Kitchen Sink Memories

My earliest memory finds me sitting in a kitchen sink, with chest-high water and bubbles all around me. My head bobs against Mother’s chin as she lifts me out and wraps me in a yellow terry cloth bath towel. Over her shoulder, the oven door is open – something she did after baking bread, making pot roast, or taking the chill off a cold night.

It’s one of hundreds of memories I have of my mom; and, oddly enough, one of many that involves a kitchen sink. Just as preachers stand behind an altar, Mother demonstrated her devotion to others at the kitchen sink, and, from time to time, she even wore a robe.

Whether it was washing dishes in the church basement after a funeral; peeling potatoes to accompany a family-sized meatloaf on Sunday; or scraping leftovers into an ice cream bucket of “kitty porridge” for her farm cats, Mother assumed her position at the sink like a dutiful soldier.

She was at the kitchen sink the night Tim, my husband, picked me up for our first date.

I introduced him to my parents while she stood at the sink cleaning Swiss chard. She wore garden attire of polyester cutoffs ripping at their seams and my father’s purple button-down shirt with its sleeves torn off and ricrac sewn around the enormous armholes. Her old elastic bra peeked out beneath her armpits as she rinsed and trimmed the maroon and green stocks.

Knowing her apparel lacked any sense of sophistication and fully aware we had reservations at a fancy restaurant, she drawled, “You sure you don’t wanna stay for some possum and collard greens?”

The kitchen sink was her stage.

It was also a place for confessions. When I was in elementary school, I tried to tell Mom a boy had touched me where he shouldn’t. She was making spaghetti at the time, unprepared for such an admission. She looked at me with her head and an open can of mushrooms cocked at an angle and said she didn’t understand what I was talking about. Too young to know if even I did, I swallowed my secret. Yet, that exchange made me more attentive when listening to girlfriends, my future students, and my daughters as they grew up.

Just before college graduation, I found my Strawberry Shortcake diary in a box of childhood trinkets. Its gold lock was broken, and I assumed Mother had read every one of its blue-inked pages. She must have been horrified by the vicious insults and names I called her for not letting me stay out late at night with my friends and, God forbid, telling me (a teenager) what to do.

I found her at the kitchen sink, scrubbing it clean, and held out the pink-checkered diary with Strawberry’s big innocent eyes looking up at me.

“I am sorry I called you those terrible names, Mom, I was stupid, angry, and just a kid. I didn’t mean what I said.”

Mom stopped scrubbing, looked at the journal, then at me, and said, “I didn’t read your diary, Jeanne. Whatever you wrote is yours to know. Not mine.”

Her kitchen sink was also a classroom, and that day’s lesson was about respect.