My father can’t remember my name

I shudder to think of what it might feel like to have unfinished business with a parent when they pass.  Someone you are meant to love.  Things left unsaid.  Things needing to be said, especially when there are issues.  There are.  For all of us.  Who doesn’t?  I don’t know anyone.

I slayed my demons a long, long time ago.  When I was little.  My father was an absent figure in my life.  I say thank gosh because he was not a great father.  And yes, I do know what a narcissist is.  He is one.

He was physically rough.  A big man.  He hit everyone in his made family—his wife, his kids, girls and boys.  He was also verbally abusive.  There seems to be an inverse proportion to how much time any of us have spent with him and the damage that was done.

Thankfully, he was absent from my life.  I have no memories of him at all before I was 5, and only one or two until I was 8, when I went to live with him for a year.  I so didn’t want to go.  He was cold and gruff and I didn’t know him.  I was so upset with my mother for sending me away…and there was no way to process that in any other way, that she was sending me away.  It was another wound on top of so many wounds from my mother—and I could only feel it as a rejection.  I cried.  But always alone.  It was no longer safe to let her see.

Against the backdrop of my dynamic with my mother, one of being infantilised, controlled, and sexualised, one that was also characterised by a lack of proper parent-child bonding, I still needed to be wanted by her. Stockholm syndrome.  How could I come out of a closet after being locked in as long as it took to break me and then just want her to hold me?  The resentment took hold—it had to, otherwise I would have lost me.  

Being sent away was devastating.  It broke something inside of me.  A tenuous thread already, it made me cold to her, detached.  There was no going back.

It was to Italy that I was sent, and there I discovered some beautiful things. How much I loved food.  I can still remember what my first dish of proper ravioli tasted like.  I was distressed because they were green.  My father was dismissive as he was with all things, “eat them, that’s what they’re supposed to look like.”  I had been raised on canned Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee, a lurid orange mushy version.  Their resemblance to the real thing didn’t even make pretty contrast.

One bite and I was hooked.  See below for a recipe of how to make them.

The first time I met my father as my emerging female self, was at dinner, a large family gathering.  He has always been fond of grand speeches, and this was no different.  At one point over dinner, he interrupted simply by raising a glass and speaking diagonally across everyone to me.  He was curious about my transition, and also proud.

“I admire your courage,” he said.  And perhaps that is true.  And then he told a story from when I was 2 or 3 years old.  He said he was going to hit me for something, probably for just being a kid, doing kid things.  

“I was about to hit you,” he said, “but then you said, ‘Daddy, don’t hit me,’ and so I asked ‘why not?’  And you said, ‘because I’m different,’ and so I didn’t hit you.  But that feeling has always stayed with me.  I never understood it until now, but now I do.

In my family, I am the only person he never struck.  Not even for spankings.  Now we know that I really am different.  Will never know if that is what I meant.  Will never know of what alternatives might exist.  None.

And here I was sitting at the table feeling strong emotions bubbling up inside of me.  But I stopped them, having learned a long time earlier to shut my heart to him.  I did it to survive.  I have always been emotionally fragile.  I’m not saying I went around crying or that people had to walk on eggshells.  It was more that I was ‘sensitive’.  Since that used to be a euphemism for homosexual, and almost exclusively meant gay male, I struggle with the use of the word.  I find that ‘Queer’ fits women better.

Why should I be grateful that I was the only person he didn’t hit?  Isn’t that a screwy benchmark?  But I think that is a calculus that many have felt, and plenty of people much harder than I felt.  We get to feeling, ‘oh it wasn’t that bad’ and make excuses for the abusers.  To me, he was still plenty of verbally abusive.  I remember being dressed down by him, and that was a horrid feeling.  The only way I could deal with it was to tell myself “you’re not my father.  You have no right to speak to me that way.”  It was hard, but it worked.  My other siblings didn’t escape.

One of my sisters cried for me when I told her a few years ago about these feelings of my mother and father.

“I’m so sad,” she said, “who were your mother and father?”

“I wouldn’t have made it if they had been.  The cost was too high to love them.”

And there is a powerful truth to that.  It can be very costly to love, particularly when there is an uneven relationship.  When we need the love of the other person, really something common in blood relations, particularly parent-child, where there is a dependency, and something goes wrong in that.

I did have to shut myself off.

Today, I think of how supportive my father has been during my transition.  How hard he has tried.  My cynical self (I am not very cynical) tells me that this is his inner narcissist and that he just wishes for a better relationship with me for his own selfish reasons.  And that this is a way to do it.  My therapist tells me that it is okay, that I can laught at it, and accept it for what it is.  I try, and I try to make it not matter. 

But it is hard to let him in at all at this point.  And as he lies dying, I kind of wonder what is the point.  I marvel at the rest of my siblings who rally around him, visiting often, and spending hours on end with him.  I can’t bring myself to do it.  A kind of kowtowing to an abuser.  I don’t have the feeling.  I said my peace a long, long time ago.  And again and again over the years.

I wore, “you are not my father, you have no right to speak to me that way,” as a kind of protective armour.  Never voiced, but always present, a kind of internal mantra to disappear to when it was time to go.  And so I did.

My father can’t remember my name…but he does know I’m his daughter, and that means the world to me.

Tortellini di Prezzemolo e Ricotta

These are not exactly what I described above, which you would make with the addition of spinach to the dough, but they are how I learned to make them later, when I was living in Bologna and working as a model in Milan.  It was one of the most beautiful times of my life, utterly peaceful and I came to associate this flavour with happiness.  It is funny that something born from strife can have such wonderfully positive and evocative memories.  I think of this dish as a kind of defiant flower that pushes itself up through cracked pavement.

• 300 g ricotta, mixed, half sheep, half goat
• 100 g parmigiano, about
• 2 or 3 finely minced teaspoons of parsley
• 1 egg
• Sea salt, pepper, and nutmeg

Use pasta of 4 eggs and 400 g of 00 flour, rolled thin, but not too thin.

Unite the ingredients in a bowl with a fork, holding back with the parmigiano until you have tasted the filling.  Mix well and then regulate the salt.

Cut the pasta sheets in squares of about 6 cms, fill, and fold as one does for tortellini.

If rolling the pasta dough by hand, roll it as thin as you can.  Make circles of dough about 5 cm across.  Place a small amount of filling, fold the dough over in half, and then bend them around your finger to make the tortellini.

Parsley and ricotta filling does not keep well, so either freeze right away, or cook the same day.  Serves 4 to 6.

First, Tomato and Cream Sauce

This is the best accompaniment for the tortellini above.  It is a delicate sauce and allows the parsley and ricotta to stand out.

• ¼ pound butter
• 3 tablespoons finely chopped yellow onion
• 3 tablespoons finely chopped carrot
• 3 tablespoons finely chopped celery
• 2 ½ cups pomodori pelati, with their juice
• 2 teaspoons salt, plus more if necessary
• ¼ teaspoon granular sugar
• ½ cup heavy cream

Place all ingredients bar cream in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and cook at the merest simmer for 1 hour, uncovered.  Stir from time to time with a  wooden spoon.

Purée the contents of the pan through a food mill into a saucepan and bring to a simmer, stirring with a wooden spoon.  Add the heavy cream and continue cooking and stirring another minute more.  Taste and correct for salt.  Serves 6.

Second, Pink Tomato Sauce

The only thing that differs in this sauce from the classic butter and tomato sauce, is the passing of the sauce through the mouli, and the addition of the cream making it richer and smoother.

• 1 kg fresh ripe plum tomatoes, peeled, seeded and coarsely chopped or 800 g tinned tomatoes with their juices, coarsely chopped
• 100 g unsalted butter
• 1 medium sized onion, peeled and cut in half
• Sea salt to taste

Place all ingredients in a heavy bottomed saucepan and simmer over low heat until the tomatoes have reduced and separated from the butter.  Remove from the heat and set aside; remove and discard the onion halves (or use them for something else).

Pass the sauce through a mouli into a saucepan and place to medium-low heat until it bubbles.  Add the ream, raise the heat to medium and cook until the sauce thickens a bit, about 2 or 3 minutes.  Serve right away; Serves 6.

Third, Burro e Oro with Besciamella Velante

This is another classic rendition of this sauce, from the Sorelle Simili, Bolognese chefs of great renown.

• 500 g peeled tomatoes passed through a mouli
• 30 g unsalted butter
• 1 onion cut in large pieces
• salt and pepper
• Besciamella Velante
• 20 g butter
• 20 g flour
• 500 g boiling milk
• salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed saucepan over medium heat, toss in the onions, and sauté for a minute until they begin to sweat, add the tomato sauce, and cook for 20-30 minutes over medium-low heat, stirring every now and again to prevent sticking.  Remove from the heat and remove the onion.

Make the besciamella, allow it to boil for 6 or 7 minutes, and then add it to the tomato sauce.  Continue cooking for another 4 to 5 minutes.

Serve immediately; serves 6.

Fourth, A Simple Alfredo Sauce

At Christmas, the traditional way to do this dish is with an alfredo sauce.  Here you would take a pint of single cream, freshly ground white pepper, salt to taste, a few scrapings of nutmeg on the finest grate of a spice grater, and a pat of butter and about 150 g of parmigiano Reggiano cheese.  

Cook down the butter and cream to thicken.  Season to taste with the spices.  Add the cheese, stir, and mix in the pasta.  Some poo poo this preparation as ‘for children’, but any ready will know how I feel about that.