February 5, 2024
I had an order to start fulfilling the same night I had to take my son to urgent care with a severe case of please don’t let it be pinkeye, a play for the preventative doctor’s note a parent seeks to keep their kid in school rather than being sent home mid-day by surprise.
It wasn’t pinkeye.
It wasn’t an infection either, deduced by another doctor brought in for a second opinion, after the first doctor subjected me to the results of a Google image search for the terrible looking disease we had thankfully just ruled out, full of children clearly struggling more than mine was. Finally some special eye drops and funky colored light unearthed mild scratches on his eyeball, the kind that apparently sound a lot worse than they are and will heal with time.
We got a prescription to fill the next day and continued merrily homeward.
But I was late, and dough waits for no woman. Not even what that woman has a gathering planned a month earlier with a handful of other church mom friends who have children with some similar medical issues as one of my own. (Not the pseudo-pinkeye; that is just a bonus special one-off.)
We’ve all experienced some of the same visible struggles: our kids are the ones wiggling in the pews, running in the back, disrupting the sacred. We share the same weary sighs and post-battle exhaustion countenance after service, we walk the same difficult balance of trying to keep our kids on one side of the crazy line without being so strict and performance-based as to quash their spirits and turn them off from the whole God thing entirely. All the while acutely aware of the way our kids might annoy others, less troubled than we.
All in all, it felt like a good bet they wouldn’t be overly judgey when I showed up with a bowl of dough.
Excuse me, pardon me, I just need to mix the levain into my autolyse. Oh hi, nice to see you all. Yes, I’m Jeannie Rose, mom of … oh this? Just some dough for some bread I’m making…
Bread will, apparently, make you do crazy things. I saw an instagram story recently riffing on this, spoofing a mom so far down the sourdough path she can’t be bothered to join her family for an outing or give her children more than a passing glance as she tends to her starter. You always want to imagine some other person who’s really truly nuts, but you’re just a dedicated baker, casually toting a bowl of dough along to small group.
I like to imagine the dough absorbs the emotional energy of the baker, maybe even the environment. It’s mysterious and completely unscientific, of course, but doesn’t it seem right that something baked with love should taste better? (On the other hand, when cranky mom shows up to bake I always make myself take some deep breaths first to avoid infecting the dough with my irritation.) What better place for a bowl of dough to bulk ferment than a sacred gathering of loving moms, joined to support each other through the rocky cliffs of parenting?
The bread I made with this dough, in fact, was glorious, silky, stretchy interior, beautiful crisp crust. One of the two loaves also had a gorgeous shape, like something out of an ad for bread.
The other, in the words of my five year old, looked like a butt.
But a butt baked with love.
