Craving Cleaver’s Cookies
Granted, I hadn’t baked in a while, but still, my teenaged son’s reaction surprised me. Grabbing the plate piled high with warm jumbo chocolate chip cookies, he threw open the front door and hollered down the street to everyone within ears range, “Cookies! Fresh baked cookies! Homemade! My Mom baked me cookies!… HOMEMADE!!!”
Within moments, a group of wide-eyed, drooling adolescent boys trooped into my kitchen, oohing and ahhing as though my son had just discovered a valuable Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan rookie card in his cello pack. He extended his treasure triumphantly, and gave the signal to indulge. Like vultures, the boys descended upon their prey. They smacked lips, licked fingers, and with grubby hands wiped crumbs and chocolate smudges from their mouths, all the while nodding like sages, and mumbling to each other, Homemade!” It wasn’t long before the plate was picked clean.
“Thanks, Mom!”
“Thanks, Mrs. Kassian!” the kids chanted in unison, as they bolted back outside to finish the neighborhood road hockey game.
“Goofy kids,” I thought, surveying the carnage, “So melodramatic!…the Oreos in the pantry taste just as good.”
A couple of nights later, I attended a baby shower. Surveying the wares on the pot-luck dessert table, I noticed a not-quite-thawed McCain’s chocolate freezer cake next to my offering of store-bought turnovers. “Let me see, …Timbits, a Save-on-Foods fruit flan, a Costco tray of Greek honey-nut things…Wow, someone went to the Cheesecake Factory and bought almond ammaretto!”
And then I spotted the offering of my mother’s generation – Grandma Gill’s apple pie! …HOMEMADE!
Most of the women at the shower were, like me, women of the twenty-first century. Professionals. Highly educated. Big earning potential. Sure, we could make “homemade” if we really wanted to! Didn’t Hillary Rodham Clinton prove that when she went up against Barbara Bush in a “prove you are a woman” campaign cookie bake? After all, baking cookies is not rocket science. We view the June Cleaver cookie-baking image of woman with scorn, as a relic of a patriarchal, misogynistic era gone by. Baking is such a waste of woman-power….and time.
So why did I feel like grabbing the pie and shouting, as my son had, “Homemade! My Mom baked me cookies… HOMEMADE!”?
Hmmm. As I think about it, I see that the point of his exuberant statement was not the “cookies” part, but the “My Mom baked me” part. The cookies were – for him – a personal gift of love and attention. He liked them better than Oreos for the same reason that I treasure the huge paper Christmas star my Dad made more than the gold-edged nativity figures. Or why a construction-paper card with a poem is more special than a fancy store-bought one. Or why Grandma Gill’s apple pie is more appealing than almond ammaretto. There are some things that you just can’t put a price tag on. Like woman-power – the power that God has given women to bless families and friends through motherly nurture, time and attention.
In giving up our cookbooks for checkbooks have we, in a mad twist of irony, lost more than we have gained? I don’t know, but the more I recognize the value of this womanly gift, the more I crave Cleaver’s cookies.
