“How did you make this?” she always asks. “A recipe,” I tell her. No magic trick. No skill. Just buying ingredients, following directions, not varying from what I’m supposed to do. My mother looks in her fridge and pulls out vegetables, slices them, even keeps the stems, sautés them, adds an egg, adds some rice, and what about that can of water chestnuts, that might be good, and is there a tomato in the garden? Oh, there’s cilantro out there, let’s add that.
When she was thirteen, she boarded a train from Mexico to the U.S. She knew no English. There were no instructions for how to become fluent, but she did, how to skip two grades or graduate at the top of her class, but she did, how to survive far from her parents, how to sleep alone instead of in the double beds she’d shared with her sisters. She did. No one told her how to measure a person by their honesty and kindness, not their good looks or money, not their empty promises, but she learned. She swears she can’t cook, but my sister and I grew up eating well: beans stewed with onions and peppers and sprinkled with cheese; roasted eggplant or buttered squash or broccoli baked into dishes she concocted to make sense of the kitchen in which she found herself.
Now I cook for her: red-lentil soup with lemon, yogurt berry pie, broccoli-with-feta pasta, all from easy recipes. “You’re so good at cooking,” she says, even knowing how to give praise—unwarranted, in heaps, how to make everything sweet.
Originally published in The Sun, December 2021 (Issue 552)
Read the newest poetry collection by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, available for purchase online.
We often think of resilience as the ability to spring back instantly from a challenging, harrowing time in our lives. Yet Shuly Cawood’s tender portrait of her mother as a resilient woman who has risen above difficult circumstances to make a life for herself and her family in the U.S. implies that resilience is a muscle built more slowly over time. Since taking a train from Mexico to the United States at the age of thirteen with no English, her mother has had to hone her instincts about other people (“how to measure a person by their honesty and kindness”) as well as learn to feed a family using only the ingredients she had at hand. While the speaker’s mother praises her daughter’s ability to follow “easy recipes,” the daughter admires her mother’s hard-won way of making a life without instructions from anyone else. This daughter is far more impressed by her mother’s creativity and resilience, using all that she’s been given to create a life, and even becoming the kind of woman who can “make everything sweet” simply by offering a bit of praise to her daughter, perhaps when she needs to hear it the most. Told in the unadorned form of a prose poem, Cawood’s piece calls us all to rise to our own instincts, to care for each other in the best ways we know how.
Invitation for Writing & Reflection: Consider a person you admire for their creativity and resilience in the face of challenging circumstances. You might write about how their ability to rise above difficulties has taught and inspired you.
ABOUT THE POET: Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood’s poetry collection, Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press) won the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. Cawood’s other books include A Small Thing to Want: Stories (Press 53) and the memoir, The Going and Goodbye (Platypus Press). Shuly loves to hike in the woods, doodle with her Crayola markers, and teach writing workshops. Learn more at www.shulycawood.com.
POETRY SELECTION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES CREWS
James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. James teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband in Vermont.
FURTHER EXPLORATION
Thank you for reading. Please enjoy these related works. A portion of all online purchases through the links below goes to support Gwarlingo. You can also look for them at your local bookstore.
Thanks to hundreds of readers who have given donations big and small, Gwarlingo remains ad-free. Donors who give $50 become members. If you love Gwarlingo, please consider giving back.
