An appetizer is meant to whet the taste buds, get the juices flowing in anticipation of what’s to come next. It’s a perfect combination of bitter, sweet, and salty flavors with crunchy and silky textures, all in just a bite or two: thin slices of bruschetta topped with jewels of ripe red tomatoes; a single seared scallop wrapped in bacon on a toothpick; a shot glass of vibrant green pea soup with a bit of sour cream and oniony chives on top.
Forming this new relationship—or relationships, really, because it was more than just Ken and me creating a new family—felt exciting, exhilarating. But as often happens with restaurant appetizers that are too big or overly powerful, sometimes it was overwhelming, and it made me wonder if I was ready for the next course. I had no way of knowing that each bite in this new life would be both beautiful and a lot to handle.
I awoke the first morning back from our honeymoon to the sound of a shower running. I sleepily looked over and saw my husband—a new word I would never tire of saying—asleep face down in the bed next to me. If my husband was not the person showering, then who was?
And then I remembered: We were not alone. I was sharing the house not only with the love of my life, but also with his children.
Later I would describe the two years after I left San Francisco as some kind of fairy tale in which I had been sprinkled with pixie dust, plucked out of one situation, and put into another completely different life. My sister put it another way.
“God whispers what he wants most people to do,” she said. “But he has to shout at you because you’re so stubborn.”
It was true. My prayers to God stayed whispers in the beginning, but he made it perfectly clear where he wanted me to be. Yet, I questioned him constantly. Not only did I not have faith in God, but I had little faith in myself.
As Ken and I spent more and more time together that first summer we started dating, he slowly introduced me into the kids’ lives. I knew he wanted to move cautiously. Ben, Molly, and Sarah had been through so much; Ken wanted to keep everything in their lives stable and consistent as much as he was able. Ken had made a promise to Grace when she was dying that he and the kids would be fine, and he did everything in his power to make it so.
I wasn’t in a giant hurry to move forward with the children anyway. I loved the stories he told me about them. I felt like I knew them. But actually interacting with them? Terrifying.
My experience with children to date had been limited to my almost-year-old nephew. It was a big jump from changing diapers and making silly faces at an infant to conversing with a ten-year-old boy and two eight-year-old girls.
And what if they didn’t like me? What if they didn’t like their dad dating anyone?
I first met them in passing one day at the house before Ken and I went out to dinner. Ben was still dressed in his black soccer uniform, watching baseball on television. His thick brown hair had a blond patch in front, dyed that color for summer only.
“Ben, this is my friend, Robin,” Ken said.
Ben shifted from a lying position to raise himself on an elbow and turned to look at me. “Hi,” he mumbled. His enormous blue eyes held mine a few seconds before he turned back to the television.
“Girls!” Ken called. Two sets of footsteps came rumbling down the stairs, and Molly and Sarah blew into the kitchen. They had huge eyes like their brother, and brown hair working its way out of ponytail holders in wispy strands.
“This is Robin,” Ken said. The girls looked at me with nothing more than a passing interest, as though I were a new kind of flower they’d never seen.
“This is Molly,” Ken said, placing a hand on the head of the slightly taller of the twins, the wavy hair a shade or two lighter than Sarah’s.
“And this is Sarah,” he said, as she snuggled in next to him with a hug and eyed me curiously.
Ben and Molly looked alike, but Sarah looked just like her dad, save for the eye color that was the same sky blue as her siblings’. The girls were twins but distinctly different in appearance, and as I would later learn, in personalities, too.
And then they were gone, off to the neighbor’s house in a flash of hair and flip-flops and brightly colored summer T-shirts, with Ben shuffling behind them.
A few weeks later, Ken suggested dinner at his house, a simple cookout with the kids. I was staggeringly nervous, far more so than I had ever been on a first date or a job interview. This felt like a terrifying combination of both.
“Just be yourself,” Ken reassured me.
Really? I thought. And who is that?
I had left a glamorous job in a sophisticated city to move to the middle of Ohio, where I was now dating a widower with three young children. Who I was, was a mystery to me these days.
I stuck close to Ken as he made dinner: burgers, salad, fresh fruit. I watched his interaction with the kids more than I participated.
As Ken put burgers on the grill, Sarah peeked her head out the screen door and said, “Dad, make sure you make it the way I like it.”
“I will, sweetie,” he answered.
When she went back inside, I asked Ken what she meant. What was the secret way Sarah Heigel liked her hamburgers? It seemed an important thing to know for future reference.
“I have no idea,” he said. He continued to make the burgers, all exactly the same. When we went inside, he put a burger on Sarah’s plate and said, “This one is yours.” She loved it.
Later in the same meal, as we were gathered around the circular dinner table, Molly said, “Dad, can we make the table big again?”
After Grace died, Ken had taken the leaf from the table, turning it from an oval into a round and hoping that, by making it smaller, they wouldn’t have to be reminded of their loss every single night at dinner.
Ken glanced at me, then at Molly and said, “Maybe we can.”
After that first meal together, Ken started integrating the kids more into our dates. We went apple picking one Sunday afternoon, and I taught them to make an apple pie. Two things I learned: Kids’ hands aren’t big enough for adult tools such as vegetable peelers, and kids have a limited interest in the same activity for a long period of time. They each peeled a single apple, but that was about it. I finished putting the pie together myself.
But they were impressed with the size of the pie—I used every apple we picked—and we enjoyed it at the end of the day.
Food would become a language all of us could understand. I didn’t know squat about motherhood or soccer or whatever eight-year-old twins might be thinking, but there wasn’t too much they could ask me about food or cooking that I couldn’t answer or even demonstrate.
One day, I took Sarah grocery shopping with me, and she asked me rapid-fire questions about produce.
“What’s this?” she asked, holding up a head of ordinary green cabbage.
“That’s cabbage.” I pointed to red, napa, and savoy varieties. “And that and that and that are cabbage, too.”
“What’s that?” She pointed to a rutabaga.
“That’s a rutabaga. It’s kind of like this turnip but with a little bit of a tan.”
Sarah smiled.
“OK, what’s this?” she asked, holding up a drippy bunch of Swiss chard with stems the size of her skinny forearm.
“It’s Swiss chard. And that right next to it? It’s rainbow chard. See the different colors of the stems?”
We went that way all around the produce section. When we got home, she ran into the house. “Dad! Dad! Robin knows everything at the grocery store!”
That autumn, Ken invited me to Dayton for Ben’s soccer tournament and to meet his family. When we piled into the family van that Friday afternoon, the kids seemed to pick up that this was some big milestone, though Ken and I had continued to maintain to them that we were just friends. Nonetheless they seemed quiet and nervous in the backseat. Soon they started singing a song they had learned that day at school. Over and over they sang the little song, “dip-dip and swing” in sweet young voices, as though the sound soothed them.
We spent the weekend at the home of Ken’s sister Karen. His mother and father, his other sister Kim, and all the cousins came around at different times to meet me. Ben, Molly, and Sarah spent most of their free time with Katie and Kevin, Karen’s kids.
When we were driving back home Sunday afternoon, we decided spur of the moment to stop at an outlet mall and go into the Disney store. Ken and I were walking through the store talking to one another, unaware that the kids were huddled together and whispering.
Sarah walked up to me, putting on a bold face, and said, “Robin, are you married?”
“I’m not,” I answered.
Sarah covered her mouth, giggled, and ran back to the other two. More whispering ensued.
She ran back up to me. “Do you have any kids?”
“I do not.”
Sarah squealed and ran back to Molly and Ben.
Ken and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows. The older cousins seemed to have filled in the kids on what their dad’s “friend” might really be. And if this reaction was any indication, they were excited by the possibilities.
In February, I closed on a condo not far from Ken and the kids, upgrading from the apartment I had moved into a year before. The first night I owned the place, the five of us ordered pizza and spent the evening painting. I had chosen a sage green for most of the living space and a warm pleasant yellow for my bedroom.
Ken and Ben set to painting the living room. Molly, Sarah, and I painted my bedroom.
Ken had instructed the kids to be careful with the paint, always work with a tarp, and not get too much paint on the roller. The kids knew to take the job seriously.
In the bedroom, I was working on cutting the edges near the ceiling with a brush while the girls took to rolling the walls down below. I looked down and noticed that Molly had stopped. She had rolled a portion of her brush over the cover on the electrical outlet and was just staring at the yellow paint on the beige plastic cover. She had not been careful.
I came down from the ladder, picked up a rag, and wiped off the paint. I looked at her and shrugged. “It’s pretty easy to clean up a little mess,” I said.
She beamed at me.
We heard the boys laughing in the living room, so we went to investigate. They had started applying paint to the wall that I wanted to be the accent wall, a bold dark brown called “truffle.”
Ken and Ben were lying on the floor, laughing at the big area they had painted.
“It looks like a black hole!” Ken laughed.
“It looks like baby poop!” said Ben.
We all giggled and decided that despite its enticing name, the color was indeed too dark. I’d never be able to look at it without thinking of baby poop.
“Where’s Sarah?” Molly asked, ever mindful of where her twin was.
Just then, Sarah came out from a closet off the hallway, carrying a little can of paint and a paintbrush.
“All done,” she said proudly.
Ken and I went to look. On the back wall of the closet of my new home she had painted, S M B K R—our initials, altogether in a row.
I reached over and hugged her, kissing the top of her head.
As I began to integrate into the family, my whisper prayers started to sound more like an actual dialogue. It went something like this:
“What if you and Ken got married?” God would ask.
“But I don’t want to get married.”
“You could be a stepmother to Ben, Molly, and Sarah.”
“I would be a terrible mother.”
“I think you can do it.”
That’s usually where the dialogue stopped, my internal voice silenced with fear.
Where was this coming from, this deep feeling of being called to be a wife and mother, two things I was certain I neither wanted to be, nor would be good at? I didn’t usually struggle with myself. I decided what I wanted—and what I didn’t want—and lived by those decisions. But here I was with an internal conflict, wanting something I wasn’t sure I wanted at all, at the same time, in the same breath.
When I look back now, I know the struggle wasn’t really with me or within myself. It was with what I felt God was calling me to do, which happened to be one thing I had told myself for years that I didn’t want.
But there was no denying that the children really did like me, which on its own was a sign of God’s grace. They could have been resentful, distrustful, and hurt that their father would fall in love with someone other than their mother. But they were none of those things.
They were beautiful children with beautiful hearts that, despite the death of their mother, were full and open and loving. They had no doubts in me—which was good, because I had so many of my own. What could I offer them? What kind of a stepmother would I be?
I’d always seen motherhood as a losing proposition. Few women get it just right. And stepmotherhood? No one wins at that. You’re constantly compared to the biological mother. And when she happened to be a mother who died so young and tragically and bravely, it’s a losing hand before the cards are even dealt.
Months passed, and I fell more in love with Ken and the children every day, to a point that I simply couldn’t imagine my life without them. But always the internal reservations bubbled just below the surface. I felt in the deepest part of my soul God’s presence: his watching, his nodding and nudging, asking me to trust him, to believe in where he had brought me.
In December, in a dark theater at a holiday pops concert of the Columbus Symphony Chorus, Ken took my hand and slipped a ring on my finger. “Will you marry me?” he whispered.
That moment felt like the actual calling from God, as though he were saying, “I want you to marry this man. I want you to be a mother to these children.” It couldn’t have been any clearer if the angel Gabriel had come and told me himself that this was God’s plan for me. Did I have the courage to say yes to Ken, to say yes to God?
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and with my heart pounding, said, “Yes. I’ll marry you.”
And so here I was waking up in a new house, with a husband and three children, one of them showering down the hall. My nerves jangled with anxiety.
Ken felt me sit up and stirred, turning over to look at me. He smiled. “Good morning, wife,” he said.
I slunk back down under the covers with him, instantly soothed. “Who’s in the shower?” I asked him.
“Probably Ben, getting ready for Mass.”
It was Sunday, and the kids knew we’d be going to Mass. It wasn’t a discussion.
At Mass that Sunday, many well-wishers who had either been to or heard about our wedding the week before greeted us. I felt like I was on display, wearing a mask, like you feel on the first day of a new job, hoping you’ll come across as competent and won’t do something stupid you’ll always be remembered for.
I didn’t do anything stupid, necessarily, but it was anything but an easy transition. I felt out of place, like I didn’t fit in, and unable to decide what exactly I was supposed to be doing. I kept thinking, This is the first day of the rest of your life. But I didn’t have an instruction book, a guide telling me precisely what I was supposed to do.
Even everyday activities felt stilted. When I went to make coffee, the kids jumped at the sound of the coffee grinder. When they moved to get breakfast, we bumped into one another in the kitchen.
After Mass, sensing my anxiety, Ken suggested we open wedding presents, with so many boxes having been delivered while we were on our honeymoon. The kids sat with us and watched, but with an anxious air about them, too, as though they were at a family event they couldn’t wait to be done with.
Finally, I did the one thing that came naturally to me: I went to the kitchen.
I took stock of what was in the cupboards and the refrigerator. I asked the kids what they liked to eat for breakfast, and I planned a week of meals. With a list in hand, I headed to the grocery store.
My sanctuary had always been the kitchen, where I went when I was sad, when I was happy, and when I didn’t know where else to go.
When I speak at public events or teach a cooking class, people often ask me how long food has been my passion. I always respond, “I’ve been eating my whole life.”
I originally found comfort in the kitchen because that is where I usually found my mother. With three older brothers, one-on-one time with her was scarce. The boys didn’t care about cooking, so if I wanted time with Mom without them, it pretty much had to be in the kitchen.
My mother was an excellent cook. She had grown up on a farm in Southern Illinois and learned to cook at her own mother’s side. She subscribed to Gourmet magazine, but her own cooking was pure home-style: pot roast, chicken-fried steak, fried chicken, meat loaf.
Other family favorites took on the flavors of where we went or people we knew. My father was in the Air Force, and when I was three, we moved to Germany. From there came sauerbraten and warm German-style potato salad usually served with grilled bratwurst.
My parents became friends with a Chinese couple through Dad’s work, and a few times a year, the two wives would have an egg-roll making day. They would make so many we could pack them into the freezer and heat them up one by one in the microwave when one of us missed family dinner because of sports or cheerleading or choir practice.
But despite my mother’s apparent love of cooking, she also had a great love of convenience products that had been a novelty to her when she was growing up. I didn’t have a made-from-scratch cake until I moved to California, nor did I have long-simmered pasta sauce because the staple on our table was Ragu.
It was a dichotomy I would ponder later, but as a child, I loved being with Mom in the kitchen whether we were making her legendary smothered steak in onion gravy from scratch or rolling crescent rolls from a can.
It’s not really surprising, then, that when Mom died, my family assumed that I would take on her role. Cooking equals motherhood. The problem was, in my book, it didn’t.
My mother’s death was a surprise. She didn’t die suddenly in some kind of accident, but I was as ill prepared for it as if she had. The whole situation was off script, not only because a mother isn’t supposed to die when the child is just twenty-two, but also because she died of alcoholism. I didn’t know someone could die from alcoholism—not just acute alcohol poisoning but from the rupturing of the esophagus, tearing of the lining of the heart, and of course, from horrible cirrhosis of the liver.
Halfway through my senior year at UD, my mother was rushed to the hospital with intense stomach pains and coughs that left her spitting up blood. My sixteen-year-old sister called to tell me that Mom was an alcoholic.
But that was all wrong. Dad, Dad was the heavy drinker. Mom just had her one drink in the evening.
“You mean the never-empty scotch and soda?” my brother, Mark, asked when we gathered at Christmas, with Mom still in the hospital but scheduled for release in a few days.
It was true. It was a magic drink, one that never emptied, one in which the ice never melted, but one that we never saw her refill.
“Or the bloody Mary at lunch?” Dorothy said.
“Or the ‘cough syrup’ in the morning?” Scott said, telling us that this was Mom’s code for Jäegermeister. She would have a shot or two of that every morning when she got up. Then the bloody Mary or two at lunch. A gin and tonic with Dad when he got home from work—a ritual I had always viewed as somehow glamorous. And finally, the magic scotch-and-soda.
Each of us had a piece to the puzzle of Mom’s disease, but each piece, on its own, hadn’t looked that bad. Our mother wasn’t a falling-down drunk. In fact, I don’t know that I ever saw her drunk. Or maybe I never actually saw her sober. Looking back, it’s hard to tell.
After she died, of course, we looked at all the signs and wondered how we had missed them. We were blind to her condition, but we wondered if Dad was, too. Had he known the severity of her drinking problem? Or had he been too afraid to address it because that would have forced him to confront his own drinking habits?
The day my mother died, just a week after my college graduation, my father called from the hospital to tell me she was gone. Before I had a chance to grieve, he appointed me the stand-in matriarch, asking me to get my sister home from school and call all the other relatives, including my grandfather, my mother’s father. I wrote the obituary and planned her funeral service and the wake.
Later, my family turned to me to plan the holidays, which I tried to do, but with little enthusiasm. The first Thanksgiving after Mom’s death, we ate at the restaurant at a nearby Holiday Inn because I wasn’t yet ready to tackle cooking an entire Thanksgiving dinner. That dinner was dreadful, made even more unbearable by the happy families—complete families—around us.
Christmas was the same, a time that reminded us of loss more than a time of newborn happiness and promise for the new year. I resented the role of being the “mother,” because I was as lost and confused as everyone else.
When my head cleared enough for me to gather my thoughts, I finally told myself, Enough. Enough of this madness of trying to be something I am not.
I started cleaning up what my life had become by ending the bad romantic relationship with the much older man I had maintained since college. And not surprisingly, it ended as badly as it had continued, with shouts and threats and broken windows. But once the dust settled, I had a newfound strength, and another reason to look around my life and see what else had to go.
How about this city? I thought. How about I say good-bye to Dayton, too?
I requested, and was granted, a transfer at the computer company where I had worked in marketing since graduation. I packed what little I had, leaving the detritus of my life behind, and moved to San Diego.
I left not only my family, but God as well. Maybe I hadn’t been perfect, but I had been faith-filled, I thought. Why hadn’t God intervened? Why hadn’t he saved my mother? Why couldn’t he show my family some way to carry on without her? Somewhere along the way, I had come to believe that bad things didn’t happen to people of faith—though there was plenty of evidence to the contrary in the world around me.
“If this is what you have to offer,” I told God, with my know-it-all, twenty-three-year-old attitude, “I’m not interested.”
From now on, I was in charge. No God. No needy boyfriend. No clingy family.
And for the next ten years or so, it worked pretty well. I fought hard for a new career in food, something I truly loved: the creation, the nourishment it brought people, and also the joy. I sent myself to the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, then spent years studying and writing about my newfound devotion.
Food and cooking became my passion, my obsession: my religion. The two aren’t actually that far apart. There’s a theory that if someone who knows nothing about Christianity reads the Bible for the first time, he’ll go away believing that it’s about food—from the dietary restrictions and the manna from heaven of the Old Testament to the New Testament’s loaves and fishes, the wedding at Cana, and finally, the breaking of the bread, the Eucharist. During my years in California, I walked a kind of parallel life with religion, though I didn’t know it at the time.
I studied at the table of the earth, learning how foods were grown and raised, how farmers and ranchers worked with weather and land to create ingredients that could be made into meals. I learned at the hands of chefs and home cooks, who took these ingredients and prepared them to feed and to nourish, whether for customers to make a living or for families to make a life. What could have been more basic and holy than that?
I may have abolished organized religion and church from my life, but I worshipped what God gave us, even if I didn’t give him credit at the time. I was fascinated the first time I tasted a fresh fig with its spongy insides behind a leathery skin, and diligent when a Jewish mother taught me how to braid yeasted dough into challah and how to caramelize onions slowly to grind into chopped liver. I sought to discern the nuances of a pinot noir made from grapes grown in Sonoma versus one produced in the Burgundy region of France.
I ate off the plates of some of the country’s best chefs, savoring sea urchin from a sushi chef in Los Angeles, truffle risotto at a fine dining restaurant in San Francisco, and broccoli rabe dressed with the gooey golden yolk of a barely cooked duck egg at a downscale Italian hot spot in New York. I broke bread in boulangeries from San Francisco to Paris, always finding time to crack open a baguette or enjoy one more crusty slice turned faintly purple from walnuts or studded bitter with salty black olives.
I took these lessons and applied them in my own kitchens, both at home and at work. It was pure joy to spend an evening rendering fat from the skin of a duck and later using it to sauté thin slices of potatoes or shredded leaves of chard. I continued to tamper with a recipe for Brussels sprouts, pasta, and egg just hours before I was to catch a flight to London, when I knew I wouldn’t be in a kitchen for days.
Food and cooking were my daily prayers, my constant meditations, the underlying lifeblood of my very existence.
Now, here I was, far away from the life I had so carefully crafted, and well into a life that God—the same God I had purposefully and methodically walked away from—had called me to.
While it had seemed so clear that he had wanted me to marry Ken and be a mother to Ben, Molly, and Sarah, it was less apparent to me what exactly he wanted me to do now that I was here. So I set up my temple in the kitchen of our new family home and continued the only prayers I knew: the stirring, bubbling, melding prayers of cooking, while I waited for further divine instructions.
Prosciutto-Wrapped Asparagus
Makes about 20
We served this appetizer at our wedding, but it also is a go-to dish for dinner parties. Sometimes I go the extra step of wrapping the asparagus and prosciutto in phyllo dough, but usually I find the process too time-consuming and fussy. The combination of asparagus and the salty Italian ham are a family favorite. We enjoy it on everything from pizza to pasta. Don’t use pencil-thin asparagus spears, but thicker ones. If they’re too thin, they’ll burn before the prosciutto gets crispy.
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 bunch fresh asparagus spears (about 20), trimmed
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
10 paper-thin slices prosciutto, halved lengthwise
1⁄2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Line a baking sheet with foil.
Drizzle asparagus with oil, tossing to coat. Season lightly with salt and pepper. Wrap one prosciutto slice around each spear, leaving tip end exposed. Arrange on baking sheet.
Roast 5 minutes. Turn spears over. Roast until asparagus is tender and prosciutto is crisp, about 5 minutes longer. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese. Serve warm or at room temperature.