These can be served at room temperature (make before!) drizzled with balsamic reduction. They are sweet and salty and creamy and crunchy and chewy, and you almost feel like you should go to confession after eating one. Forgive us, Lord, but there was bacon.
*You already have balsamic reduction in your fridge if you have paid any attention to me online. It’s something you need to have. If you, for some reason, do not have it, make some stat! Heat 3 to 4 cups of balsamic vinegar plus 1 tablespoon of sugar in a saucepan over medium heat until it reduces by half and looks like syrup (if it coats the back of a spoon, it’s ready). It is sweet and basically perfect. Store in a closed container (I use a mason jar) and keep it in your fridge. Drizzle it on everything (veggies, potatoes, eggs, ice cream, strawberries, avocados, salad, chicken, salmon, pasta, cheese and crackers, air).
Any time women come together with a collective intention, it’s a powerful thing. Whether it’s sitting down making a quilt, in a kitchen preparing a meal, in a club reading the same book, or around the table playing cards, or planning a birthday party, when women come together with a collective intention, magic happens.1
— PHYLICIA RASHAD
CHAPTER 17
BONUS MOMS
Last summer, as often happens, the Hatmaker Moving Parts outpaced our bandwidth, and we had to call in reinforcements. (We have five kids, and they mostly all live here and it is just bananas, you guys.) So my friend Amy took Ben for a couple of days while we shuttled other kids somewhere or flew somewhere or whatever cluster we were managing.
Amy is a rare find. I have never seen her remotely unhinged, and she homeschools four sons in the house her husband grew up in. She manages this Zen because she quietly, gently curses like a sailor and fancies bourbon. She is always sending articles about weird stuff like emu oil and protein structures of different mammalian milks and how Thomas Jefferson wasn’t math educated until thirteen. She once took a maimed chicken to the vet instead of the dinner table. When the flu struck our house last year, she called in $150 worth of holistic oils and colloidal silver and lauric acid to our hippie pharmacy with explicit instructions, and I proceeded to pump my people full of crazy for the next week. (Fine, the flu was totally eradicated.) Amy once locked me into a discussion on “sacred geometry on the micro and macro levels,” so that probably explains things well enough.
I tell you all this so you can make sense of her text to me during Ben’s stay:
“Burying dead parakeet at 10:15 p.m. in the backyard, and Ben dug up old cat bones. I think. Not sure. Have buried 20 animals back there since 1976. We all had on headlamps. Changed hole locations and went on with ceremony. Might be traumatized. Be aware.”
This is what happens when your granola, unschooling, earth mama friend lives in a pet cemetery: your son becomes a grave-digger and has attended not one but two services for Amy’s dead animals. (Tiffany, the handlebar-riding chicken, began resurfacing after a few months and required a second ceremony and bigger rocks. Ride or die, Tiffany.)
Jenny, Shonna, Stephanie, Trina, Michelle, Tonya, Alison, Angie, Lana, Lindsay, Cortney, Sarah, Amy: these girls are the ones I lovingly refer to as my kids’ Bonus Moms. Some go back to my oldest in diapers, some in the last five years, but all have stood in as extra mothers to my children, and me to theirs.
From my earliest memory, Bonus Moms were a given, a childhood staple. Sure, I was raised by Jana King, but I was also parented by Sharon, Melissa, Prissy, Cheryl, Judy, Rita, and Debbie. I knew their houses as well as my own, and their kids were practically my brothers and sisters. I was either grounded or swatted by each and every one of them, and I have nearly as many memories under their care as my own parents’. I loved them like an extra daughter, and their faces were in all our pictures: vacations, games, graduations, weddings, baby showers.
Because my mom assembled such a tight tribe, I had a precedent for prioritizing my own, my girlfriends, my consortium of Bonus Moms. At first, it was simply survival, as early childhood often is. In that stage, it seems like every friend is having a baby every five minutes, and when you get together, you must group-parent or someone might not make it out alive. To this day, I cannot believe my girlfriends and I met at the pool with almost twenty children under five between us. We’d set up watch stations around the perimeter and chatter across the pool while pulling one anothers’ toddlers out of the water periodically, dabbing more sunscreen on any kid in reach. We’d group feed them with whatever we scavenged from our kitchens: six peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (one on inside-out end pieces of bread), five pieces of leftover pizza, two bags of Goldfish crackers, some grapes on their last legs, three baggies of carrots, and eight juice boxes. It was like the loaves and fishes—somehow it always stretched.
In the preschool years, the Bonus Moms traded kids and swapped free days. Trina and I rotated: Tuesdays at my house and Thursdays at hers. Six straight hours of liberty to grocery shop and clean toilets was the sort of dream life we’d only read about. Our kids barely had a memory without each other, so parenting three or six? What was the diff? We basically had the same rules, the same food, the same parenting style, and the same naptimes. Our kids were like a tiny pack of wolves, and we raised them as a conglomerate.
Trina’s youngest daughter Hannah and my Gavin were absolute best pals and had more sleepovers than I could ever number. (When we moved neighborhoods and ended their future in the same middle and high school, Hannah cried bitter tears and Gavin stopped speaking to us.) Anyhow, Gavin had night terrors until he was six, and during one sleepover with Hannah, he woke up screaming nonsensically about spiders in his bed. Trina’s husband, Andrew, quick on the draw, sprinkled baby powder all over Gavin’s bunk and declared it “a spider’s worst nightmare.” We used that trick for the next ten years. (Huge shout-out to Bonus Dads too!)
When my mind wanders back over those years, I cannot recall a single scene that didn’t include my girlfriends feeding my kids at their tables, bathing them in their bathtubs, squeezing their ketchup at Chick-fil-A, holding their hands crossing parking lots. I braided their daughters’ hair, tucked extra sons into bed, wiped their noses against their wishes, attended their band concerts. Our husbands always group texted us, looking for a specific wife, knowing she was likely among her tribe, or in any case, one of us was probably supervising her kids.