Frosting -- and the things I didn't ask

It was in the last week of my mother’s life that I made a pained and broad attempt at making the perfect frosting.

My mother made frosting that she was famous for. It was peanut butter and powered sugar and milk and butter and vanilla. All those things so perfectly combined that she didn’t write the recipe for it, nor could she. It was made each time based on the turn of the spoon, the pull against the beaters, the color of the sugar turning pale brown. I could not duplicate it but, then, I rarely tried. My mother baked the cake for every special occasion. It was an anchor to every birthday party.

My mother had been in the hospital for two weeks this time.

The first week, we thought she might come home. The second week, we settled in. We didn’t dream the third week would be the last. But it was in that second week, as reality was dawning, that I decided to do everything I could think of, maybe my last things ever - yes, and it would be my last - with my mother. I started to bring her all of her favorites. Her favorite blanket, her favorite lunch, her favorite author. But all of these fell on my mother without much notice. She was awake most days but for the most part she lay, waiting.

I would try to cajole her with stories from work, from home, from the boys. Finally, I marched into the hospital carrying a slice of cake for my mother, one topped with her peanut butter frosting.

My mother was alert and talkative, a noticeable uptick in her mood. She laughed at my story about being interviewed on a local radio show. I had mispronounced my own name, live, on-air. When she laughed, I bloomed inside, the sound of my mother’s laughter so rare by then.

Oh Putz! she said, my nickname a gift, too.

I brought out the cake after the nurse had taken away another lifeless cafeteria tray, of which my mother had only eaten the grapes.

“Here, try this,” I said. I wished to fatten my mother up, refreshed to her old self with one slice of cake.

My birthday - perhaps with that peanut butter frosting I loved.

“What is it?” My mother was no longer interested in food and faced each meal like a trial.

“I tried to make your famous frosting!” I said. I left out the part where I had thrown out several bowls of it before finally coming up with something marginally similar to her’s. I knew this - that it had to be thick. Layered on thick, but also in consistency - not thin or dripping. My mother had her standards when it came to frosting.

She stared at the cake, propped on the rolling tray slid over her bed, and knew she had to try it. For me. She had no appetite, but she finally reached out and scooped frosting on one finger, carefully, to taste.

“Mmmm, it’s good and thick,” she said. “Like it should be.”

It was the last normal thing my mother and I would ever talk about. Frosting. It was nothing, but it was something. I would live and relive that conversation countless times. That one last moment when my mother was just my mother and I was just her daughter, doing something any mother and daughter would do.

I feel now that I learned only that one skill from her, to make frosting.

Why hadn’t I had my mother teach me everything in those final weeks? I wasted away those days in the hospital learning nothing more. How do you make roast beef tender? How do I get a baby - your baby grandson - to sleep through the night? How do I clean a washed-in stain on a favorite shirt? All these questions would come up after my mother’s death, all things a daughter would ask her mother in a lifetime. Ones I never asked. Ones I never dared to ask. Because asking those things would mean that our life together was over.

~

That first year by myself, I scorched gravy and shrunk baby clothes and killed flowers. I worried over rashes and coughs and how to get a baby to eat. I asked friends and family and pediatricians, but they weren’t the same. I wanted my mother.

If only I’d known enough to prepare for this lifetime without her. But all the asking was done now. How could I have let her go without asking the things only she could tell me? But how could I have guessed what tomorrow would bring, let alone a year, a decade, a lifetime? To ask all that I would need to know to raise my babies, to make my home, to live my life, without her?

It wasn’t until later that I realized this.

The list of questions that I never asked her? Those didn’t matter. Not during that last week in the hospital. Not even now. Because I already knew all I needed to know from her in those final moments: That she loved me. That I loved her. That we were together in the end - and that we would be together, in some way, always. Like every time I made her famous peanut butter frosting.

Thick, with love, and for her two grandsons. ❤️