On Your Terms

Kaan Cankat, Industrial Relations Section

Princeton Writes Prize

2020-2021 Staff Essay Contest

I was zesting the lemons and trying to forget the looming pandemic when my phone rang. It wasn’t the default Apple ring tone, but Facebook Messenger’s familiar chiming. That meant two candidates: Mom or Dad. They call on Messenger because it’s the easiest way to call someone in New Haven from Istanbul. I picked up. Mom. “So, what are you up to?” Usually, this is a simple question to answer—just say what you happen to be doing. But I hesitated. In situations like this, you only really only hesitate if you have something to hide, like, for example, if your mother is a trained baker and you are baking a lemon poppy seed pound cake, and you didn’t ask for her recipe. Worse, if your mother knows that her lemon poppy seed pound cake is your favorite. I confessed.

“What recipe are you using?”

“New York Times Cooking.”

“Would you forward it to me?”

I did.

“Give me a minute.” She hung up. A minute later, my phone buzzed again. I opened the attachment to find a color-coded revision of the recipe. I was instructed to beat the sugar with the eggs first—otherwise, I “wouldn’t get a nice rise on it.” I knew the New York Times’ recipe would probably rise just fine, but our household isn’t one to settle for “fine.” Under ordinary circumstances, I probably would have rebuffed the recipe revision. Mom, I can figure out how to make a lemon poppy seed pound cake on my own just fine, I might have said. But in the early days of the pandemic, something began to change between us. Calling home used to mean a 10-minute catch-up once or twice a week; now we’d begun speaking for 45 minutes to an hour. My mom is immunocompromised, and I was worried for her. And I could imagine that she was, like me, terrified. When we called, I shared more readily, and listened eagerly to whatever my mother had on her mind: gossip, what she was reading, her thoughts on some topic. But our newfound openness wasn’t enough for me to think of asking for her recipe; cooking still felt somehow beyond the pale.

My mother never taught me how to cook. Not because she couldn’t or didn’t want to, but because I never let her. I remember she offered frequently, and I refused stubbornly. Our relationship was rocky. Food hit a nerve. One morning, when I was 16 or 17, I woke up to a buttery scent drifting into my bedroom from the kitchen. I rubbed my eyes and lugged myself down the hall to find neat rows of brioche-like buns. I knew these well—by that point my mother had been refining her popover recipe for months. I sat down, groggy, brimming with early-morning adolescent attitude. I began to cut into a popover, and almost as soon as my knife pierced the crust, I was reprimanded. I should use my hands, she said. I was smashing the delicate pastry, the product of a whole morning’s worth of effort.

“Why can’t I eat something how I want to?” I muttered childishly, knowing that my lack of appreciation would cruelly deny her what she wanted: the feeling that she was a good mother who had woken up early to prepare the perfect breakfast.

“Because it’s just plain wrong. You’re ruining them.”

We got angrier, and then didn’t speak for a week. What the neat line of pastries had said was Let me love you, and what I had muttered back was Not on your terms. In turn, I wanted love on my terms. I thought I could throw a tantrum until her care fit the mold I wanted it in.

Since that day in March, when I first picked up my phone, poppy seeds and a lemon zester in hand, I’ve made a habit of calling my mom to ask for her recipes, tips, and kitchen wisdom: add baking soda to the water when you soak the lentils; put carrots in your zucchini pancakes; let the pastries jostle around in the oil as you fry them. At culinary crossroads, lost and helpless, I reach for my phone. How many eggs did I need again? Is it supposed to be this gooey? In June, living with a few close friends, I decided to make a börek: a savory layered pastry with a spinach filling. I called my mom to ask for her recipe. She recited it from memory. That night, two friends and I began to follow the recipe: Vivek would cover the dough in oil, Margo would pour the milky sauce, I would coat the dough in the sauce as we lay the next layer in the pan. We layered and repeated for half an hour and let out a sigh of relief as a finishing egg-wash was applied to the top layer. Exhausted, I couldn’t help but marvel at how my mother regularly did this by herself, a one-woman operation of lather and coat and layer. That night, at the dinner table, I felt giddy as my friends grinned through mouthfuls of börek.

In August, I sent my mom a photo of a chickpea stew I had made. I woke up the next morning to a voice memo. Long, emotional memos were increasingly common as we were kept apart longer and longer.

“It means so much to me to see you cooking things like this. This is all I’ve ever wanted: to see you standing on your own two feet in the world.”

In November, I read Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking. I was told it was a memoir about grief, but as I shut the book and nestled under my covers late one night, replaying Didion’s somber recollections of her husband, I thought that to feel so empty in his absence, she must have felt so full in his presence. In Didion’s grief, what I felt was her love. The last few times my mother has called she has told me how sad, isolated, and defeated she has been feeling. She cries often. I worry about her mental state as much as I do about her fragile health. I cry often too. When my parents tell me about something they’ve done that I consider risky, I panic. If love is nestled in grief, then grief is nestled in love too: I love the people I do knowing that losing them would break me. I recently sent my mom a photo of a pearl couscous dish with feta and chickpeas. “Looks amazing! Would you send me the recipe?” she responded.

She called the next day: “I just can’t imagine having chickpeas with feta. It’s not right.”

“Think of it as feta and tomatoes, not feta and chickpeas. Give the feta a chance.”

Something clicked. “Oh! I see!” she said with a gasp. “In that case, I could add sundried tomatoes, and maybe even some sumac on top. Yes! I could even mix the feta with lor cheese.”

I smiled as she bristled with life through the phone. She sent me a photo of the bake. She had eaten three bowls of it, she said, but there was no feta—it “just didn’t feel right.” I didn’t argue. Okay. On your terms.