Mothers Who Eat the Good Strawberries
Madeleine Corcoran
It is a warm night in late May. My mother-in-law sits at her dining table, picking through a dish of strawberries and eating some of them. There are two clocks within hearing distance, a grand one made of lacquered wood with golden edging hanging over the table, and a utilitarian plastic disk in the adjacent kitchen. They tick out of time, echoing one another like an off-kilter heartbeat. For the past few days in Bulgaria, it has been unseasonably warm (as it always is nowadays). The day was close and humid. The thrum of bees was thick in the air. My in-laws’ garden is lush with growth. That evening, I saw lightning across the plains, purpling the sky momentarily, but thunder never came.
My mother-in-law finishes eating and proudly reports to her son, my husband: “There, I have eaten all the bruised ones.” He gives her a pained look. For who would labour to eat the bruised strawberries and never eat the delicious ones? Who would walk all the way down to the town square to buy and carry a large bag of strawberries back up the hill, only to eat the mushy bits? A mother, of course. The kind of mother who has been told forever that motherhood is her crowning achievement in life and involves sacrifice and the negation of pleasure.
I grew up in the UK, but most of my mothering has been done in Bulgaria. I moved here when my first baby was six months old—a rather wild decision, looking back on it, to learn to become this new thing while learning to live in a new country. I have, therefore, been an insider and an outsider to Bulgarian motherhood. It would never have occurred to me to eat the bruised strawberries. I would eat the good ones, without guilt, without thought, even. What did this difference mean, and why does it feel important?
As I spoke to Bulgarian mothers and mothers of many other nationalities, a certain logic about the strawberries emerged. The ones who said they would eat the bad fruit and save the good for their child did it on the principle of “putting my child first.” And yet, I felt like I, too, put my children first. I just didn’t put myself last. Had I misunderstood a zero-sum game, or was the best of all worlds more possible than others had assumed? It seemed that giving up good fruit was a rule written down somewhere long ago.
Since becoming a mother, I have thought about pleasure more than ever before. The sheer restorative joy of feeling the warmth of the early spring sunshine on your face after a broken night’s sleep with a baby; the way ice cream tastes when you share some with a small child for the first time; pushing a pram surrounded by the sweet almond scent of blossoming linden trees. These are the sensual, profound pleasures borne of the intimacy of early motherhood. But to talk about pleasure on a bigger scale, we must also consider pain. And motherhood definitely contains pain. If you tell Bulgarians you are committed to pleasure, many of them see you as bizarrely optimistic. A labrador person who chases down fun and always sees the bright side simply because they don’t have the intellectual capacity to envisage reality; someone to whom nothing bad has ever happened. Or, as Bulgarians might have it: a Westerner, with their incessant urge to smile. What is there to smile about! (I still instinctively smile at people on the street.) However, I think of pleasure as a serious business, an act of survival, even. One that must be dug into to help one bear the pains of motherhood.
How to unravel the pleasure and pain, and how we each carry them as mothers? The juddering, splitting spring of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Bulgaria was much like coming into motherhood. The weather provided an event in those fretful, static months. Those of us in Sofia had snow and sunshine by turns into April. Trapped in an apartment with my barely three-year-old, I became engrossed in the street outside my balcony. The birch tree, the washing lines, and the way the pavements crackled with meltwater from the rooftops one day and froze over the next. This seemed to illustrate, the more I observed, that birth was not one event but a painful series of coming in and out of life. Green shoots came through, perished in a frost, pushed through again, and eventually, life won out. The crocuses and marigolds spattered the neighbourhood plots, but only after lashes with the whip.
Of course, this is the wisdom of Baba Marta, that ancient winter-to-spring grandmother who might bring sunshine and hasten the first crops or just as easily kill them off with the cold. Between pregnancy and birth and bleeding and breastfeeding and succeeding and failing and becoming a new person and losing an old person and gaining a new person, becoming a mother was much like that spring. Between milk and blood, it was very much like the red and white of the Martenitsa threads. It was a stop-start that put life and death in the frame unlike anything had before. Profound movements in the smallest of spaces. New shoots cracking out of the soil so painfully, so ecstatically. There were the prayers I said, kneeling on the carpet, when my first baby did not gain weight. A woman came round and snipped his tongue tie with a little pair of sterile scissors. I stopped weighing him. I carried on breastfeeding. Everything is done with your fears between your teeth. And then, one day, your child is the tallest in his school class. No one can tell you anything anymore. You did it your own way and you deserve delicious strawberries.
Perhaps the strawberries were to do with scarcity. If I had only a few good strawberries and I didn’t know where the next strawberries were coming from, I, too, would give them to my children. If I didn’t have much to eat, I’d eat the bruised ones. Within my husband’s lifetime, there has been food instability in Bulgaria. He remembers how precious the oil and preserves sent from his grandmother in the countryside were during that time when everything fell apart. My own family comes from Ireland, a country that experienced famine during my great-great-grandmother’s lifetime that saw the population drop by 20-25% through starvation and escape. I searched my mind, wondering if my own mother or grandmother would have denied themselves strawberries. Perhaps a cultural inheritance compounded by the fact that my mother was a single parent without a lot of income would mean that she too went without. I messaged her to ask about her practices around strawberries. “I wouldn’t think about it,” she said. “We all share whatever is good.”
Indeed, my memories of enjoyment are like this—my mother, my sister, and I enjoying something around the table. We are a team. We each have to take part. Our unity was perhaps also strengthened by the fact that there was no patriarch in our home to tell us how to do things or to make demands. How many years or generations does it take for the fear of scarcity to fade so that mothers, too, may eat the best strawberries? Which internal and external systems make sure that mothers continue to forego even when plenty of strawberries are on the table and in the market?
“Maybe we just always had a lot of good food,” my mother said, thinking of her own childhood and how no one was compelled to eat the bad strawberries. When I first arrived at my one-day-to-be in-laws’ house, they reminded me of my maternal grandparents. Although generations apart, I see parallels between the war generation in the UK and the generation now in their sixties, seventies, and eighties here in Bulgaria. They share a stoicism, a belief in self-reliance and self-capability. My grandfather trained in horticulture at the end of World War II when the nation desperately needed food. He then became a market gardener—someone who grew produce for the market. Later on, reflecting the times, he moved to factory work. Nevertheless, his garden was a place for growing food, and the wartime culture of “grow your own” lived on at my grandparents' dining table. My grandmother made marmalades and jams, which she spread into the centre of sponge cakes. My grandfather would take me to the end of the garden where he would press red and black sour berries into my hand from the currant bushes. He grew gooseberries and rhubarb, sour-sweet things used in my grandmother’s crumble. Everyone knew that carrots from the garden had a richer, sweeter taste, something green and deep, as if they carry the high notes of the soil. My grandparents never owned anything more extravagant than a bicycle (not even their own home), but there were radishes, lettuce, baby tomatoes, and plenty of summer strawberries under glass boxes.
In my fridge, right this very minute, sits a plastic bag stuffed with radishes, lettuce leaves, and spring onions from my in-laws. Thanks to their “grow your own” mentality, I’ve tasted strawberries entirely unlike any I’ve tasted before—a whole range of non-commercial varieties, some with a marzipan tang to them and the tiny mountain strawberries. I’ve tasted grapes that have a sour skin and a sweet amaretto centre; medlar fruits (with the rightly evocative name mushmula in Bulgarian), which have a jammy centre you can squeeze into your mouth from the tough casing; janki (a type of yellow plum) compote; spring garlic shoots gathered in the forest; and cherries and sour cherries in an abundance I’ve never seen before. Baba, grandma, shows her love by thrusting these bags of grown and picked things into our hands whenever we see her. Food is precious; that much is clear. Food is love.
Relationship psychotherapist Esther Perel observes that women in caregiving roles often report difficulty finding their sense of desire. When caring for someone, we necessarily displace a sense of ourselves. Sometimes, we find it has gone missing when the time comes to call upon that erotic, fun-loving part of the self. How can we find her again after the necessary sacrifices of early motherhood? What do we even want anymore? Perel defines it as follows: “It is about the feeling of being deserving. Deserving to feel good. Deserving to be given to. Deserving to be pleased and pleasured.”
For her third birthday, my daughter asks for a “strawberry cake.” I have a love-hate relationship with the special task of making birthday cakes. I remember my own mother staying up until 3 a.m. creating incredible cake designs. A perfectly captured Ariel the Little Mermaid, Humpty Dumpty that sat upright on his wall (and fell off spectacularly and appropriately as my sister blew out the candles). It feels like a motherhood rite of passage. Something written into my motherhood long ago. I start with lots of ingredients and no plan. I end up with a stack of cake layers and cream. Some parts are broken and uneven. The cream is melting. I throw on as many strawberries as it will take, hoping to hide the rough parts. In the end, I am pleased with my efforts. The cake is an overflow of strawberries. I have to remove shelves to fit it in the fridge. It looks like a fabulously overdressed woman heading to a ball. I want my daughter to have loads of strawberries.
What is more strawberries? Me giving her the good ones now, or me eating plenty of good ones with her? All of us sharing the baroque strawberry cake, so that when she is a grown-up, maybe even a mother, she eats the good strawberries without a second thought, just like her mother used to do?
