The day the police were called to my house to take my sister and me away, our family of four sat down to dinner as usual, 6 p.m. on the dot.
That morning, as I ate a bowl of Life cereal (it was the 1970s after all), I watched my 40-year-old mom pull out the Crock-Pot, tie an apron around her slim waist, and get to work on her red sauce.
Mom’s sauce always started the same way: browning the beef. As it crackled and popped, she used a worn-out wooden spoon to break up the meat, push it around the bottom of the pot, the rising steam making her blink. As the beef made a show of cooking, she added tomato paste, cans of Chef Boyardee tomato sauce with mushrooms, a few cloves of garlic, a green bell pepper, and a pinch of cayenne pepper. Their entrance quieted the racket down to a low simmer. In seven hours, the contents of this slow cooker would come together like a tight-knit family.
The police had never been to our house. Seeing them hanging around the kitchen counter seemed like a clerical error no one had corrected. But there was no mistake; my mother had called them.
When they arrived, she was sitting at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, her eyes red with exhaustion. My dad was somewhere in the background, where he always stood when she got this way. My older sister and I sat on either side of her. When the police officers walked in, my mother looked up from her life—the former valedictorian turned housewife in a Jewish suburb of Cincinnati, her mathematical mind bored stiff by the day-to-day monotony of raising kids and running a home.
A crime had been committed, but not the one the police were there to investigate.
She grew up in 1940s Savannah, the daughter of Polish immigrants. Her father sold shoe supplies door-to-door, and her mother worked at a department store. Their dreams were simple: Their son would become a doctor, and their brainy daughter would marry a Jewish boy to take care of her. Had she been born a generation later, my mother might have crafted her own definition of a good life rather than fall into line with the dull drum of society. A crime had been committed, but not the one the police were there to investigate. Mom had been robbed of the chance to do something. Less clear was why she directed her anger at my sister and me.
Pointing to us, Mom looked squarely at the cops and said, “Take them.”
I had just turned ten; I was all freckles and ponytails. My sister was fifteen, a full-blown teenager with bad skin, wild hair, and bell-bottomed jeans. The cops asked a few perfunctory questions and then quickly deduced there was nothing to be done here—my sister and I were good kids. One put his big hand on my mother’s back and handed her the business card of a family therapist. “Sometimes this helps,” he said.
When the police left, it was late afternoon. My dad, who ran a building supply business out of our basement, went back to work. My sister went to her room.
I lingered in the kitchen. It was almost dinnertime, and I was getting hungry. All I ever thought about was food—my bottomless pit was the punchline of every family joke. I would eventually learn that food and love are not the same thing, but at age ten, I could’ve sworn they were.
The minute the police went out our back door, I put my arm around my mom’s shoulders and asked about dinner. I was used to her outbursts, which usually occurred when she felt underappreciated. And she wasn’t wrong. We rarely acknowledged all the ways she took care of us. One summer when I couldn’t pass my swim test, she drove me to the pool at 7 a.m. every day for three weeks, so that I could work with one of the lifeguards before the pool opened. She chauffeured me from one activity to another, celebrated my wins, and took me for ice cream when I fell short. She would’ve thrown herself in front of the cop’s car before allowing them to take us. I know all of this because in her calmer moments, she told me everything about her life. I didn’t understand most of what she said, but one thing was crystal clear: the price she paid to be my mother.
Sometimes it’s just easier to hold onto something than to name it and have to look at it.
The business card with the family therapist’s name and number sat on our kitchen counter for weeks. We used it as a coaster. But then, out of the blue, Mom called the doctor and scheduled an appointment. For the full hour, the four of us sat silent on Dr. Atkin’s brown, itchy couch as if we didn’t have anything to say, as if we were all wondering what we were doing here in the first place. My sister and I may have even had a laughing fit. The doctor asked us what brought us to her office, and no one could articulate what was going through our minds: We hate each other. Now, can we wrap this up and get to dinner? Sometimes it’s just easier to hold onto something than to name it and have to look at it.
But here’s the thing. As my mother pivoted from rage to dinner-making mode that fateful day, she looked at me with tears streaming down her face. “Well, I guess I’d better get busy. We have to eat.” It was her way of apologizing and reassuring me that this family would not fall apart.
Decades later, I still make my mom’s sauce. And when I do, I think of those cops hanging around our suburban kitchen and what I saw—the reality of being a mom, the sacrifices you are asked to make, the way it is so often left to you to pick up the pieces even when you’re the one who has fallen apart. By the time I chose to have kids, solid in my career and marriage, I was ready for all of it. I’d been watching my mother my whole life.
That night, we sat down to plates of spaghetti topped with her rich, meaty sauce. This dish was her superpower—it could bring us all to the table and hold us close. Satisfying in every way, it pulled us out of our darkest selves and enabled us to feel what no amount of therapy could: happy to be together.