A Feminist's Daughter Finds Love in the Kitchen On Mother's Day last spring, my 10-year-old daughter listed some things she loves about having me as her mother. The first two surprised me: "You make my lunch most days," she began, "and you make dinner." Other observations followed, including that I am "huggy" and "smart." But first came the kitchen. Briefly, I was affronted. Why does food service count the most? But within seconds my reaction did a full 180, because I remembered why I spend serious time in the kitchen: I know my presence there has a value that goes far beyond the food itself. Once upon a time, I had a mother who inhabited the kitchen with care. The bliss of licking drippy, sweet things off the mixing spoon after she had stirred pudding or poured cake batter into a pan was often mine. I believed my mother loved those moments, and our entire home-based family life, as much as I did. Yet by the time I turned 9, my brother and I lived in a post-divorce household, with Dad in a new home and Mom in full feminist revolt. Dinners of chicken cordon bleu and baked desserts gave way to oven-roasted meats that were deemed done whenever my mother could tear herself away from making art and selling it - or, when she wasn't home, to no dinner at all, unless you counted the banana I nibbled while crouched in my closet, hoping any would-be attackers couldn't see me through the window as darkness fell. My mother burst out of her caretaking role after a dozen years. Her mother, an immigrants" child who had dropped out of high school, never burst out. With an often-absent husband, two young children and little money, my grandmother cooked three meals a day, flew into rages and regularly banged my mother's head against the wall. For my mother, the kitchen felt like a trap. When the women's movement blossomed in the late 1960s, she was ready. She vanquished the spirit of homemaking the way Virginia Woolf had killed her "Angel in the House." And then a tidal wave of rage, disappointment and raw desire overtook her. I saw it in her vehemence toward my father and in the raucous consciousness-raising groups that met in our living room. I saw it in the changed contents of our dinner plates: a dried-out chicken leg, a potato collapsed inward from overbaking. When my mother banged out work correspondence on an electric typewriter way past bedtime, my needs had no standing. On other nights I would lie awake for hours, unable to sleep until she came home at midnight. Complaining got me nowhere. My mother was an unstoppable force, powerful, beautiful and finally happy. As her days and nights expanded to include solo shows, romance and the founding of feminist organizations, I could see in her radiant face and laughter that she was fulfilling her potential. Her red hair grew ever upward, a hood of curls that shouted out her freedom. She had suffered and struggled. She was talented. She deserved to thrive. But my body spoke my devastation. I went from being well fed and popular in third grade to near skeletal and often mocked in fifth. I wasn't anorexic; I just didn't know how to cook. I turned sallow and hollow-eyed and suffered headaches, eczema and stomach pains. On the windy playground, other children would crow, "She's so skinny, she's going to blow away." And I was lonely. On weekday afternoons I would let myself in using the key around my neck. If my mother was home, I would find her in her basement studio, wielding a torch of blue flame, shaping metal into sculpture. She wore a leather apron, elbow-high gloves, a polka-dot cap, a breathing mask and a plastic face visor. Her bushy red hair burst out the back of the cap, a sign of her uncontainable passion. Mom! I would yell, keeping my distance, because even the sparks could burn you. She would look up, turn the knob to stop the gas, pull down the breathing mask and tilt back her visor, showing her freckled face. "Oh, hello, sweetheart," she would say in her Brooklyn accent. Janet Benton, a writer and editor in Philadelphia, is completing a historical novel about motherhood.