A Mother's Day Madrigal

for bakers and mothers alike

“I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist.”

Anaïs Nin

I’M BEGGING, pleading, praying to a god I don’t think I believe in to make the crying stop. I promise to change: I will give up smoking and cussing and returning library books late and texting at red lights and I’ll call my mother every day. It’s dark, I’m sweaty, and tired and what I’m holding now in the middle of the night is firm, warm, not more than ten pounds. It feels just like bread dough.

This is my baby girl. And all I want is sleep. And rest. Some quiet. But all I can do is close my eyes and tell her I love her as she screams. I rock and bend and sway and twist my body in rhythm to the cry of her colic as my narrow vision sweeps the room like a lighthouse, looking for a miracle. 

In moments of anguish, time is so stubborn. The more I wish we could sleep, the louder the cries become, the more my arms ache, the slower time moves. 

Until, finally, it won’t go anywhere at all. 

Then suddenly, impossibly, it’s morning. I’m awake and the sleep I’d been desperate for is now already past. 

A SOURDOUGH culture is a collection of dozens of wild yeasts and bacteria. These little living beings eat carbohydrates and sugars naturally present in flour. As a result of their meal, the sourdough culture ferments into that bubbly, gassy thing we use to make bread. 

Since before recorded time, bakers have leavened bread with sourdough. Working within specific boundaries of time and temperature, bakers feed it according to how they want it to taste. The results are that a young sourdough, fermented for just a few hours, will have more of a mild, lactic flavoring (think of traditional French bread). An older sourdough, fermented for up to 24 hours, has a more sour, acetic flavoring (think of tangy Ethiopian injera). 

No matter which recipes a baker makes, no matter which type of flour they use, every sourdough culture in the entire world has one thing in common: it is hungry. And so it must be fed. 

Baker’s call this sourdough maintenance, seeding, or refreshment. We do this because the sourdough used to make today’s bread has to be kept separate from the sourdough used for tomorrow or next week’s batch of bread. Think of it like a bank account: you can withdraw however much money you want. But to accrue interest, and to not overdraft, something, just a little bit, always has to be kept in the bank.

IT’S MOTHER’S Day today. 

I’m not one for Hallmark Holidays. In my life I’ve done my best to give gifts, material and otherwise, precisely when there was not a reason to give them. I prefer to be reminded–and remind others–of love when least expected.

On Monday, my daughter Camille and I had our first baby playing with a water hose on a hot afternoon date. She was naked, I was barefoot, the sun was warm, and we were both happy. 

Then I stepped into something squishy. It was the dirt and grass and earth she’d saturated with water. But it had the texture of something I know, had just touched in fact, and it was still moist in my nail beds. Before playing, I had mixed my sourdough. The wet earth between my toes felt just like it.

After an hour, Camille came in from the yard. She was all dimples and dirt, her body warm and soft as the dough I mixed earlier. I began to get her dressed, one sock and one sleeve and one more sock and one more sleeve at a time. Then I started on dinner: peeling carrots, browning onions, baking bread, washing dishes. When I sat her down with crayons and stickers she said, “When is mommy coming home?”

I was running cold water over warm pasta when she asked this. And something in her question made me ask myself. When is mommy coming home?

Mommy, Mother’s Day, Mother Earth. All of us have a relationship with our Mother. All of us share one, too. 

Oh…that portion of sourdough which needs to be fed but kept separate for the next batch of bread? Bakers call it The Mother. 

I BAKE because language is inadequate. Because of all the things I’ve done in my life, nothing speaks to me as loudly as baking: it was the first thing that ever trusted me completely. Out of this loyalty, I gave it everything I had.

Baking is not about being patient, or being slow, or even being gentle. It’s about noticing, and it’s about nurturing what is noticed. More than anything, it’s about time–not the hours and minutes and months. But deep time, moments which are exempt from clocks and calendars, moments which are knitted together by not being aware of them. 

You see, bread is nothing more than fermentation. And fermentation is nothing but combining ingredients and then controlling time, deciding how long that sourdough will eat and when it is ready to use. Of course flour, water, and salt, compose the actual loaf. But those elements would be nothing on their own. It’s only when they’re combined together to ferment that bread is made. And the only person who can start that clock is a baker. A true alchemist. 

THE DIFFERENCE between baking and great baking is in how we treat our mothers. Of all the things a bakery contains–fancy equipment, great ingredients, ancient recipes–the thing which defines a baker most is how they care for their sourdough. This nuance of watching and listening and waiting and knowing what to do next, this poise and all its tenderness…this is what makes a baker great. 

Since moving to New Orleans in 2009, I have spent an accumulation of years in soggy and dank and moldy bakeries in the middle of the night when the rest of the world was sleeping. Up all night–cleaning, nourishing, feeding, baking, noticing, shaping, measuring and covered in flour until I was white as a ghost. But there I was, doing something I felt that I had no choice but to do, so great was my love. 

Still after all these years, I know nothing as honest as a warm loaf of bread made with my own hands.

MOMMY came home late that night. Camille didn’t want to read before bed, so we rocked instead. And whispered. I felt her eyelashes paw at my shoulder as she blinked off into sleep. I closed my eyes, too. The bread from dinner was still a bit warm in the kitchen downstairs, so its cologne trickled upstairs–malt, roasted seeds, lactic acid.

I lost a lot of selfishness when I became a baker. More than I want to admit. I had to, in order to care for something which relied on me. After all, my bread was something I created. But I still don’t know if I’ve become a better man since becoming a baker. 

Bread isn’t made when the baker’s ready. It’s made when the bread is ready. The sourdough can be sluggish, ornery, over-fermented. But one thing is guaranteed in baking–bread is seldom the way you want it to be and it’s never the same way twice. For this reason, a great baker is always responding to fermentation, not reacting to it. Because my only chance at making my bread somewhat consistent is ensuring that every time I leave the bakery–despite hurricanes, despite Covid, despite general elections and laziness and hangovers–I have fed the mother.

I still hope that after all these years of taking care of a mother, baking prepared me for being a better father.

I PUT Camille to bed and Mommy came home with two tomato plants. She ate while I washed up and asked if I wanted to plant them with Camille. “Let me know.”

What I wanted her to know is that one teaspoon of soil and one teaspoon of sourdough each contain billions of microorganisms. Put that another way: there are as many living things in a few grams of soil and sourdough starter than there are people on this earth. 

And we call home for both of these forces by the same name. Mother. It contains all the life and time and ingredients we need. It’s just waiting for our hands, for their alchemy. 

“I think she should plant those tomatoes with you,” I said.

I WANT TO HEAR ABOUT WHEN YOU FEEL DEEP TIME—WHAT DO YOU DO, WHERE DO YOU GO, WHY DO YOU LEAVE?