Wooden Spoon

by Carrie Pålsson

The week was not going well for Meg, a point driven home by a little breakdown inspired by the simple act of baking cookies. Somehow she had found herself huddled up on the couch, eating cookie dough with half-mixed in flour after chucking a broken wooden spoon straight out the window.

This was not how Meg Williams was supposed to spend her time. Meg Williams did not mix cookies in a cheap plastic bowl with a cheap wooden spoon. Meg Williams was a working mom who lived by the laws of instant cooking. At home she didn't even bother slicing a roll of pre-made cookie dough. Instead, she bought the good stuff from the frozen food section of Costco. Why bother baking it yourself when you could get Otis Spunkmeyer with barely any energy output? If the kids were really lucky she'd throw some ingredients in her Kitchen-Aid mixer and let it do all the dirty work. Meg Williams simply didn't have time to piddle in the kitchen.

But then, it was not Meg Williams clutching the slightly greasy plastic bowl. It was Meg Spaduski sitting on that couch in her childhood home that was so different yet so very much the same as all those years ago. It was only the lack of a decent wooden spoon, a mother and 10 years that made the difference. Of course, Meg Spaduski loved to bake. She loved to mix the dough with care, incorporating "love" into the cookies, just as her mother taught her from the tender age of six. Meg Williams thought the "love" was something suspiciously like "air" and could be better achieved with the Kitchen-Aid.

Meg Spaduski's life had come to a grinding halt the day her mother died. She wasn't even around the day it happened. She was busy with graduate school, just moments away from a hard earned art history degree when she got the call. Her mother had been killed after her car was hit by an old woman in a giant Buick who didn't see a stop sign. Meg had rushed home to her father, planning on providing comfort while being comforted, but she was shocked to find that she wasn't much needed. Her father had a "good friend" who was willing to comfort him in his grief. It all seemed very strange to Meg and she determined that the "good friend" who eventually became her step-mother was somehow at the root of her mother's death. She had no proof and didn't even really understand how it all connected, but in her heart she felt that things just weren't right. She never went home again.

Instead, she took some odd jobs while trying to pick up the shattered pieces of her life. Her mom had been so much more than a mom--she was also Meg's best friend. Meg felt hopelessly adrift without her. The odd jobs had led to her meeting the love of her life, an affluent restaurant owner with a soft spot for her particular brand of wit. With his help and encouragement she finished up her degree. In the process he lost a waitress but gained a wife.

Though Meg often agonized over the premature loss of her mother, she had built a good life for herself. She'd grown into a very successful art professor and a busy mother, all while pretending to be mild-mannered and cultivated. What a joke..

If only they could see her now, with her snapped wooden spoon and her bulging biceps.

Though Meg dressed with style and grace, she could never really hide the fact that she was a strong woman. It was in her genes. Her father was a sports star of fine German stock. He had been the state wrestling champion and most valuable football player. It was no surprise Meg had inherited her father's strength.

Meg's hysterical tears turned to hysterical laughter at the thought of her brute force strength that caused the cheapo spoon to bust with a loud SNAP! when she'd added the second cup of flour to the mix. She was just beating in some "love." How does love break a spoon?

Sitting on the couch, fingers sticky with the sweet brown sugar mix, the ridiculousness of Meg Williams meeting Meg Spaduski was too much. The Meg Spaduski of old could beat most of the men Meg Williams knew in a good round of arm wrestling, if only she had the opportunity to prove herself.

She could just see herself swishing up to the president of the university in her long black gypsy skirt and flowing red peasant blouse, exuding the air of feminine mystery she'd been carefully cultivating for the past ten years.

"Hey Bill, wanna arm wrestle," she'd ask in the old vernacular that she'd tried so hard to get rid of. A professor must always speak properly after all.

Bill and his entourage would fall out of their chairs.

She had no doubt she'd beat the skinny little ferret man, but the gentle, peaceful art history teacher that she'd become would never do something like that. Her colleagues had no idea that she was anything but ladylike. Her quiet, gentle voice made the men in her life think they had to protect her. Her free flowing skirts and dresses made the students wonder if she had ever ridden a bicycle or climbed a tree. In fact she had, and often, but that was when she was a wild child, running around with all the boys in her neighborhood.

When the rumors came out that she'd backed a male student against the wall and snarled her displeasure two inches from his face not a single faculty member had credited the story. They all laughed at the absurdity of it and the unruly boy was left to stew in his own juices at the double ignominy of being beaten by a woman and thought a ridiculous liar.

If only they could have seen her in her youth. If only they could see her now. Not even David, her husband, had ever really understood the whole story, though she had never made any great secret of it. Life with her alcoholic father had to be experienced, not explained. And honestly, she didn't even want David to know too much of the truth. Her teen years were too angry and bitter to remember. Her mother had been the only thing that kept her going. Despite all the problems she persevered and did everything she could to make Meg's life as normal as possible. Meg had run from that life as fast as she could. She made sure her current life and her former life never had a chance to meet.

But here she was with the broken wooden spoon, trying so hard not to revert back to what she'd been, yet forced to spend the next couple of weeks with the father she hadn't seen in at least five years.

Damn She cursed out loud. Double dog damn.. Then she laughed. Double dog damn was the harshest language her mother ever allowed her to use. It was probably the harshest language she'd used since her children had been born. Who speaks like this? she wondered, as she climbed off the couch and went to hunt up another spoon.

This whole mess had started a month ago when she'd received a panicked call from her father, informing her that the hated step-mother was gone, along with most of his possessions. At first Meg didn't understand. What did that have to do with her? What did he want from her? They hadn't been on good terms for the past ten years, not since he'd fallen in with That Woman. He'd visited her home a few times, oohing and ahhing over his grandsons, but that was it. A yearly Christmas letter, checks on birthdays and that was enough.

But now he wanted something. He'd always had a woman to take care of him so he expected Meg just to drop her own life and run to help him set up house and cook meals and do whatever else it was that good daughters did in times of crisis.

Meg had flatly refused at first. Her home was with her children. Her family lived in California, not Idaho. She wanted nothing to do with the situation at all, and put it out of her mind.

But David. . .

Well, David just wouldn't leave it alone. His own family was tight-knit and he couldn't stand to see Meg cutting off her father, even though he knew the relationship was strained. He finally talked her into heading up to Idaho for three weeks while he took the boys on a backpacking trip through the mountains. Neither Meg Spaduski nor Meg Williams went backpacking so she finally agreed to do what she could. There are worse things than family, after all, right? she'd told herself at the time.

And she was right. There really were worse things than family. She just didn't know what.

Her father was almost like his old self and the house was eerily unchanged, though that was only because That Woman had taken all the current household items and her father had been forced to dig out the home decor from ten years prior. If only her mother had been there, things would have been bearable. They always knew how to have a good time together, despite her father's drunkenness. Meg would have been the carefree girl who baked cookies for the family in the mornings then ran outside to climb trees all afternoon.

But it wasn't quite that simple. Meg was the woman of the house, for lack of a better term, and she was responsible for getting things organized. The kitchen was the first order of business.

Cookies were the second order of business. The moment she'd walked in the door her dad had demanded her famous chocolate chip cookies. When she was a kid she made chocolate chip cookies every single Saturday morning. They were always perfect little puffs of gooey, chewy happiness that all the neighborhood kids clamored for. Teachers would ask her to bring them in to class on Fridays. Even the minister would seek out Meg's cookies at the monthly church potlucks.

But there was a problem with this batch of cookies. Meg's mother's special wooden spoon was long gone, doubtless thrown out by That Woman before Meg had a chance to rescue it ten years ago, and the cheap replacement she found at Wal-Mart wasn't strong enough to withstand the beating. She was left with a broken spoon, broken memories, and a broken heart. Nothing would ever be the same.