The Perfect Bite
On the Care + Feeding of Young Adult Children.
A friend of mine came to town.
Over dinner at Lotus of Siam, at Red Rock Casino, over plates of pad thai, shrimp curry and chicken larb, Rivka and I talked about our husbands and kids, the space and time between visits, how everything has changed and nothing. She has two daughters close in age to my older girls, Lucy (18) and Edie (17). The girls went to school together in New York City. Our families have been connected in various ways for decades now.
Rivka told me that one of her daughter’s transition to freshman year was not easy. She and her husband went to see her for Parents Weekend. They took her out for dinner.
Rivka and her daughter have this thing about “the perfect bite.” A kind of insider joke they have that involves getting a little bit of all the good stuff on a plate, and loading it onto a fork for “the perfect bite.” Rivka said she had some kind of dish with chicken, potatoes and vegetables and her daughter was angling for her to make her the perfect bite.
So, she did.
Over and over. Feeding her, like she fed her as a baby. Fork to plate, to mouth, back to plate. Rivka fed her adult daughter, her homesick, stressed, worried adult daughter, perfect bites of food. Over and over from her hand to her mouth. Finding just the right nibbles of what she needed and piling it all onto the fork and then putting it lovingly into her mouth. Feeding her, like she was a child again.
OMG. I get goosebumps thinking about what a comfort that must have been to a young woman excited, but worried, about being in the world, outside of her home and family, that tenuous place between dependence and independence.
Jesus. She fork-fed her adult child. Because this young woman needed that primal connection. The connection that grounded her and reminded her of who she was. That she was loved.
And that everything would be just fine.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how our young adult children are actually still children, and how much they still need us to feed them in all the ways this can mean.
This comes as a bit of a surprise to me.
I thought when my kids graduated high school that they would disappear. Immediately.
Poof.
This is how it had been explained to me, and how I prepared for it. I remember reading Rob Lowe’s memoir, in which he writes about feeling the sheer agony of losing his son to college, while also acknowledging what a beautiful thing it was for his kid to live his own life and go to college.
In a piece called Unprepared, excerpted from the book, in Slate, he wrote:
Today is my son Matthew’s last night home before college.
I have been emotionally blindsided. I know that this is a rite many have been through, that this is nothing unique. I know that this is all good news; my son will go to a gre at school, something we as a family have worked hard at for many years. I know that this is his finest hour. But looking at his suitcases on his bed, his New England Patriots posters on the wall, and his dog watching him pack, sends me out of the room to a hidden corner where I can’t stop crying.
And so, this is how I expected it to go. In fact, it was what happened to my parents in 1984, the year I graduated high school and went off to college.
I went home the first summer after freshman year, but then never again. I could’ve come back to Corinth, a small town with one traffic light anchored by a floundering paper mill, where my dad worked his whole life, and where nearly everyone else worked, too. But I couldn’t bring myself to return. Small town life felt constricted and strangling. I moved from college to grad school in Albany, to grad school in NYC.
I used higher education to make my escape.
While other people married high school and college sweethearts, I busted through romantic relationships like a freight train through the side of a mountain. They made babies and lives and made plans in this small Adirondack community. I couldn't leave them in the dirt fast enough. I severed all my connections and pretended they didn’t exist.
I felt like I had to scorch the earth to find myself.
My adoptive mom, a wonderful, doting mom for the first decade of my life, had never been able to ease into my adulthood. To relinquish the control she had when I was small. The thing that made her such a great mother to me early in my life, a kind of blanket of love she threw over me, suffocated me as a young adult. She bristled any time I tried to assert myself in a way she didn’t have a hand in.
“If you do ______, don’t bother coming home,” she would say.
And so, I didn’t.
All she wanted was to parent me in the way she wanted to parent me, the fantasy she had of motherhood and daughterhood, but I couldn’t let her. Our relationship twisted around this fracture all our lives.
Decades later, in fits of dementia, she reminded me often how I abandoned her by leaving for college and never coming back. Like Rob Lowe, she knew it was for good. Like Rob Lowe, it cut her down to the bone and sinew. Toward the end, she reminded me daily. Rob Lowe recovered from the loss and made his peace.
My mother did not.
And so this informed how I thought it would go when Lucy and Edie got to young adulthood. I thought they would ache to leave us.
Instead, my oldest kids still need to be nurtured in ways I couldn’t even fathom as a teen. We live in a world where they are watching babies die on the internet, all day, everyday. Where watching an actual genocide is a scroll away. Then, these young people get to argue about that on the internet, because there are sides to genocide, explanations about who started it, and who continued it, and who deserves peace and who doesn’t, and who deserves a home and who doesn’t, who has humanity and who doesn't, but its all meaningless because our kids are all watching dead babies on the internet and that is inside them now. How will they forgive us? And we live in a world where people put out for consumption and branding their best, curated selves, without regard for realness, so that performativity is the point, not actually living, where everything feels acute and noted, and phones and messages cannot be escaped, and life is on line, and everyone is watching, ready to jump in and pound you for making a mistake. And there was all that mental isolation of the pandemic, during the most formative years of their development since their infancy, where many of them, like my own, spiralled into crisis and it mangled their world view. They came to adulthood understanding how absolutely fucking fragile the world is. Jesus. These young adults, even ones in the pillowy security of the middle and upper classes, under a blanket of privileges, grew up with a world - quite literally - on fire right in front of them.
Make no mistake, they need to be nurtured. Fed by the people who love them. Given the perfect bite when it can be assembled onto a fork and fed to them, like they are the priceless beings they are. And believe me, every one of them is priceless.
Right now, Lucy and Edie are in either London, Paris or Madrid, depending on when you read this, with David for work this week. (He produces shows. This is one of his shows.)
These trips, which usually involve some kind of work for David or me, are not without design. We learned while taking the family to Costa Rica this summer for vacation that travel is important to all our kids for different reasons.
For Lucy and Edie, it’s about a kind of guided independence. David makes all the travel plans with all the kids needs in mind (this is his superpower, really), allowing the older girls to roam freely, go to clubs, drink at bars with other young adults, and hang with people their age at midnight beach bon fires. They aren’t quite ready to take these trips alone, to plan them, finance them, organize them, research them. They still need our guidance.
To form the perfect bite for them.
To put it all the best parts on the fork for them.
To feed them the things they crave.
Edie texted me tonight that she misses me. I knew she would. I miss her, too. I remember that I carried her most of her little life in a pouch, attached to me, and breastfed her until she was three. Those were some of the most beautiful years of both of our lives, even though only I remember them.
“Miss you babe! How’s Madrid?”
And then she sends an explosion of photos and tells me of their adventures and mishaps. She sends me photos of her gnocchi, a way to connect with her food writer, mom. She is drinking a Paloma. Lucy has a whiskey sour. Edie grumbles that dad is making her walk the streets of Madrid in her high heels. It’s good to laugh with her. There is a kind of stresslessness I sense in her voice. That dad has her, and that she has herself, that he is providing a place for them to launch themselves into the world.
It is their perfect bite. I am so grateful they are being fed.
______________________
END NOTES:
Stay tuned for Sunday night’s recipe in Kitchen Suppers. I’m going to show you how we do our non-traditional “Yakitori Thanksgiving,”which could be a great Friendsgiving or a simple party idea for having people over. All the prep is upfront and you can even make guests do the cooking - it’s part of the fun.
If you have time, please read this older essay about a boy named Roberto, who did not have adults to guide him into adulthood. I think about kids like Roberto, without these kinds of supports, all the time.
If you haven’t, consider checking out: The Meth Lunches: Food + Longing in an American City and if you do, maybe leaving a review in a favorite location!
Thank you, as always for reading. xo Kim
I never cried harder than the day we left our only child at the dorms for his freshman year of college. I sobbed all the way from Flagstaff to Kingman on the drive home.
This is so true. Like you, I could not wait to leave home. But nowadays, not only are kids finding it emotionally hard to leave home, but economically difficult. I think we need more multi-generational homes.