month? Why is it that some days I can only muster grilled cheese and Netflix?

There are countless people who praise me for being a "Supermom" and say "I don't know how you do it, Amy!" It's meant as praise and loving support, as if raising five children alone on a teacher's salary is some kind of miraculous accomplishment no matter how I do it.
My children are good students and kind, funny people. I make it to work most days, and I am a solid teacher. This is a victory those people seem to reassure me. This is impressive. However, they didn't smell the rotten turkey. They didn't notice mismatched socks. Those details are reserved for me, and I haven't made peace with it.   Sometimes a turkey is just a turkey, but often it represents the lack of control I have over my daily life.  It's a symbol, reminding me of all of the moments where I fail my children and myself.  The smiling picture at the beach goes on Facebook, and the beautifully roasted turkey goes on Instagram with a filter and a bubbly hashtag. The rotten roasting pan stays with me, and scrubbing it, with all of its accompanying self doubt, is exhausting.

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