Note: I originally wrote this essay as a submission to The New York Times' Modern Love column. Their submission guidelines ask that the piece not be published elsewhere while under consideration. It wasn't accepted, but I still believe in it, so I'm sharing it here. I’ve also included my recipes for buttermilk biscuits and sausage gravy for my paid subscribers.
I stood at the stove stirring gravy like I had a thousand times before, and the thought hit me. I am making biscuits and gravy for a man who no longer loves me. For a man who sleeps elsewhere and longs for another. For a man who stood before my closest friends and family, looked me in the eyes, and said… I see you. I choose you.
For a man who broke his promises. For a man who no longer sees me. No longer chooses me.
The sausage sizzled in the cast-iron, releasing its garlic and fennel into the air. The biscuits were rising in the oven. The kitchen smelled like most Sunday morning of our married life until it wasn’t. The choreography of it lives in my body: brown the meat, add the spices, melt the butter, sprinkle the flour, stir until it thickens, add milk slowly so it doesn’t clump. I didn’t need a recipe. I was the recipe.
Upstairs I could hear movement… the familiar weight of footsteps, a door opening, the sounds of my kids waking. Maybe it was the scent of sausage and tradition pulling them from sleep. Maybe it was simply morning. I am glad my son Isaiah is home from uni. Having him home makes the house feel less fractured. Less like a structure after the storm has passed and taken half the roof with it.
I reach for a new bag of flour. Carefully opening the fold, I wonder if this is the last bag I will open and dump into the glass container in this house. The last place we were whole.
There are griefs that arrive like earthquakes… loud, tectonic, impossible to ignore. And then there are the others. The micro griefs. The ones that appear in the act of stirring. In the folding of laundry. In the putting away of groceries. The gravy is a micro grief. The biscuits rising are a micro grief. The muscle memory of loving someone who no longer loves you… that might be the smallest and largest grief of all. I feel my throat constrict.
My son comes into the kitchen. “Hi, Mom.” His long, lanky body folds itself around me in a sleepy welcomed embrace. He smells like boyhood and whatever cheap cologne he’s currently experimenting with. I press my face into his chest for a second longer than usual. He doesn’t know what is happening in me at the stove. He doesn’t need to. That’s the mercy of kids. They allow you to keep your interior storm private.
“Smells good” he says.
It does. That is the strange part. It smells like love. Like steadiness. Like the version of our life where the future felt assumed and durable. I used to believe in the durability of things. In vows spoken clearly in front of witnesses. In the particular gravity of being seen. I believed that seeing, once declared, was permanent.
I wonder sometimes what I was to him.. him being my former husband. I wonder whether I was a solution to a problem he needed solved (widower with four motherless kids). Whether love and need are always this entangled, or whether that particular confusion belonged to us alone. It’s not a bitter wondering. It’s more like examining a bone after the flesh has gone. Where did it fracture? Was it always hairline? Did I mistake being useful for being cherished? And yet… there is no satisfaction in villainizing him. That would be too easy. Too clean. We (re)built something genuine. We built children who move through this house with ease and appetite. We built years of Sunday breakfasts and road trips and dinner table talks and shared exhaustion. None of that disappears simply because love does.
The biscuits are done. I pull them from the oven and split one open. Steam escapes in a soft rush. I ladle hot gravy over the top and watch it spill down the sides. This used to be his favorite breakfast. I think it still is. I used to feel a small pride in getting it right. In being known for something so specific just for him.
Resentment lives here too. I won’t pretend it doesn’t. It flickers in the ordinary indignities.. that I am still the one who knows how to make the gravy just right, that I am still the one performing rituals and traditions that stabilize the kids, that I am still the keeper of continuity while he is free to reinvent himself and dream out loud like this was something you can just do over.
Sometimes (often times) I feel used.
I feel used for my steadiness. Used for my devotion. Used for the structure of a life he no longer wishes to inhabit.
Who am I making it for now?
For my son, yes. For my daughter who will wander in any moment, hair tangled, hungry and putting the kettle on for tea. For the version of myself who still believes that care is a language worth speaking, even if the original recipient no longer understands it or wants it. Maybe I am making it for the woman I was when I first learned how. The former wife, the ex wife, who wanted to be seen and believed that feeding someone was a form of being understood. Maybe I am making it because I need something to rise.
The house fills with the sound of plates clinking, wood stools scraping, my kids eating. They don’t taste the grief. They taste salt and butter and heat. They taste continuity. Stability is sometimes nothing more than repeating what you know how to do.
I don’t want a resolution. I don’t want a lesson about self-love or reinvention or… phoenixes rising from ashes. I’m not interested in redemption arcs. I’m interested in the precision of this moment: a woman at a stove, stirring gravy in a house that will no longer be hers for long, listening to her kids laugh and chat about life and sharing Seinfeld quotes.
There are things I am afraid to say.
That I’m angry. That I feel discarded. That I sometimes want him to understand the cost of leaving… not in money or inconvenience, but in these accumulating incisions. In the way a bag of flour can feel like a farewell. But fear has never been an instruction to remain silent or reduce my life.
So I stand at the stove and stir. I feed my kids and the man who no longer loves me. I inhabit the tension between what was and what no longer is. I let the biscuits rise for no one in particular. I let the ritual outlast the marriage. I let the grief be small and specific and ordinary. It’s a strange thing to continue loving in the shape of habit when the person who once received it has turned away. Stranger still to realize that the habit may have been yours all along.
The gravy cools, thickens. The morning moves forward. And I remain… not resolved, not triumphant or undone.. simply here, in the kitchen, in the in-between.
My go-to recipes that are always a hit. Perfect soul
food, especially when needing to be comforted.
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