A father’s love language, a daughter’s grief
Home is where your dad eats pasta to help you feel less alone
Food has always been my father’s love language. It makes sense, as he’s a first-generation Sicilian-American raised in a matriarchal multi-generational family where the kitchen was the center of the universe.
My paternal grandparents’ house had a huge kitchen table that was rarely without guests and always open for business, with any number of random neighbors, friends or family members entering their back door — which led directly to the kitchen — at any and all hours. They never left unfed.
My mother used to joke that my sister was a chubby kid because whenever she would cry, Dad would give her a bottle to soothe her. This trend of feeding us whenever we would be sad or emotional continued throughout our lives and even into adulthood.
Though my dad was a girl dad, the father of two daughters, he always struggled with exhibitions of strong emotions from the women in his life. This was probably because he had a hard time expressing feelings himself.
I have many memories of my father feeding to soothe us, but one in particular sticks out in my mind. It was after my mother’s death in 2004, which happened a day before my 33rd birthday. I had been living in San Francisco when she died, but about two years later the company for which I worked as a technology journalist asked if I wanted to relocate to New York.
I was not only grieving my mother’s loss but also heartbroken after being dumped by the man I thought was the love of my life. (Spoiler alert: He wasn’t.) The idea was that being closer to my family — who all still lived in suburban Philadelphia where I was raised — would help, even though I was terrified to move to such a big city where I had few friends at 34.
Since I the first time I visited NYC when I was 13 on a school trip — where we went to the top of the original World Trade Center — I had a poster of its skyline on my bedroom wall, and held the city in mythical regard. Though I’d been there many times between 13 and 34, moving there in such a fragile emotional state especially since I had such a tight-knit, supportive friend group in SF was distressing to my fragile psyche.
The night before I left for NYC on an early-morning flight those friends — mostly British — saw me off with a raucously drunken evening that lasted well into morning. I may have slept an hour or two before leaving for the airport with two huge bags, the remains of my life in SF that I could carry with me. My friend Gavin accompanied me in the taxi to see me off.
When I arrived to my father’s house in Pennsylvania, I collapsed immediately into bed; we were meant to get up early the next day to drive to the apartment I would sublet in Brooklyn for a couple of months before I found a permanent place to live.
The apartment was in Sunset Park, which was kind of close to Park Slope — where one of the few people who I knew in NYC, a work colleague, lived — but also very far away, as Brooklyn in 2006 was still in the nascent stages of gentrification. It was still on the seedy side of the tracks, on the N, R subway line, and for someone already stressed about the move and used to living in a comfortable apartment in the trendy neighborhood of Lower Pacific Heights in SF, a major change.
The day was hot and white, a typical early September day in NYC, and feelings of desolation began to overwhelm me as we drove over the Verrazzano Narrows bridge and north toward my new home. I don’t remember what we talked about but I was sure that I hid my deepest fears about the move from my father, since these were things we never talked about.
Arrival was a culture shock, though I tried to hide my rising panic. The sublet came with a psychotic kitten and roaches — the first of which I knew about (though not the psychotic part), the second of which I didn’t. It was also full of the owner’s stuff, of course, moved aside in a way that I could squeeze in my things, but would constantly be reminded that I was just a temporary settler.
My dad was meant to stay the night and then go back to Pennsylvania the next day, leaving me alone in the big city to start my new life. It was a Sunday and I already had to work on Monday morning; I would commute on the subway to a shared cooperative workspace in SoHo in Manhattan.
The afternoon turned into evening, and my father relaxed in the living room as I put stuff away in the bedroom. I remember that overstuffed closet and deep sense of hopelessness I had as I stacked and hung my clothes where I could find space. The weight of my hangover, fear, grief and the long day finally bubbled over and I burst into uncontrollable sobs, ugly crying my way through the rest of unpacking.
I tried to hide my tears from my father but it was kind of impossible given the size of the apartment, and eventually he wandered in from the living room and asked me what was wrong. I couldn’t explain to him how scared and lonely I felt, how I never thought I would be staring down 35 without a partner or a family of my own, how I missed my mom even though we were never as close as I wished we would be in real life.
I couldn’t say that I was still utterly heartbroken over my ex-boyfriend, and that if I was honest with myself I had moved to NYC not so much to be closer to my family but to be closer to where he lived in Kentucky, since he’d insisted that the long-distance part of our relationship was one of the reasons it didn’t work.
I just stood there, my sobs dissolving into sniffles and frantic wipes at my face, and told him simply, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” A moment passed and then he said without looking directly at me, “Come on, it’s past dinner time. Let’s go get something to eat.”
As neither of us felt up to going to a restaurant, we walked down the busy street until we found a simple bodega. I stocked up on a few essentials, including the makings of an Italian-American staple — pasta with marinara sauce. I went back to the apartment and prepared a dish both of us had eaten countless times, my father so much so in his childhood that as an adult he rarely ever touched the stuff again.
But that night he did, sitting at someone else’s kitchen table with me in an act of love and solidarity at a time when his grown daughter needed her daddy. I don’t remember what we talked about or if we talked at all. But I do know that the act of sharing a meal — something we didn’t do nearly often enough since I reached adulthood and moved away — helped ease my worry at least for a little while, and make a stranger’s apartment feel more like home.