Saturday, May 15, 2010

Daily Bread

One of the most prized pieces on my over inflated bridal registry was a Cuisinart breadmaker. It oozed urban homesteader with the brushed chrome and ability to churn out whole grain goodness hands free in a Sunday afternoon. Upon registering for it the husband even got in on the excitement citing a morning ritual of coffee and warm homemade bread to begin our days of married bliss. Not to mention Barbara Kingsolver’s husband wrote an inset in his wife’s book about how to impress your wife with a breadmaker. When we opened the box our first Christmas from my mom, we felt we were so on the pulse of married trendiness we could hardly stand it.

We put the breadmaker to use probably more than the average person uses a small appliance with such limited output. Our Sundays were in fact filled with good bread, pizza dough, angel biscuits, and banana bread. We grew dill our first year of marriage and the husband churned out dill bread until Thanksgiving. When the economy started to fall apart and we were both faced with potential layoffs and the husband made the voluntary cut back to go back to school, the breadmaker took the place of store bought bread because we could always scrap together whatever kind of flour was left in the pantry to produce a small loaf for the week. The breadmaker fueled our creative survival as it could receive the most mundane ingredients stacking liquids under solids topped off with yeast to produce fluffy white decadence and make us feel like rich gourmets even if all we had to go with it was peanut butter or hummus from the back of the fridge.

When I was pregnant I made bread with rye or flax seed meal to fulfill my whole grain needs. Sometimes my shifting appetite would outlive the loaf which was left to mold in wrapped cellophane and the breadmaker parts would acquire layers of gunk while they sat in the sink waiting for the husband to wash them in between classes and all nighters. Little did we know our negligence of the breadmaker was the foreshadowing the relinquishment of sane living that comes with having a baby.

Today we have a one month old child and the breadmaker sits in a prominently displayed location in the dining room, set up by my mom who saw it necessary to spend the time I was in the hospital cleaning and organizing my house, beginning with washing our breadmaker and removing it from the very uncool location of on top of the dryer. While mom was swiffering and scrubbing our house the husband and I were drowning in a river of sleep deprivation. I was recovering from major surgery and learning to breast feed my son without falling asleep while the husband learned to change baby while figuring out how to balance his next week and a half of missed classes and freelance deadlines. Neither of us had a clue what we were getting into and had both assumed I would naturally push out an intuitive little soul who would sleep and feed naturally and life would snap back to normal in a matter of weeks. On money we would say “how much does an infant need in the first months anyway?” On childcare “the students at my school bring their dogs to class, I can certainly bring my baby” or “I’ll just set up a pack n play in my office, all he’ll do is eat and sleep those first months anyway .”

All this seemed life faraway fantasies concocted by very naïve people on the first day of my son’s life as as I, on my knees peeked out of the hospital bathroom at my husband soothing the baby in the rocking chair after his most recent crying spell. I had forgotten that the epidural was still flowing through my body and the painkillers from the C-Section had masked my lack of strength so much that the simple misstep of one foot had sent me to the ground. I pulled the emergency cord and the husband looked at me with total baby versus spouse conflict. I told him I was fine but when hospital staff didn’t come quick enough the baby returned to the cradle and he hoisted me back to my bed. Later that day as he e-mailed his freelance clients on the delay in getting his work done (and the delay of us then getting paid) the WIC woman stopped by to inform me that I qualified for vouchers for weekly food items for myself and the baby. As a nursing mom, I qualified for the “whole grain option”, meaning a weekly loaf of whole grain bread from any local large chain grocery store. I signed my name with relief on the government paperwork as my son rested on my chest in between feeding.

It may be months (even years) before my life evens out to one of homemade whole grain bread again. In the meantime I reach for the pre-sliced Sara Lee whole wheat without even bothering to toast it. These days, I can’t even keep night from day. But when it does, the breadmaker is still standing like a beacon of social savviness reminding or taunting us that we were once adults who sought a life of leisure in the form of warm simple carbs. I brush the crumbs of my Sara Lee slice off of my son who perpetually sleeps on my chest now and try to type over his tiny limp body to draw myself back into the world that was once myself. I hope to do it all again tomorrow.