I didn’t intend to miss Friday Bites last week. I tried writing it, and it ended up being a jumble of words. A really tedious play by play of M obtaining pork belly and me pressure cooking it into a beautiful Korean soy-glazed pork belly dish, and then deciding to make it into a filling for siopao. (I’ll still talk about the siopao.) My brain was fried. Raising a toddler can do that.
The other thing was that it was coming up on Mother’s Day, and that’s been an excruciating day for me since my mom died.
I just finished Prince Harry’s biography the other day (is it still called an autobiography if it’s ghostwritten? Or is it categorized as a memoir?). My mom was a Princess Diana fan, so I was too. I remember where I was when I found out about her horrific car accident. It feels like a formative moment for me, though I couldn’t tell you why. My mom was also a Prince Harry and Meghan Markle fan, although now that I think back on our conversations, maybe she was just a Meghan Markle fan.
(We’re a house divided here — to say it nicely, M is actively uninterested in British royalty. I am not obsessed but I like the gossip and I do love Prince Harry and Meghan’s love story from beginning to present.)
I expected a lot of scandalous moments and wild stories from Prince Harry’s early life. Sure, there’s the bit about his frostbitten penis and the sentence about losing his virginity behind a pub. There are the stories behind his decision to go to a party dressed as a Nazi, and the story behind his Vegas butt-nakedry. On the whole though, these stories, their context, and much of Prince Harry’s life is…mundane. It’s not that interesting. These things could have happened to anybody, really, but he happens to be a prince and thus, more visible than a lot of people.
What is interesting to me is how so much of his life and how he lives it is, consciously and unconsciously, built around the mother-shaped hole in his life and his heart. And his grief, which he was unable to process or express from the very beginning — can we even imagine being unable and/or not allowed to even cry when a loved one passes away? And what that repression does to a body, mind and spirit, no matter who you are?
The ways we keep my mother’s memory alive in my house are many. We keep her picture in a prominent place in our living room. We say hello to her every day. Sometimes I bring her food. O sometimes brings her a rock that she’s found. I tell stories to O every day about what her Lola Solly liked to eat or do or say. I do this so O knows my mom, and I do it so I can feel like my mom is close to me.
Whenever I make siopao, I feel my mom close. I feel her when I make the dough using her recipe, I feel her when I make the decision to make it her way (and when I don’t), and I feel her when I roll out each ball of dough, load it with filling and try to seal it up the way she did. I have not been successful at making them look as pretty and cute as she did, even though I’ve taken videos of her rolling, filling, shaping, forming, sealing. I watch her hands and it’s like she’s performing a magic trick before my eyes.
Mom’s siopao, pre-steamed.
Throughout Prince Harry’s book, particularly the third section, I found myself eager to talk about it with someone who was also interested in his story. That someone I was eager to talk about it with, I realized, was my mom.
My mom didn’t read often (except The Bible) but I think she would’ve been excited to read the third section of Prince Harry’s book with me. I think she would’ve been furious on his and Meghan’s behalf. I can see her shake her head, and I can hear her fume about Prince Harry’s father and brother. I can hear her say, “Why don’t they do anything? Why don’t they help them?”
Every time I make siopao, I use my mom’s ingredient amounts but I try different techniques and processes that I find in various cookbooks. This time around, I decided to do it all my mom’s way. I halved her recipe (her original recipe makes enough dough for…a LOT of siopao) and decided to do one long rise. Other recipes I’ve found call for three rises, but I mean…who has the time? My mom sure didn’t, and I don’t either, so I followed her lead instead: one long rise, cut the dough into smaller pieces, let them rise while I fill and shape them (I call that the half rise). I let the shaped siopao rest in the steamer baskets while I fill and shape the remaining dough — I consider that as like, maybe a quarter rise? It’s what my mom did, and her siopao were flawless in flavor and design, so who am I to mess with her recipe?
Mom’s siopao, ready to eat.
(The siopao tasted great with the pressure cooked soy-glazed pork belly, btw. They didn’t look so cute but they were delicious. My mom would probably have laughed at how much these little buns popped open, and then she would have said, “Keep practicing.”)
I ended up having a beautiful Mother’s Day. It’s become a bit more emotionally complicated, but somehow more bearable, since becoming a mother myself. M and I stayed up late on Saturday night reminiscing about my mom in whispers over O’s sweet sleeping face. I made a lemon blueberry Dutch baby for breakfast, M made a delightful eggplant parmesan for dinner. We danced around to Eurovision performances, and I took a leisurely shower (they’re hard to come by these days). We said happy Mother’s Day to my mom. O said my mom’s name, which made my heart swell with happiness and heartache simultaneously.
I don’t quite know how to end this thing. I guess what I’m trying to say is that grieving for a beloved mother never goes away, whether you’re a normie or a royal. Every person’s journey with grief is different, truly. I think we all may just be muddling our way through it, trying different things until we figure out what feels like healing. Or maybe we never find out what works. Maybe there is no one thing that works. Maybe we just figure out what works for this particular moment of grief.
Or this particular batch of siopao.
My siopao, looking nothing like my mom’s.
