The thing about bread is, you can’t rush it. You have to give it the right environment with the right touch of warmth and precise ratio of yeast to flour to liquid. But you can’t make it become bread any quicker. That just takes time.
My father was an excellent bread baker, which is not really a surprise. He was a chemist, and baking is, after all, a formula before it’s an art form. Other cooking would frustrate Dad; my mother made him do all the grilling. He was never quite satisfied with his barbecued pork chops or slabs of ribs that, to him, seemed too saucy or too caramelized.
But later in his life, when I was in high school, he picked up a book on bread baking. He would spend Sundays making white bread or French loaves or, later, pretzels that he would form into everyone’s initials. He didn’t worry about what he was making. He would follow the recipe meticulously, knowing precisely what would happen at every step. The results were, of course, exactly as he expected.
I am more of a cook than a baker. I can make a good pie and can even make a loaf of bread if necessary, but I lack the diligence and practice required to be truly superior at baking. I like to cook because I can throw things together, fix the flavors midstream if I need to, and usually come out with something delicious. Baking, and life, require a little more patience—something I do not have in abundance.
Somewhere along the way, I decided that if I was going to do this stepmother thing, I was going to do it perfectly. Perfect is a dangerous word. It’s full of expectations, most of which I’ve since come to believe aren’t based in reality. Perfection as I’d perceived it precluded emptying oneself to become obedient to God’s plan. Being perfect takes up an awful lot of space, and so it doesn’t allow for that emptying thing to happen.
For me, God’s will became supplanted—again—with my own will to be a perfect wife and stepmother. I wanted to be a straight-A mom right out of the chute, like a student in cooking school who wants to be Julia Child the day she graduates. I allowed myself no leeway, no room for learning, or God forbid, mistakes.
I knew, just knew, that if I tried harder, worked harder, and loved harder, I would be a perfect straight-A mom. What that search for perfection actually gave me was an A+ bout of anxiety that turned into something more serious.
Not quite a year after we were married, I was sitting at my desk at the newspaper. I felt a flutter in my chest. It wasn’t painful, just odd. And it lasted long enough that I thought I was going to pass out. I picked up my cell phone and walked calmly to the stairwell, the only place for at least partial privacy in the bustling cubescape of the newsroom.
Then I coughed. I felt a quiet thump, then my heart rhythm seemed to be restored. What was it? Did I just have a heart attack? But I felt no pain. A stroke? But I was fine now.
A voice inside me said that tightness and shallow breathing were something to check out. I called my physician. When I told the nurse about the cough, she said the episode warranted a visit. A cough is often the body’s way to try to correct an abnormal heart rhythm. A few more episodes of what I perceived to be a sputtering heart rate and a trip to the emergency room landed me in the office of a cardiologist.
Ken and I sat quietly while the doctor looked over my EKG and stress test results. Ken’s foot jiggled anxiously, and not for the first time since this heart thing had started, I felt guilty. Here was a man who had lost his wife to cancer, and now his new wife of not yet a year was complaining of heart palpitations.
“Your heart is perfectly fine,” the cardiologist said, after reviewing my test results. “Some women in their forties”—I loved the as-you-age comment—“experience what they think are unusual rhythms, but they’re nothing to worry about.”
Then he said it was possible I was just anxious. “Is there anything that could be causing you stress?” he asked.
“Like a new marriage and three stepchildren?” I wanted to say but didn’t. I left with a clean bill of health, promising him and my husband that I would just try to relax.
Of course, relaxing wasn’t something I had mastered exactly. When I lived in San Francisco, I juggled multiple projects constantly—consulting and editing books in addition to my full-time plus restaurant critic/food writing job—all in the name of bettering my career.
Every year, the consulting firm for which I did work on the side threw a cocktail party to thank the chef’s council, a group of us who helped food companies brainstorm and create new products. It was sensational work, highly creative, focused, and short-term. It also paid what I considered to be a huge amount of money, so I felt the need to go all out for every project.
At the party, I ran into one of my teachers from cooking school, someone who also consulted frequently and whom I occasionally took with me on restaurant reviews. When she asked how I was, I started rattling off every project I had in the works.
She stared at me. “Robin, whenever I’m around you, I expect to see smoke start pouring out of your ears. You’re always in overdrive. Slow down. You’re going to burn out.”
And that was years before I tried to become a super stepmom. The stress I created professionally, then personally, did eventually catch up to me, breaking my healthy heart, though not physically.
After being married about three years, after the newness of my life had worn off but the daily demands and challenges remained, I started to crack. I often found myself crying, though only when no one was looking: after Ken had fallen asleep, when I was in the shower, or driving to and from work. A lifelong insomniac, my sleeplessness reached epic proportions. I would lie awake for hours each night, recounting the day and replaying and analyzing each event.
Then the crying started to creep into less private places such as the dinner table or while watching television. I didn’t know why I was crying. I had the perfect life, a job I loved, a husband I loved who adored me, and three beautiful stepchildren who had welcomed me so openly into their lives. Obviously, if the problem wasn’t these people close to me, then it had to be me. And if it was me, then I just needed to try harder.
On those nights when I started to cry in bed after Ken went to sleep, I tried to pray, much like the prayers I said after my father died. “Please. Please. Please.” The tears dripped down my cheeks as I tried to lie as still as possible and not let my crying turn into actual sobs that would wake Ken.
Inevitably I would feel God come to me. Sometimes I envisioned Jesus sitting on the edge of the bed, and when it was really bad, I felt his arms around me. “What do you want me to do?” I asked silently. But I felt his arms around me, that’s all. I couldn’t hear him, because the rumblings in my head were so loud.
“Just try harder,” I shouted at myself. “Just be better!” It was hard to hear what Jesus might be saying to me when I was so busy screaming at myself.
What I didn’t know then was that marriage and parenthood aren’t always happy and harmonious. Despite the children’s love for me, I often felt fake and disconnected. Somewhere along the way, I had picked up the idea of what a super stepmom would be: a perfect replacement mom with all the right answers, calm and unshakable, and still even a little bit hip and cool. But what I saw when I looked in the mirror was a tense and uptight woman with crow’s feet around her eyes, fine lines that were beginning to turn into canyons from my constant frowning and scowling. I may have been trying to be Maria Von Trapp, but I was closer to being the Baroness, cold and remote, uncomfortable and artificial.
I didn’t have any good role models. My mother had faced a multitude of heartbreaks, from her own mother dying when she was in college to the tragic death of her first husband, then to losing herself in alcoholism. As a guide, she was dubious. At that time, I wasn’t strong enough in my faith to look to Mary, something I often do now.
I had arrived in this land of stepparenting as though landing in a foreign country without a road map or dictionary of the language. I looked around to see what the locals were doing and tried to blend in. The problem was, I didn’t believe that I was like the locals. The vast majority of the women I met in Dublin, Ohio—who invariably were the mothers of the kids’ friends—were biological parents.
One Christmas, I hosted a mother-daughter cookie exchange. As the mothers sat around the kitchen table nibbling on the sweet treats while the girls played in the finished basement, I felt sort of left out of the conversation. Not shut out—these women were kind and gracious—but left out. The talk centered on school and church and whatever the kids were involved in. Nothing about arts, culture, politics, or worldviews or even personal growth.
As I listened and looked around, it dawned on me that not one of these women worked outside the home. They led what appeared to be perfect lives: beautiful houses always meticulously maintained. They volunteered at their children’s schools and were always impeccably dressed at their husbands’ sides at all the right events. The kids, the house, the marriage—these formed the totality of their day-to-day lives.
They all seemed happy. But their life was not mine. It wasn’t where I was or where I would ever go. I needed my job, my career, in addition to my family. If these neighbors were my role models, then I was in serious trouble because I was already different. Not just different, but lacking in the perfection I held as my ultimate standard.
So the crying continued, starting earlier in the evening and awaking me any night I might actually grab a few hours of sleep.
After work one evening, I climbed into my car in the parking lot and immediately started sobbing. “What is this?” I cried at the car’s interior. The day hadn’t been bad at work; in fact, I was managing work beautifully, even though a television gig had recently been added to my responsibilities as food editor. Once a week, I taped a cooking segment with the local news station to air in conjunction with that week’s Food section. It was a whole new realm for me, requiring a new set of skills. It was stressful, I suppose, but I had managed so much more in San Francisco between my full-time job and freelance work. If work was OK, then why was I sitting in my car in the parking lot sobbing?
Then it dawned on me. I was crying because it was time to go home.
I was leaving the land of deadlines and demanding bosses and a constantly expanding workload to go into the abyss: my home life. Where three little people needed guidance and structure and love—in addition to being dropped off and picked up and helped with their homework. Dinner needed to be made, dishes washed, and piles of laundry washed and put away. I could look around the house and find a dozen or more projects that needed tending to every night.
And it flattened me.
Let me step back for a moment and explain that the division of household labor came naturally to Ken and me; we both just did what we were best at. Of course, cooking went to me, just as mowing the lawn and shoveling the snow went to Ken. (I had lived in California so long I’d never had to learn to do either.) I’d done laundry my whole life, so I could take that over fine—though the volume of laundry for five people compared to one was more than a little daunting.
The housework? We split it. But living alone for so long had left me comfortable with a certain degree of mess. Which is to say, not much. When I lived alone, there wasn’t much mess because there was just me. Add three kids and a husband making their own little messes, and suddenly it’s a much bigger mess.
The smooth clean lines of a demanding job didn’t unhinge me because I knew what was expected and how to accomplish it. I was in control. At home? It was messy and sticky and constantly changing. I struggled with getting the kids to choose fruits and vegetables over sweets. I worried that Ben wasn’t studying enough and that the girls were studying too much. I feared that I wasn’t making Ken happy because I constantly harped on the state of the house, which no matter how hard I tried, always seem to be accumulating dust and trash and piles—and piles—of laundry.
I could say in my head that these things didn’t matter, that a life and a marriage aren’t judged by the cleanliness of a house or how many veggies your kids eat. But my heart had grown stony and wouldn’t listen.
Between sobs, I called my sister. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I’m so sad. I don’t know why this isn’t easier. It’s been three years. I mean, come on! Why am I still struggling with their schedules and laundry and piles of dishes? Why am I undone by that?”
Dorothy murmured and tried to comfort me, but I was inconsolable.
“Maybe,” I said, unsure I wanted to say what I had been thinking for weeks, “I need help.”
“I think it’s a good idea,” Dorothy said, having watched me descend into this sad muck for months.
My crying stopped, and I had a sense that maybe all this internal struggle was more visible on the outside than I’d realized.
“Robin,” she went on, “I’m sure you could handle this on your own. But if you knew you could do something that would make it better sooner, wouldn’t you want to do it? If you were sick with an infection that would probably clear up on its own, but there was a drug that would make you well sooner, you’d take it, right?”
Dorothy had endured her own anxiety crisis a year before when she was pregnant with her second child. She, too, found herself crying constantly, finding little joy in caring for Josh or anything else. It was her fear of what this stress was doing to her unborn baby that finally led her to get professional help, which made an enormous difference, and fairly quickly.
She sent me an e-mail with her counselor’s phone number. I made the call when I got home that night, leaving a message something like this: “I’m not sure why I’m calling. There’s nothing really wrong. I just can’t seem to stop crying.” Pause, tears welling up. “I cry all the time.”
My first appointment with Julie was much the same. I cried. And cried. The only words I could get out were, “I don’t know why I’m crying. I have everything I could ever want.” Over the next few sessions I was able to explain to her how hard I tried at being a good wife and mother, but how I actually felt like a fake.
When Ben started high school, I went grudgingly to the mother’s club meeting. Grudgingly because I didn’t feel like I belonged. A woman who went to our church, whose youngest daughter was a senior came up to me and touched my arm. “I just want you to know how beautifully you’ve taken to all of this,” she said.
“All of this?” I asked. I wondered if she meant the mother’s club, where I had wandered from table to table holding my watered down Dixie Cup of Hi-C, wondering whether I should sign up for the fashion show or the garden committee, hoping to find something as simple—and private—as a bake sale.
“Motherhood. I see you all together, and you’re a family. You’ve jumped right in.”
I’d jumped right in, all right. But most days I felt like I was sinking, not swimming. Apparently I made it look good, because I received a lot of comments similar to this woman’s.
“I see you at church together, and I just cry,” said a woman who had known Ken and Grace. “I used to cry because it broke my heart to see the four of them. Now, when I see the five of you, I’m so happy.”
An older woman at church who was friends with Grace’s mother came up to me at church every so often and whispered, “You are so amazing.”
What I felt like was a great imposter. “Today, the role of Ben, Molly, and Sarah’s mother will be played by Robin Davis, the understudy.” Too bad no one ever gave me the script, and that I didn’t know my lines.
“So why don’t you tell them?” Julie asked, after I’d described this life I had created.
“Tell them what?”
“Tell them it’s hard. Tell them you’re struggling. When someone asks, even casually, ‘How are you?’ tell them you’re having a hard day.”
Was it possible that I was feeling fake because I was acting fake? What would happen if I just stopped trying to be perfect?
The counseling gave me great comfort, helping me put into words and say out loud what was festering in my heart. And Julie was able to sort my feelings and put together actions to bring me out of this darkness.
Still, it wasn’t an easy transition. I had fallen into what Julie called a “major depressive episode.” I couldn’t assimilate who I thought I should be and who I believed I actually was. Since I’d entered this marriage I had carefully scripted everything in my head. But nothing was going according to my plans. It wasn’t getting easier. I wasn’t feeling more comfortable in this life.
“Have you always planned your life this carefully?” Julie asked me.
I thought for a moment about how I had left Dayton and my family—and God—almost out of spite, and how I had determinedly put myself through cooking school, how I had carefully constructed what I thought would be a “perfect life” only to discover it wasn’t what I wanted at all. “Yes,” I told Julie. “I always have a plan and a plan B and C and D.”
“And how has that worked out for you?”
Looking at my life at that moment, I had to admit, it wasn’t going well.
“You need to live in the moment, not rehearse the future,” Julie told me. “When you try to live in the future, you’re destined for disappointment. Life will never be exactly the way you imagine it.”
There was one more thing I had to do. “You need to tell Ben, Molly, and Sarah,” she said.
“Tell them I’m depressed?”
“Be honest with them,” she said. “Ken was always honest with them about their mother’s illness. You’ve both been honest with them about your relationship. Now it’s time to be honest with them about you.”
After dinner one night, I asked them to stay around the table. “I want to tell you something.” I took a deep breath and started on the part I had practiced. “When Josh was a baby, I used to tell him all the time when I watched him, when I changed his diaper, ‘Be nice to me, Josh. Your Aunt Robin doesn’t really know what she’s doing.’”
I looked around at my three stepchildren. “I don’t really know what I’m doing with you guys, either,” I said. “I’ve been trying hard to be perfect—whatever that means—and I haven’t been doing a very good job. I’ve become really sad. So I’ve been seeing a kind of doctor. The doctor says I’m depressed. Have you heard that word before?”
They nodded. “Is that why you cry?” Sarah asked.
“It is. And I want you to know that it’s not you, none of you. I just haven’t been really sure what it is I’m supposed to be doing, and I became convinced I wasn’t doing it right. But I’m working on it, OK? And I believe I’ll get better.”
Ben looked relieved. He smiled at me. “What can we do?”
Tears welled up in my eyes. Such a big heart, this boy. “Nothing,” I told him. “Just be you. And pray for me.”
The kids went off to do their homework, and I sat at the table and looked at Ken. “How do you feel?” he asked.
“About a hundred pounds lighter.”
“They don’t expect you to be perfect. They love you just the way you are.”
And I knew, maybe for the first time, that it was true. But it wasn’t just a flip of a switch: click, I was better. I still struggled often with my role, sometimes losing sight of who I was trying to be and who I actually was.
I usually let Ken take the lead in most things concerning the kids. I always figured he knew better. But every so often, I’d recognize there were other paths than the one he put them on.
Take math, for instance. When Ben was in seventh grade, Ken pushed him to excel in math. St. Brigid offered algebra in eighth grade, but students had to pass a test to get into it. Ken worked through problems every night with Ben at the kitchen table while I made dinner; Ben wasn’t always enthusiastic about the process.
“If you take algebra in eighth grade, then you can take geometry as a freshman, trigonometry as a sophomore, calculus as a junior, and AP calculus as a senior,” Ken said, explaining, again, why this extra studying was necessary. “It’s very important to take calculus before college. You’ll be better prepared.”
I drained a pot of pasta, then dumped it into a skillet where onions and garlic had been cooking. I added peas, then a little Parmesan, last minute touches for dinner, all the while listening to the exchange at the table, one I had heard a few times before.
I believed what Ken said: Math was important. And I knew that if Ben went through calculus in high school, he would probably have an easier time with any math classes he had to take in college.
But I also knew something else. “Some people go their whole lives without taking calculus,” I said quietly. Ken and Ben looked up from the math problems.
“You never took calculus?” they said almost in unison.
I shook my head.
“Never?” Ken said.
“Nope,” I replied. “I took algebra in high school and barely squeaked by. I took it again in summer school at college just to prove to myself I could do it. But,” I continued excitedly, “I took a six credit-hour class in Shakespeare in college. Now that was awesome.”
Ben scrunched up his face. “I’ll stick with algebra, I think.”
“As long as you know you have choices.”
With the girls, the revelation came with dance. Sarah and Molly were taking dance classes before I met them, another opportunity Ken wanted to provide for them, much like soccer and piano lessons.
Molly quickly limited her dance to tumbling, for which she had a natural affinity. She seemed to fly and flip as easily as breathing, even as she became taller. As a high school cheerleader, at 5 foot, 8 inches, she was hard to miss when she took off doing back handsprings down the field or court, each one more perfect than the last.
Sarah tried tumbling, too, but became frustrated when it didn’t come as easily to her as it did to Molly. “I think you should try ballet,” Ken told her.
“Ballet?” Sarah groaned. “It’s so boring.”
Sarah had taken hip-hop and tap, but never ballet. Between sixth and seventh grade, we convinced her to try it. She grudgingly agreed, mostly because it was just for a few weeks during the summer.
She took to the classical dance form the way Molly had taken to tumbling. She jumped levels quickly and worked diligently, and by her freshman year in high school, she was on pointe and dancing fifteen hours a week or more.
Ken and I supported her dance, sending her to a summer intensive program in Cincinnati for three weeks after her freshman year. Ken wasn’t sold on it, but thought living away from home for a short period of time would be good prep for college. At the beginning of her sophomore year, Sarah started talking about going to an extreme ballet camp at Kaatsbaan, an exclusive dance center in Tivoli, New York.
Ken was hesitant. Was this the best way she could be spending her summer? he wondered to me.
“It’s so expensive,” he told Sarah. “If you really want to go, you’ll need to come up with half the money.” Instead of being discouraged, Sarah was determined, choosing babysitting jobs over evenings out with friends.
After her three weeks in the Hudson Valley, Sarah was no less in love with dance. Two girls at her studio had declared they were going to major in dance in college, and both were scouring the country, researching dance programs that emphasized ballet, and scheduling their auditions. Sarah talked about them wistfully, with great admiration. “I wish I could do that.”
But she knew that as much as Ken supported her dancing, he had subconsciously drawn the line at college, and I followed along. “You have to major in something practical,” Ken would say. “You could always minor in dance.”
I would chime in with how hard a dancer’s life is. “It’s so competitive,” I would tell her. “You’d work hard, probably waiting tables to support yourself, and maybe never get the opportunity to really dance.”
Sarah never fought our opinions, obediently believing what we told her. But sometimes when I drove her and her friends somewhere, I would hear her say how much she loved dance and how she wished she could dance forever.
About the same time, a woman at church approached me after Mass one Sunday. “Robin, I was wondering if you might talk to my daughter,” she said. “She just graduated from college and is thinking about doing a writing program in England. Since you’re a writer, I thought maybe it would help if you talked to her.”
“I’d be happy to,” I said. “Have her call me at work.”
A few days later she did. “How did you become a writer?” she asked.
“I’ve been writing since I was about five,” I told her. “But for a long time, I didn’t know what I wanted to write about.” I told her my winding career tale, about graduating from college and moving to California, quitting a good job in marketing and going to cooking school in San Francisco, and finally combining my love of food and my love of writing. It wasn’t a straight path, I told her, but I’d always gotten by and had never been unhappy with my choices.
“Do you love to write?” I asked her.
“I do,” she said. “But my parents think I need to do something more practical.”
I looked at the framed wedding picture on my desk, at Sarah’s smiling face. Hadn’t Ken and I said the same thing to her? I spun my chair in the other direction, facing away from my desk and the photo. “You should do what you love,” I told her. “If you can afford it, go to England. Work office jobs or wait tables if you need to, to support yourself. Start a blog. Take a job in PR or in advertising. But as long as you have the dream, follow it.”
Sarah’s studio had a meeting with parents of students in the senior intensive program, their most serious dancers. Ken did most parent meetings, but I opted to go to this one. The instructors told us that if our daughters wanted to proceed to a college level or professional dance program, we needed to declare it to the studio so the instructors could make sure they were helping them get to that level.
As we were driving home that night, I asked Sarah, “Do you love to dance?”
“Yes,” she told me. “More than anything.”
“Then maybe we should start looking at colleges with dance majors.”
She looked at me, shocked. “What about Dad?”
“Well, I think we should tell him. Don’t you?” I smiled.
That night, when we walked into the house, Ken was watching television. “Ken, Sarah has something she’d like to tell you,” I said. Ken turned off the TV and looked at her.
“I want to major in dance in college.”
He looked at me. I nodded just slightly. “OK,” he said. “What do we need to do?”
Later that night, after she’d gone to bed, he said, “I always wanted to support Sarah in dance, but I guess I didn’t think it would last all the way to college. Did you?”
“Not really. But you know I talked to Missy’s daughter about writing the other day?”
“Yes.”
“I was telling her my story, about finding my way trying to be a writer, then a food writer. I kept telling her she should follow her dream. But I realized that’s not what we were saying to Sarah.”
He nodded.
“I know it’s not practical,” I told him. “But if I’d always done what was practical, I never would have met you. We have to make it OK for the kids to take risks and know that God will put them where he wants them to be.”
Ken smiled and pulled me into his arms. “Who knew an English major could be so smart?”
Maybe, just maybe, I did have something more than food to offer these kids. Maybe my life—maybe just me—was a kind of food for them, too.
Bread Sticks (and Pizza Dough)
Makes about 12 sticks or 4 individual-size pizzas
Pizza is a staple at our house. Columbus has dozens of decent pizzerias, but when time permits, I like to make my own pizza dough. The kids like to stretch and shape the dough, and top it exactly as they like. The recipe also works great as soft warm bread sticks. Serve them with a dipping sauce of good-quality olive oil sprinkled with salt, a pinch of red pepper flakes, and freshly grated Parmesan cheese.
1 envelope active dry yeast
1⁄2 cup plus 1 tablespoon warm water (105 to 110 degrees)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1⁄2 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons honey
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil plus additional for coating
Dissolve the yeast in warm water. Let stand 5 to 10 minutes or until foamy.
Combine both flours and salt in a large mixing bowl. Make a well in the center.
Add the honey and 1 tablespoon oil to the yeast mixture. Stir until the honey dissolves. Pour into the well in the flour mixture. Using a wooden spoon, stir to combine. Turn out the dough on a lightly oiled surface. Knead with oiled hands until dough is smooth and still slightly tacky, about 5 minutes.
Lightly oil a large bowl. Place dough in bowl. Turn to coat. Cover bowl with plastic. Let rise in a warm place until doubled in volume, about 1½ to 2 hours.
Punch down dough. Cut into 12 equal pieces (or 4 pieces if making pizzas). Roll the 12 pieces into logs (or the 4 pieces into balls). Place on an ungreased rimmed baking sheet. Cover with a clean kitchen towel. Let rise until doubled in volume, about 45 minutes to an hour.
Preheat oven to 450 degrees. (If making pizza, place a pizza stone in the oven. If you don’t have a pizza stone, turn a rimmed baking sheet upside down and place it in the oven.)
If making bread sticks, brush sticks lightly with olive oil. If desired, sprinkle with sea salt, dried Italian seasoning, red pepper flakes, and black pepper. Bake bread sticks until golden brown, 8 to 10 minutes.
If making pizzas, stretch out to four 8-inch rounds. Top as desired. Bake on pizza stone or on the inverted baking sheet until crust is golden brown and topping is bubbly, about 8 to 10 minutes.