Yeast Bread and the Patriarchy

“I never cared about feminism when you were little because I was too busy chasing you around,” my mom tells me over buttered toast and fried eggs, “but now I’m just about ready to smash the patriarchy.” She’s not being dramatic. In fact, at this very moment, I am drinking from her black-and-white “Bitches Get Shit Done” mug, a gift from an officemate that my mom likes to use for steeping her Earl Grey on lazy Sunday mornings. When Mom says things like this, my dad looks at her from across the breakfast table and smiles, almost thirty years of supporting her under his belt. His kind blue eyes crinkle up as they do when he’s particularly amused.

My parents officially became empty nesters in the autumn of 2016, when they dropped me and my oversized mattress topper off in front of my new University of Maryland dorm and waved goodbye. I knew they fretted about my adjusting to college life, but as they drove away, I was nearly as worried about them. What would they talk about when the house was silent, empty? My parents were always stressed from their executive positions in D.C., and I rarely saw them spending time together. My older brother, Jack, had gone off to college three years before, but at that time I, with all of my extracurriculars, had still been around to ease the transition. This round was different.

I went home to suburban Maryland sporadically throughout my freshman year, usually with Jack, a senior, in tow. We would visit for a candlelit Sunday dinner or sometimes even a whole weekend. Trips home were calming, familiar, at least at first.

Slowly, as I settled into a routine at school and spoke less to my parents on the phone, I began to notice changes around the house when I visited. The old outdoor basketball court disappeared, replaced with rows of seeds and straw. Stacks of books piled up in the dining room. A pair of binoculars hung inexplicably from a hook near the back door. One afternoon I arrived home to see Dad fiddling with a little black box in the corner of the living room.

“It’s an Alexa!” he’d said proudly, straightening up. “It’s important that you stand near her and talk to her in a commanding voice.”

“Alexa,” he’d boomed. “Tell me a joke!” He cracked up, belly heaving, light glinting off of the top of his bald head. Surprised, I made eye contact with Jack; Dad rarely laughed out loud. Mom just shook her head from the kitchen, cropped silver hair ruffling about her ears as she filled the watering can. Clearly, she’d been subjected to Alexa’s jokes all day.

My sophomore year, my dogs grew noticeably fatter but my parents turned from a mildly outdoorsy couple into a pair of avid bird watchers, of all things. They made frequent trips to the library together in the electric car to check out piles of birding books. I learned, somewhat unwillingly, about the Goldfinches and Swainson’s Warblers and Common Yellowthroats that frequented our backyard bird feeders. I would often come downstairs in the mornings on my visits to find my parents, bathrobes on, coffee mugs in hand, standing and staring through our glass sliding doors at the colorful array of creatures out back. I noticed a marked difference between their newly sleepy Sundays and the jam-packed weekends of my youth, when they would bicker over who would take which kid to whatever faraway sports complex was required that season. Back then, there was hardly time to get dressed in the morning, much less reflect on who we all were becoming.

That same sophomore winter, Mom dragged Dad to the Women’s March in D.C. with her in exchange for her having accompanied him to an environmental protest in the city the month before. An eye for an eye, she reminded him.

“Have fun storming the castle!” I’d called as they headed out, and Dad, in his ancient red coat, turned around and flashed a sardonic smile, his hand on Mom’s back. I noticed that he had started giving her kisses when he got home from his meetings at night, something I hadn’t seen since I was little. He likes to talk about how he used to sit on the edge of her desk and flirt in the Congressional office where they first met as staffers, all those decades ago. Their relationship had been clandestine until they went out for Italian one lunch break and came back giggling and smelling strongly of garlic, inadvertently alerting their coworkers to their blossoming office romance.

This brings us to now. Mom is busy dismantling the patriarchy, as made evident by our breakfast conversations. When she drops off groceries in my apartment one afternoon, she sits my female roommates down and asks them if they are speaking up in class enough. Our old laundry room glows purple with the light from a row of UV lamps that my dad installed for a new indoor herb garden. They go to jazz concerts and visit Frederick Douglass’ birthplace out on the Eastern Shore - something which, when I ask why, they sternly inform me is for fun. Dad sometimes has trouble remembering how to spell words, and Mom walks a little more slowly than I remember. Still, she talks of hiking the famous Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Northern Spain some summer, to which Dad always has one response: “Do whatever you want.” He doesn’t intend to sound dismissive; he means it in a practical sort of way. She can do what she wants. She completes her Duolingo every night, earbuds in, Spanish grammar lessons reflected in her glasses. The last time I checked, she had a 476-day streak.

One morning, Dad gets excited when he spots a rare Red-Headed Woodpecker in the tree out back, his favorite. He watches it through the glass, transfixed. It occurs to me that he gleefully examines the bird in much the same way that I sometimes study him and Mom. I see their life in bursts and pieces, and I guess that’s how they experience mine, too.

Mom soon develops another obsession: baking homemade bread. She makes millions of annotations in the margins of her creased cookbooks and orders baffling ingredients like Sprouted Wheat Flour and Bread SuperStarter online. She is discouraged when her rye repeatedly falls flat, but is delighted when a giant bag of Crust Enhancer from King Arthur Flour arrives in the mail.

“It looks just like our bird seed!” she exclaims. “Us and the birds, we are the same!” She pats one of our increasingly-chubby dogs’ heads and slips her some bread dough, thinking I don’t see.

Later, over dinner, we discuss yeast bread and the patriarchy. Mom muses about getting a Nevertheless, She Persisted tattoo, a proposition to which my brother and dad threaten that if she does, we all will. Apparently, that is the Obama family’s rule of law, too. The next day, we attend the local library’s annual Trivia Night and handily compete under the team name of Vital Wheat Gluten, a title that confuses the judges but tickles Mom to no end. We lose to the team of local librarians, which hardly seems fair.

As with all couples, Mom and Dad have their moments. But the moments usually feel light, like when Mom, fed up with Dad using Sparknotes instead of reading the novels for their couples’ book club, joined another, more “serious” women’s club. Now she has her allotted time slot to socialize and her allotted time slot to focus on the literature, an arrangement that seems to suit them both much better.

It’s when I am home for winter break, alone in my twin bed in my childhood room at the top of the stairs, that I overhear Mom on the phone. I listen to her softly pad into the library below in her cozy slippers before settling down on the couch.

“I know, Mom,” she says. She must be talking to my widowed Grandma Barbara, who lives alone outside of Philadelphia. “It totally makes sense why so many couples get divorced after their kids leave home.” I can hear her gently blowing on a mug of tea, probably the herbal kind that Dad scathingly refers to as “dishwater.”

I get out of my bed and tiptoe towards the top of the staircase.

“Right, what is there to talk about anymore? No more soccer season,” she jokes. Silence fills the room as she listens to her mother for a while.

“But you don’t have to worry about me and Doug. We’re doing just fine on our own.” I take a few soft steps down the stairs, and I see the twinkle in her eyes. There is a slight smile on her lips.

Just fine on their own.