Chapter 20

THE FOOD CHAPTER

When someone dies, has a baby, or has serious surgery, food appears in abundance. When people don’t know how else to help a family in need or crisis, they send food. This explosion of generosity results in a massive accumulation of meals, desserts, and gourmet baskets. This is a wonderful communal gesture and helps alleviate the stress of cooking and shopping. As I mentioned before, I’m the oldest of nine children, so my mother was constantly having babies. Rather than associating each of my mother’s trips to the hospital with the thrill of anticipating a new sibling, my fondest memory of those times was the arrival of the new and fun things that the neighbors would send over for dinner. “Mom’s having a baby, maybe we’ll get that hamburger casserole again from the Thiels!” I knew my kids were coping the same way. Food makes everything better.

During the height of my illness, the baskets of cookies, lasagnas from the school Loaves and Fishes committee, and a variety of delicious-looking meals from friends started pouring in, much to the delight of my husband and children, but not so much for me. The sights and smells of this free-flowing feast of delicacies were the final nails in my nothing-by-mouth coffin. They would try to hide the food from me when I’d struggle through my daily lap around the house, but there was too much of it. Towers of treats were piled high in every corner. It got to the point where, during meals, we had to hermetically seal my room off from the smells. Jim would close all the doors leading to the bedroom and stuff towels under the door. He would burn scented candles while I inhaled aromatic oils to take my mind off the deprivation. I tried to pray, but this was admittedly torturous. Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights, but now I had him beat.

Food had always been a major theme in my household and in my life. Jim’s relationship with food is very primitive. In other words, he sees it, he eats it, regardless of its nutritional value. This was the guy who had mindlessly eaten chips and stinky guacamole in my face while I was in labor. I have always been the voice of reason, saying, “Suppress the urges of the id! Be conscious of what you put in your body! If there is free pizza, you do not have to eat it! You are not hungry. Be mindful of why you are eating and what you are eating.” It’s also the job of the parent of a young child (or a dog) to monitor food intake, so kids (or dogs) don’t make bad choices. Food and eating should be reflective of how you honor and respect your body, and the bodies of those you are feeding. I have always thought of it as my responsibility to reinforce this message for my family, which has earned me the prized nickname “the Food Nag.”

Once I became deprived, my whole perspective changed (remember my Mister Softee observation on the ride home from the hospital). I had lost more than twenty pounds so far and was making plans, as soon as I was able, to gain it all back and then some. I told myself, When I can eat, I am going to eat anything and everything. That I had deprived myself of food that I wanted in the past seemed so ridiculous and an obvious attempt to exercise my now glaringly evident control issues.

Whenever someone visited, I’d only want to talk about what meal we would enjoy together once I got my swallow back. With Karen, we would have the Hawaiian pizza with hot sauce that we perfected during years of playdates, followed by an entire cake from an incredible Italian bakery we both know. With my friend Niels, who was the DP on The Jim Gaffigan Show, I would have that merguez sausage sandwich with egg and avocado from Café Gitane that we’d once shared during a beautiful afternoon of filming; and so on. I remember one day after a particularly disheartening home visit with a swallow therapist, I needed some cheering up. I texted Niels: “Soon: Merguez Sandwich!” and he replied, “Sorry, honey, I’m not eating bread now. Drains my energy.” The arbitrary decision to “give up bread” because it is supposedly bad for you used to seem to me to be not only logical, but smart. Now it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. Like cutting down on air to make your lungs more active. I wondered if you offered a starving man a loaf of bread, would he ask, “Is that gluten-free?”

The other things I missed about food were shopping for it, prepping it, cooking it, and serving it. Food preparation and serving are acts of love that nourish the body, soul, and spirit. Being bedridden, I couldn’t do any of those things.

Meals have always been a time of togetherness in our home. When Jim is back from touring, it’s our tradition to celebrate with a big family dinner. Oftentimes we will have guests over. There is seating for twelve around our big wooden table, and on Sunday nights, every chair is filled.

Jim and I decided early on in our lives as parents that if we were going to have this nontraditional lifestyle with five kids in an apartment in Manhattan, we would hold on to some traditions of our childhood that gave us a solid foundation as adults. In fact, the table we sit at is the same table where Jim and his six siblings ate Sunday night dinners in the 1970s. This tradition has evolved somewhat. For example, Jim and his brothers are probably still traumatized from the itchy coats and ties they were required to wear, so we’ve made ours more casual affairs. But we still start our meals with the traditional Catholic grace, and the kids take turns being the leader. Before you think we are the Flanders family from The Simpsons, know that grace normally results in bickering among the kids: “Mom, Michael did the sign of the cross wrong!” At least we try. After the prayer, we attempt to engage them in some kind of statement of thankfulness, and then while we are sharing the meal, we do our aforementioned “best and worst” of the day or some other conversation starter that encourages them not to just shovel food in and ignore one another. If there is a guest there, we try to prompt the kids to let them have food first, and we also warn the visitor not to be shy, because if they blink, our kids will have eaten everything! Mealtime at the Gaffigans’ is a really raucous party every night where as soon as the plates are clean, there could be an impromptu game of charades, Marre playing the piano, Jim being silly (“How does it feel to have the best-looking dad in the world?”), the kids being smart-alecky (Jack: “I don’t know, Dad; do you know someone who does?”).

Now that I was at home recovering, they still carried on the same way at mealtimes, but I felt separate and disconnected. If you caged a bird whose mission was to feed worms to her babies, she might die. I get it. The hunger I was feeling was also a soul hunger. I would try to put on a brave face and sit with them, just to be nourished by the togetherness and laughter, but I was too weak, too dizzy. My family would be embarrassed and awkward, apologizing for eating in front of me. I was once a force in this house, and now I was treated like a fragile piece of china that might break if you breathed on it too hard. So someone would carefully help me back to bed where I would lie and listen to the laughter and conversations that I was no longer a part of.

When you think about recovering from surgery, you can’t help but envision long, boring days at home with enormous freedom where you’ll finally be able to do your scrapbooking and other rainy-day tasks you’ve been putting off throughout your life. There were so many times in the past where I was caught up in a whirlwind of to-do lists, schedules, and deadlines that I would think to myself, I need a bed day! I need a bed week! I just need to stay in bed and catch up on all the books and writing that I long to do. I could finally organize all my photos! Maybe I even could do some crafting, if only I could just stay in bed all day. Now that wish had come true, and I was more miserable than ever. I had so many ideas swirling around in my head, but I did not have the health or energy to even sit up and write. What good is a laptop when you don’t have a lap? But I did have my phone so I could send texts to people about food, or text Jim in the other room and say, “Hi, could someone send a kid in here?” The novelty of having Mom home had worn off and everyone was going about their lives, popping in only now and then to check on me. I started to miss the constant train of interrupting nurses in the ICU. Well, not really, but you catch my drift. The smartest thing about the smartphone is the Notes app. I couldn’t really write down my feelings in a significant way, but I could make notes.

This is a poem I wrote after a week of lying in bed, smelling food I couldn’t eat, and hearing everyone in the next room that seemed a world away.

i am a Ghost

life rushes by and i stay the same

i see people laughing and living but i cannot participate.

they know i am there but they are too scared to really look at me.

when i get mad i throw dishes.

i groan in the night.

cup of coffee is dream of a past life. it’s like i can smell heaven from purgatory;

i know i will eventually get there

but it’s just out of reach.

Now that I existed as a wandering soul looking in at life from the outside instead of being in the middle of it all, something began to happen to me. God was giving me the opportunity to sit back in silence and develop a new awareness of what was really going on. To observe my life without living it. Even being stuck in bed, in other circumstances I would have been busying myself with something. Okay, maybe not crafting, but something. If I could eat, I would be stuffing myself until I couldn’t feel my feelings. If I could take sleeping pills or painkillers, I would have welcomed the escape and binge-slept. All I could do now was see and hear.

Jim was fully engaging in fatherhood in a whole new way. I saw Jim spontaneously teaching Jack how to tie his necktie before a bar mitzvah. He saw me staring and said to Jack with a sideways look at me, “Your mother doesn’t do a good job on the knot.” I started to notice that the kids were approaching Jim in a new way. Whereas before there was a little bit of a “What did you bring me?” approach to Jim when he walked in the door, I saw things like Katie showing Jim her sketch pad and asking him if he liked a new character she was drawing. “Katie, I think you should design a tour poster for me!”

She blushed with pride. “Really, Daddy? Are you joking?”

“No, I think that rabbit with big eyes is amazing and I think he could sell a lot of tickets!” I joked that he should review the child labor laws.

It wasn’t just a change in Jim I noticed. Marre had blossomed into a young woman. She was thirteen now and was getting herself around the city. I used to be paranoid about her walking half a block to school when I dropped her off at the corner, and now she was taking Katie to the art supply store on her own. She came into the bedroom and shared with me that on their way back from buying glue and glitter, Katie had stopped and given her unopened juice box and goldfish crackers to a homeless person on the street who was asking for change. “I let her do it, Mom, because we only had pennies and I thought it would be rude to put pennies in the cup. Is that okay?” It was more than okay. My kids were coming into their own as people, and they didn’t need me breathing down their necks to survive. They were doing great.