300 Eggs:  She’s Difficult

My mother has always been an excellent cook. Her menus wow at her frequent dinner parties. She knows how to sear and how to braise. I once watched one of my friends, avowedly adverse to vegetables, scarf down thirds of her ratatouille. I still dream about her carbonara with pancetta and peas.

Not only is she talented, for years she got dinner on the table every night for our difficult blended family of teens and pre-teens, and did it in such a way that none of us can remember ever complaining about the food more than once. She weathered our vegetarianism, and a brief vegan phase, too, with grace and an abundance of greens.

Even before that, when other six-year-olds were learning to turn bread into toast, my mother taught me to make a steak. Because of my mother’s culinary skills, I can make hollandaise, poach an egg with a runny yolk, and do omelets in both the French and American style. Because of her steady love and persistent care, I have the confidence to try a Scotch egg, Chinese tea eggs, or Acharuli Khachapuri in my own kitchen. Certainly, she inculcated in all her children a love of food, and a love of the hard work and feeling of accomplishment we get from cooking it and serving it to all the people in our lives we have come to care for.

However, it was my father, better known for Crock-Pot chicken and opening cans of Campbells, who showed me how to master the simple perfection of a weekday breakfast egg. My paternal grandmother worked in a diner for much of her adult life. My father was a short-order cook to help put himself through college, and everything I learned about frying an egg and doing it fast can be traced back to this ancestral wielding of a spatula. He also makes the crispiest, tiniest home fries I’ve ever eaten.

Because of both my parents, I came to cooking early and am assured of my competence in this arena. Conversely, I came to parenthood late, and am not sure anyone ever feels accomplished at being a mom. I didn’t come to parenting late in my life, but late in the life of my child. My daughter was sixteen years old when she came to live with us, and seventeen by the time we officially adopted her from foster care.

Before I abruptly became the parent of a teenager, I had seen commercials made by the Ad Council about adopting older children in need of families. There are a lot of them, these children and the commercials about them. The advertisements that caught my attention were a series of short videos featuring (fictional) foster and adoptive families of teens. In one, a mother messes up her (new, teen) son’s haircut. In another, a father accidentally destroys multiple trays of cookies. The tag line is always the same: “You don’t have to be perfect to be a perfect parent. Teens in foster care will love you just the same.” These ads are great. They're funny, smart, and address a real need. When the Ad Council researched reasons that potential foster or pre-adoptive parents didn't take in teens, they expected to hear that people were scared of the drama or trauma associated with older children in foster care. Instead, they found that many potential foster parents felt they weren't good enough to parent teenagers from foster care. These men and women were afraid that they did not know enough to serve the needs of older youth, and they were also nervous about learning on the job—you can fake it in front of a four-year-old, but a teen will notice when you're clueless. These commercials were a direct response to those findings.

I saw these ads before I adopted, and thought they were hilarious. After my daughter was placed with me, I used to watch these ads obsessively and cry.

When our daughter first came to live with us, she wanted me to make her breakfast every day. I love to nurture people through food, so I thought this was a good idea. On the other hand, high schools in America persist in the cruel and ridiculous habit of starting before 8:00 in the morning. And neither my daughter nor I are morning people. It was therefore pretty painful for me to get up at 6:00 AM and make some eggs. But eggs are what she wanted, and I wasn't going to refuse. Specifically, she wanted fried eggs over-easy.

I turned the flame up under a pan and thought of my father. I ever so carefully fried those eggs for my daughter, with lacy whites and barely runny yolks. I toasted bread. I put out fruit. And the first time I made her eggs for breakfast, she wouldn't eat them because the yolks were too runny.

“I’m not going to eat these,” she said. “These are fucking disgusting.”

The sun was just beginning to come up, spreading light, if not warmth, over the breakfast table. I said nothing. The only thing I hate more than mornings, and being yelled at, is wasting food. And yet, in the face of her breakfast table rage, I threw away the eggs.

The second time, the yolk wasn't runny enough. “You did it wrong!” she said, pushing her plate away and crumpling an insubstantial paper napkin in her hand. “I told you I want to dip my bread in it. You don’t know how to listen.”

My heart began to race. My hands went numb. I was angry. I was sad. I felt guilty, and more than anything, afraid. Most parents have experienced their children turning up their noses at a homemade meal, and I knew this even then. I was also acutely aware, in that moment, that I am not most parents, and my daughter is not most kids. What if I was wrong to have attempted this at all? Maybe I wasn’t the kind of person who was equipped to parent a teenager who grew up in foster care. What if my daughter would always hate me, or anyway never learn to fake it enough to even get the words, “pass the salt, please” out of her mouth?

One morning I made the terrible mistake of breaking a yolk. I didn’t even have to clear her plate; my daughter dumped this one directly down the garbage disposal herself, a look of disgust hardening like a ketchup smear on her mouth. I made another egg. This one too was unacceptable.

This went on for months. On the occasions when there was nothing to complain about regarding the eggs, my daughter was often too tired, not hungry enough, or too rushed to eat them. They went in the garbage too.

There came a time when my daughter wanted scrambled eggs instead of fried. This was an easier proposition, or so I thought; broken yolks are part of the process. However, to season her eggs, she wanted some very specific and unique flavors. She instructed me to mix a little cream cheese in with the eggs, and then pour an entire packet of toxically orange Goya sazon on top, adding just a hint of oregano and dried thyme. I did my best. My efforts were repeatedly deemed (loudly) not to be good enough.

I must have made 300 eggs for my daughter.

And unlike what the charming Adopt USKids commercials would have prospective foster and adoptive parents believe, my daughter would not accept me, and my scrambling skills, just the way I was.

She never once said “thank you.” She never once said “okay.”

One day, my daughter requested a kale apple smoothie instead of eggs. This was a breakfast I could get behind. It was easier to make and faster to clean up. It was healthy and, when I slurped some from the blender jar, delicious. We put it in travel mugs for her to bring to school. Sometimes, we even got those travel mugs back. Occasionally, they weren’t moldy upon receipt. But then we were back to eggs for a while. With yogurt and toast. And the egg-rejection began anew.

~

“Mom food,” once demeaned as comforting but boring, as less than what one could get in a restaurant, is all the rage now. Anthony Bourdain fetishized potatoes peeled with a dull paring knife into the palm of one’s hand, single mothers compete on MasterChef with secret family recipes and compelling personal back stories, and nearly every restaurant you see has an elevated mac ’n’ cheese. In anxious personal and political times, we want to be enveloped in the loving steam coming off the top of a well-seasoned casserole. The new-found fame of everyone’s mother’s mashed potatoes brings an important appreciation of the hard work of nurturing, no matter who we succor and how. It also puts pressure on the idea of food preparation and parenting. If Michael Symon’s mom can make perfect lasagna, certainly we should all strive for that in our own home kitchens. If mom food is made with love, what does it say about us if, between school pick-ups and cleaning out the drain in the kitchen sink, trips to the CVS for last-minute poster board and talks about sex and consent, we sometimes slap a meal down in exhaustion, with resentment, with anger? Worse, what if we have chosen to parent with love, and our perfect food, the soufflé that would bring James Beard to his knees, is rejected by the only person we seek to nurture?

The pictures of happy, imperfect families presented by Adopt US Kids and the Ad Council are like the gastro pub version of meatloaf. The chef-y version of meatloaf is, let’s be honest, probably better than your own. It’s not so bland, the crust is crispier, and the texture is lighter and fluffier. Though the meatloaf crafted for you by a professional chef was prepared with a different set of motivations and emotions than your mom’s, it looks good and tastes good every time. It is the idealized version. It’s your mom’s meatloaf on her best days. It does not speak to all the burned, dried out, under-seasoned versions she and you suffered through around a not-quite-clean Formica tabletop on days when each of you had other things on your mind than food. It does not communicate the full weight of what a meatloaf is.

Similarly, those advertisements from the Ad Council cannot show you what it feels like to have a child you are trying to form bonds with reject you over and over again. They tell you that you don’t have to be perfect, but what they don’t say is that your foster or adopted child will expect you to be.

Children who have been placed outside the homes of their biological families have not experienced perfection. In fact, they haven’t experienced adequate care. That’s why you, a foster or adoptive parent, get to take them home with you. It would make sense if these older youth, so accustomed to failure, were more appreciative than the average teen of a hot meal, however imperfectly prepared, or of an overture of love and support, however bungled. But love does not make sense. When our most basic needs—for food, for love, for someone to keep our minds and bodies safe—have not been met in the past, we are suspicious of anyone who claims to now be able to fulfill them. We are terrified that if we trust our caretakers they too will disappoint us, and we’re not sure we can endure one more betrayal. Even little disappointments, in this context, can feel like a tipping point.

The thing is, there is no such thing as a perfect parent. And there's no such thing as a perfect kid, either. I knew this going into adoption, but like everyone else, I still had to reckon with my unconscious assumptions about what adopting a teenager would be like and the ways in which these aspirations could not be met. My daughter, too, had to adapt to the ways in which we were not the family she had expected.

Many young people who have been in foster care for a long time have some idea of an ideal family. Sometimes, that ideal is the biological family they have been ripped away from. Sometimes it's a foster family they are no longer with; they have picked up on a few things other foster families do and have come to think that that is the only way (dads don't cook, or moms don't garden, or everyone should always drink milk at dinner). Other times, their fantasy family comes from what they have seen on TV or read in books. Finally, there are some older youth in foster care who struggle to accept family at all. I have heard some older youth in care say, "I want to live with a family who're just in it for the check." What they mean, of course, is that they don't want to be cared for. But the thing is, youth in care are just like the rest of us. Every single one of us wants to be loved and listened to and feel like we belong. Every single one of us sometimes struggles to balance our independence with these inescapable facts: that we are all interconnected, can't survive on our own, and are obligated to one another. Moreover, we've all thought at various times that we wanted something, only to realize later that wasn't what we wanted at all.

The struggle to balance independence and intimacy, to create ties, and to simply learn to sit at a table with one and other are particularly prominent for families that are just starting to come together. Starting anything is hard. Starting over is painful and difficult, but it is also emancipatory. It is a chance to re-write the story of who we are and how we move through the world. That revision is enormously empowering, but it is often born of loss and always hard-won.

I know now that being picky wasn’t just a way for my daughter to try to push me away (though it was that); it was a survival strategy.

Eventually, there came a day when my daughter preferred to eat breakfast at school because they were serving house-made chocolate chip muffins. Despite the fact that no sane person wishes to start each morning before the sun comes up being yelled at for their cooking skills and then washing pans, I was sad about this. Cooking for our children is such an obvious way of caring for them, and not being able to do that in the mornings felt like a lost opportunity. I have to hand it to her, though: when she shared one with me during a disciplinary hearing we were all hauled in to attend at the school, it was the best muffin I've ever had. The girl has a good palate.

Then, one Saturday, she woke up and cooked eggs for herself, and insisted I take a bite. I was so immensely proud of her. My daughter is a very good cook when she works at it. Over her time with us, she has learned to make scrambled eggs seasoned exactly how she likes them. One day, she excitedly told me she wanted to educate me about poached eggs. Standing in my pajamas at the stove, I watched her place plastic wrap in a water glass, just like she had learned on YouTube. She carefully cracked an egg into the Saran, and then twisted the top of the cling film until she had a secure package. “Now,” she said, “put it in the boiling water.” Pushing my flannel sleeves up and shoving aside my concerns about chemicals leaching into the albumen, I did as she asked. After three minutes, she proudly revealed our incredibly spherical breakfast, seasoning mine with a little flaky salt, just the way I like it. She even, after a few attempts, got those over-easies right. I taught her how to make perfect hollandaise.

This is what good, imperfect parents do: we persist, and we watch our children become the best versions of themselves. We teach them to love food, and cooking. To love themselves, and us. We give them the skills to make a mother sauce and the resilience to let go of their failures in the kitchen and start again. We insist that they wash the dishes. We help them learn to want these things for themselves, and we watch them develop their own techniques for making things just the way they like them.

But it doesn't happen right away. And no one should expect that it will.

Recently, my daughter asked me to make her an elaborate Sunday brunch. We hadn't done this for a while, but I toasted the bread and made a metric ton of tiny home fries. I placed spinach on the toast and fried a bunch of eggs, over-easy. I covered the whole mess of it in hollandaise. There was crisp bacon and fresh fruit to go with it.

We all gathered around the breakfast table. "Mmm . . ." my daughter said. "Thanks, Mom."

~

When I asked my daughter how she would feel if I wrote this story, she had only one request: she wanted me to title it "She's Difficult." I thought about that for a while, because my point is not to say that teenagers, or youth who have been in foster care, are difficult. My point is also certainly not that my particular daughter is difficult. My reason for writing about all those eggs is to say that teenagers are wonderful, and adopting from foster care is hugely rewarding, and I love my daughter. And also to say that building a family, or any kind of relationship, takes time. So she is right: she was difficult for some time. Sometimes she still is. I am sure I was difficult too: as the child of my parents, the sister of my sisters, and the mother of my daughter. There will always be times when I am difficult. But it’s easier now. Things don't get easy all at once, and the path toward ease is not linear. But it is worth it, every day, to sit with our difficulties, to eat the burned dinners and broken sauces too, and to trust that after a lot of practice, we won’t scorch the egg whites anymore, and even on days when we do, it will be okay.

I know that one night in my own youth, my dad tried to make some monstrosity involving cherry pie filling and a pork chop, and that even my own mother sometimes ordered a sub-par pizza instead of cooking, but I remember the good meals most, and that we never went hungry. Those Ad Council commercials are right. You don't have to be perfect to be a perfect parent. And you do not have to be perfect to be a perfect daughter or son. Teens in foster care will take you as you are and love you just the same—but not for a long time. And only if you do the same for them. No matter who our children are and how we came to know and love and nurture them, it is incumbent upon us to see the child we have in front of us, not some other version of her. Honor that young person through all her stages. Make those 300 eggs. Every broken yolk is worth it.