My mom slept with cookbooks.

Literally.

She shared her bedroom with my snoring father, two boxer dogs and enough cookbooks to fill a floor to ceiling bookcase – not that she ever put the books on a shelf. Instead, they were stacked haphazardly around her side of the king-sized bed in what amounted to some sort of book nest. I always suspected she cherished her cookbooks more than anything else in her lair, including my dad.

Mom usually went to her bedroom immediately after Walter Cronkite reminded her “That’s the way it is.” I didn’t think much about her early bedtime and what she might be escaping from or to; I was just relieved to be rid of her for the night. She closed the door with a finality that reminded us she was not to be bothered. Not that we ever did.

For the remainder of the night I was left with my drunken father passed out and snoring in his Archie Bunker recliner. The snoring was annoying but better than listening to mom yell. Besides, dad was so out of it that I could watch what I wanted on TV and even turn up the volume without stirring him. It was the only peace I knew in my day. When I eventually climbed the stairs to my own room, a sliver of light escaped from the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door of my parents’ room; mom was still awake. I wondered how anyone could read cookbooks for hours on end.

It seemed mom’s only pleasures in life revolved around food. More than cooking, she loved to eat. She was a type II diabetic and morbidly obese from my birth to her death. My dad was a drunk, but a happy one. He loved Stroh’s beer and ginger brandy the way mom loved Hostess fruit pies and sweet corn. My mom, forced to live paycheck to paycheck, because our happy drunk drank most of the money, was anything but happy.

When I would hear her car coming up the gravel driveway, the hair on the back of my neck would stand on end. I’d quickly review a mental checklist of how I’d spent my day, wondering if anything I’d done or left undone would set her off. In the end it didn’t matter, when mom needed a punching bag, she didn’t trouble herself with an excuse. And when she needed comfort, she always turned to food.

We found our common ground in the kitchen. There she shared with me the recipes she’d discovered in her bedroom. If we could afford the ingredients, we tried them as she found them – a much needed break from wieners and beans and tuna casserole. The best and probably most expensive recipes were saved for holidays. At Christmas mom would open one of her books to something exotic like a cookie with a Hershey Kiss hidden inside a pecan and brown sugar dough ball. I would look at the way she’d turned down the corner of the page and wonder how long she’d been waiting to try the recipe.

And it was in the kitchen that I could please my mom at last. A beautiful tray of holiday sugar cookies iced to perfection earned me an occasional compliment, one I would treasure for weeks and cling to when her anger returned.

Like mom, and perhaps because of her, I love food and cooking. I spent years trying to outrun her shadow and memory. So desperate to know I wasn’t like her, I couldn’t bear to consider what we had in common. For years the fleeting love we shared in the kitchen seemed tainted, and I wouldn't allow myself to think it had been real. Only now, nine years after her passing do I feel safe in acknowledging our similarities. It took me a long time to see my mom as a woman; to recognize that she had a life before she was a mom, my mom; to understand what she was escaping from all those nights in her room; and finally, to accept her.

My cookbooks are lovingly displayed in a large bookcase in the kitchen. At night, when Bird immerses himself in Cash Cab or MythBusters, I pull a book from a shelf and sneak off to the bedroom we share. Many a night I’ve curled up with Rick Bayless’s Mexico, One Plate At a Time, only to be transported in my dreams to Mexican markets with stalls brimming with peppers in every color of the rainbow.

I wonder where all those bedside cookbooks took my mom? Did she dream of vibrant peppers? Of iced cookies twinkling with sprinkled sugar? I’ll never know, but I like to think that she was able to find some peace in her life back then even if only in her dreams.