My Mom's Aggression Cookies Were Her Way of Coping With a Stressful World

The year was 2021. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you what day or month. That entire year is a miasma of emotions. I was intent on being physically present for my Mom during her extended stay as a patient at New York Presbyterian, a ritual that began in December 2020 on the morning she called up complaining of chest pains. I was there from the moment she woke up until she reluctantly closed her eyes each night. I was there as her advocate, her friend, her son, and her companion.

We were together, with me by her bedside in the hospital, 12 hours a day, every day, for half a year. On top of this, I was relaunching my liquor brand Sorel and engaged in the business of being a CEO and all that encompasses. I was responding to emails, taking Zoom meetings, answering phone calls. It was finance, legal, production, marketing, human resources, PR — the full monty, the whole mishegas, all while sublimating the experience of watching my Mom die.

Related: Mourning My Mother with Lemon Cake

I looked over at Mom one day and she was smiling. She was sitting up in bed, listening to Ella and Pops, doing the crossword puzzle in the morning paper. She reminded me that she’d been reading the NY Daily News since it cost five cents, and she asked if I intended to bake today.

“No, Mom,” I responded, adjusting the oxygen tubes helping her breathe. “You’re in the hospital.”

“Oh,” she said. “I forgot. It’s the third time you’ve had to remind me.”

Related: It's My First Holidays as an Orphan. How Do I Deal?

We’d been listening to jazz standards because being old and waking up in a strange place is disorienting. At 93 Mom had some, but not much, mild cognitive deterioration. Music was her mnemonic device — a combination of being married to a musician for 60 some-odd years and her own deep connections to her youth meant these songs grounded her. They recalled to her all she had been, and in those moments the taste and smell of memories ceased their fade. Her mind cleared, and her clarity was unimpaired by time, if only for brief moments.

I wondered if she knew she was dying. I think she suspected.

Related: I Remember My Mother With Love, Carrot Sticks, and a Crappy Bowl of Spaghetti

The scent of freshly baked goods has the same impact on me as jazz legends singing America’s songbook had on Mom. I grew up in a household that was always colored by the wafting aromas of baked goods. At Dad’s bidding, upon her second set of children — two boys and three girls, the second and third separated by a decade — Mom left her beloved job as a research scientist to be a full-time home mom. Cakes, cookies, muffins, cupcakes, biscuits, bread (I didn’t know what store-bought bread tasted like until I was 12 years old), pies, and the occasional pizza from scratch formed the olfactory tapestry of my childhood. As a kid, I bonded with Mom the same way she bonded with her Dad, by learning to bake.

My training — and my relationship with Mom — began when I was 12, around the same age she was when her dad, a trained chef, taught her. “So many people in the world are lonely,” Mom said aloud, as she read the comics. “So many people, so few connections.” I wondered what about the comics made her go all Eleanor Rigby on me.

The gentle demeanor of the woman who birthed and raised me belies the harsh realities of the world she’d lived in. Born in Harlem, New York in 1927 to Caribbean immigrants, Mom had seen some shit, including during the Great Depression.

Related: The Pandemic Is Making Me Deeply Anxious About Food

“Cover this up for my dinner,” Mom said of the half-eaten lunch they’d served her in her hospital room. “We don’t waste food in this house.”

“Eat what you want,” I told her. “They’ll bring dinner later; remember you’re not home; you’re in the hospital.”

She laughed and nodded. “That’s right,” she said. You told me.”

Jim Crow, WWII, the Great Depression, the Korean war, the Civil Rights Movement. It’s almost as if her entire life was one period of massive upheaval overlaid upon the next, none of which she took out on her kids. Exactly how she managed this I’ll never know. It may have something to do with the fact that, as someone who baked seven days a week and sometimes multiple times a day, her favorite recipe was a concoction named “Aggression Cookies.” While she made her own version, in the middle of the 20th century, women around the country were sharing their own Aggression Cookie recipes — usually oatmeal cookies — in church and community cookbooks, and Peg Bracken's legendary The I Hate to Cook Book turned them into a national phenomenon.

My Mom's Aggression Cookies

Put all ingredients together in a huge bowl and beat the dough into submission. Pound, beat, and punch it by hand, until you get rid of all your aggressions, tensions, and uptight feelings. When everything is completely mixed (or when you are exhausted and feeling totally zen) form into small balls the size of walnuts. Place 1/2" apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Smash each cookie like you’re letting it know who’s boss with a small glass which has been buttered and dipped in granulated sugar.

As a kid it never occurred to ask what my generally congenial Mom had to be aggressive about. As an adult living in the post-George Floyd era, it’s a wonder she managed to channel any violent tendencies through flour, butter, eggs, and baking soda, or powder. Forget all the claims of who invented “rage baking,” my Mom was doing it back in the '60s and not because she was trying to mitigate the frustration of being stuck at home during a global pandemic. My Mom had real reasons to be angry.

I remember gazing over at Mom. Her arms were covered in black and blue bruises from daily blood tests. Her glasses were sitting on the bridge of her nose, and her oxygen tubes were, for some reason, on her forehead. She vanished into nostalgia for a moment, and told me how much she missed her favorite aunt, Alma Gibson. Auntie — as we all called her — was the first person on either side of my family to set foot on the continent of North America.

"My Mom had real reasons to be angry. "

Jackie Summers

I adjusted my mother's breathing tubes again as she gasped for air, and asked her if she was tired of fighting. It was my way of checking in with her. On some level she knew her fight was almost over and this was my way of testing the waters of her resolve to keep going.

Related: It's Jackie Summers' Time to Shine

She didn’t answer. Instead she replied "I’m glad I taught you to be a fighter. Life is a fight,” she coughed, her tiny chest heaving. “But it’s a fight worth fighting.”

Which meant she’d interpreted the underlying reason for my inquiry. On some level I was processing how the fight changed her, challenged her, if she let it define her or if she defined it. And in my heart, I was questioning if my fight would extend as long as hers. I was projecting, overlaying her past on my present and future, wondering if I’ll still be fighting well into my nineties.

In the breadth of a heartbeat, I questioned if I could embody even a fraction of the spirit this woman contained in her tiny frail body. Even in this state, her defiance was overruling the faulty valves in her heart, pushing forward with smiles and music, and checking on me. Her congestive heart failure was killing her. I was trying to be as supportive as I could; meanwhile she’d had transcatheter aortic valve replacement, and from inside her frail failing body, she was checking up on me.

She knew. Her fight was almost over and she was testing to make sure I’d be able to keep fighting after she was gone. She was right to check. Being a son framed a large part of my identity. I liked being a son. I was good at it. I liked being her son.

Related: How a Single Grain Shaped the History of This City — and Holds the Key to Its Future

It’s been four years. Now in addition to all of the legitimate reasons I’ve got to be angry, the pockets where I’ve buried my own aggressive nature over the years are proving incapable of containing something that was always far beyond their capacity. It’s beyond just missing my Mom. For the first time in my life I find myself wanting to be someone I’m not: a guy who could just spend an afternoon chilling with his Mom and listening to music.

Mom’s favorite song of all time, "Blues in the Night," came up in a Spotify mix and she recalled every word of this song written by Johnny Mercer in 1941 and which she’d likely heard for the first time over 80 years ago at the tender age of 14. She was smiling as she hoarsely crooned the warning of the untrustworthy nature of men, conveyed in song from mother to daughter, now conveyed by her from mother to son. The knowledge that I’ll never understand the full context of why this resonated so deeply with her sat on my chest like an anchor.

Now it’s clear to me. While I would gladly carve out a chunk of my own flesh with a wooden spoon to spend one more afternoon doing nothing in particular with that woman, Mom left me with something better than self-mutilation. She left me legacy.

"This woman spent a lifetime sublimating her own rage, channeling it into not just baking but changing the world around her."

Jackie Summers

As the living embodiment of "show don’t tell," she laid out a blueprint for transmuting pain into art. This woman spent a lifetime sublimating her own rage, channeling it into not just baking but changing the world around her. She did this so maybe someday it would be prepared to handle not just my own apoplexy, but the combined fury of everyone in my entire family line who never got to experience the fullness of themselves.

Related: The Bake Sale Returns to Its Political Roots

Truth is, there aren’t enough cookies on the entire planet, aggression or otherwise, to soothe the rage I carry in each drop of my marrow. Except that was her path. I now inhabit a world improved by how my Mom — and all of my ancestors — channeled their frustrations into making the world a place more amenable for their progeny to realize the fullness of their potential. The best way I can honor her isn’t by baking cookies, but by continuing their work of reshaping the world into a place where fully realized humans can shed impediments like so many crumbs.

I know my path. Because she showed me how daily acts of defiance can transform into an act of creation.

Related: Meet the Bakers Who Are Changing Their Communities for the Better—One Slice at a Time

Read the original article on Food & Wine