Any Thursday ~ Terrible and Wonderful Contradictions
My mother-in-law Rosanna moved in with us last Tuesday. I'm not sure why I'm calling her Rosanna when for twelve years she's been Mom, but something about having her in my kitchen every morning makes me need the distance of her actual name.
She makes bread on Thursdays. I don't know how she decided this, but already, after one Thursday, it feels like she's always done it here. The smell gets into everything—curtains, cushions, my hair. My husband Collin says it's nice. I suppose it is.
"You feed them both, you know," Rosanna said this morning, apropos of nothing. She was watching me make two different breakfasts—scrambled eggs for our teenager Marcus who won't eat anything else, oatmeal for Collin who's watching his cholesterol. I'd already eaten my own toast standing at the counter at six-thirty, before anyone was up. Or so I'd thought.
"Feed what?" I was trying to find Marcus's special plate, the one with the dividers that he insists doesn't matter but then won't eat if his eggs touch his toast.
"The opposite wolves. Inside everyone. My grandmother used to say you feed the good wolf or the bad wolf, but that's not true. You feed them both. Every day."
I wanted to ask her what she meant, but Marcus shambled in, all six feet of fifteen-year-old misery, and grabbed his plate without thanks. I watched him pour orange juice dangerously close to the rim, willing myself not to comment.
"Morning, sweetie," Rosanna said to him. He grunted. She smiled like he'd recited Shakespeare.
This is the thing about Rosanna—she acts like everything is normal when nothing is. Her husband, Collin's father, left her two months ago for a woman who sells real estate and does yoga. Rosanna hasn't mentioned it once. She just showed up with three suitcases and her bread-making supplies and folded herself into our life like she'd always been here.
Collin thinks she's having a breakdown. "She's too calm," he says. But I watch her hands when she kneads the bread, and they're steady. When she held Marcus while he cried about failing his driving test—held him like he was five, not fifteen—her hands were steady then too.
The wolves thing stayed with me all day. At work, when I snapped at my assistant for losing a file, then helped her look for it. At the grocery store, when I let someone cut in line, then honked at someone in the parking lot. Both wolves, always hungry.
When I got home, Rosanna had rearranged the spice rack. Alphabetically. My first thought was rage—who does she think she is? My second was relief—I could actually find the oregano. Both wolves, fed simultaneously.
"I made soup," she said, not apologizing for the spices. "That kind you like, with the beans."
It was exactly the kind I like. I hadn't even known I had a kind until she said it.
Marcus came in, accepted soup without comment, but sat down to eat it instead of taking it to his room. Collin arrived late, kissed my cheek, kissed his mother's cheek, sat down like this was any Thursday. Rosanna had somehow made it any Thursday.
"Tell me about the wolves again," I said.
Rosanna ladled more soup, though my bowl wasn't empty. "It's not complicated. You think you're choosing between being patient or impatient, kind or cruel. But you're both. All the time. The trick isn't feeding the right wolf. It's knowing they're both there, both yours."
Marcus looked up from his phone. "That's weird, Grandma."
"Everything's weird, honey," she said, buttering his bread without asking if he wanted it buttered. He ate it anyway.
Later, washing dishes—Rosanna washes, I dry, we've never discussed this—I want to ask about Collin's father, about the yoga real estate woman, about the opposite wolves of staying and leaving. But she hands me a plate, and I dry it, and the words don't come. Or rather, different words come.
"You can stay as long as you want," I say.
"I know," she says, like she's the one doing me the favor.
And maybe she is. Tomorrow she'll make breakfast. She'll move my coffee cups to a shelf that makes more sense. I'll be annoyed. I'll be grateful. Both wolves, fed equally, which might be what love actually looks like—not choosing between emotions but having them all at once, contradictory and complete.
The bread smell is still everywhere. It probably always will be now. That's either terrible or wonderful. Rosanna would say it's both.
She's right.
