Gates Annai (they/she) // Literature Editor
Step 1: Form the Dough
Dough is a chemical process between heat, a living thing, food, and as I always like to say; a little bit of love. I name the doughs I make; Jeremy, Miranda, Alice, Buddy, I fuss over them. Certain pastries will ruin when you check on them too often in the oven—it’s the heat and moisture that allows them transformation. My problem has always been love that smothers.
My grandma didn’t teach me to bake but I remember watching her do it. Back when she came to my choir and band performances, put me and my cousin in the bath together, made me a warm lemon water when I had a sore throat, or snuck me marshmallow cream on a spoon when I wanted something sweet. But it was my cousins she took to Disney world, who she bought big gifts for, who she spent the weekends with just for fun.
“She’s the matriarch” my mother told me when I started noticing, her expression filled with a condemned regret for me. I would understand that word in the context, “she treats you differently because we never subscribed to the matriarchy.”
Even though I think she loved me, the Grandma of my childhood was a matriarch being defied.
Step 2: Spread the cinnamon
The women of our family dance ballet. I did it for a year but never liked it. What I wanted wasn’t even really to dance, it was the connection my cousins had to each other, and then to our matriarch. Maybe my parents didn’t subscribe to the idea, but I craved her approval. I wanted to be smothered and spoiled and checked on too often.
Matriarchs are a traditional way to hold a family unit together. She’s supposed to provide the nurturement and home for which each member can live in. It’s a type of power imbalance that European tradition will claim is love. My Grandma’s previous marriage before she left Scotland was abusive—she stole everything he had and left the country, she took back power for herself.
This power imbalance as love works well when those with less power refuse to struggle for it. When we all fall in line.
Katie quit dance later. She was golden and popular and beautiful and on track to take over the family dance studio, and then she quit.
Step 3: Bake at 150 degrees for 20 minutes
In highschool my Grandma had a fall in the garden, completely shattering her leg and hip. I think it was summertime because we thought she might be better by Christmas. We visited her a lot in the hospital. We finally all had something in common.
I remember she looked small and fragile and unimposing in the hospital bed.
“Do you know where you’re going after surgery?” Katie asked her. In a few years our matriarch would look at her new piercing and weight gain and tell her she looks like a piggy.
For now, Katie was the one taking over the dance studio. For now, our matriarch jokingly pointed up to the sky, and with a wide grin, guessed, “up there?”
We all laughed. I had never seen my grandma with more personality than in that hospital bed. I thought I might get to know her after this.
One time I put my dough next to the oven fan to help keep it warm and it overheated and began to cook too early. You can’t un-bake dough—transformation exists in permanent states.
Step 4: Coat in frosting
She was not better by that Christmas but she was out of the hospital by the next year in a wheelchair. Our family was stretched between three long elementary school-type lunch tables covered in a cheap, dollar store tablecloth and we were all trying to remember how to do a gathering. How to cover our imperfections in a cheap, pristine, white sheet.
They kept asking me about the weather in Vancouver. I just kept telling them that it molds a lot easier here. Grandma was quiet.
I looked at her.
There was this time when I was a kid that she stood up for me against my auntie with whom I used to have problems with before the accident. My matriarch took my side, defended me, used her influence to let me win this one stupid argument.
I grieve for her in the way I grieve my doughs. I love her like I check the oven too often—like I can somehow freeze transformation.