Mississippi Comforts: True Stories of Redemption and Hope
If these women had any dreams beyond tending to their husbands, babies, and barbeques, they kept those thoughts to themselves. And if word of your sympathies spread, your family feared waking in the middle of the night to a burning cross on the lawn, or a brick thrown through the dining room window during supper.
If your glamorous, tortured wife became an alcoholic, like my mother did, you sent her away to the state mental hospital in a straitjacket to dry out. If your husband was a notorious skirt-chaser, like my father was, you might pull your. And if you were a lesbian, before you even knew there was a word for the feelings you had had for as long as you could remember, you suppressed this fundamental part of yourself for as long as you possibly could. You lived a lie.
You kissed boys and wore their fraternity pins, curled your hair, entered beauty pageants, joined a sorority. You and your friends talked about wedding cakes, honeymoons, and how many babies you wanted, just like you were supposed to. Appearances mattered above all.
No one I knew ever ventured farther north than Memphis or maybe Nashville, and that was just fine with them. My roots ran deep into the red earth; the land felt as much a part of me as my limbs, my heart.
Kisses from Katie | Book by Katie J. Davis, Beth Clark | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster
I hated it with a fury. I loved it with an all-consuming passion. This is the great paradox of the South. For a time, I assumed I had no choice but to stay on the straight and narrow path that had been laid out for me since birth. And the cycle would continue. And the cycle—at least for me—would end.
My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart
Photograph by Stephanie Rocha. Touchstone October Length: Southern Discomfort Hardcover You may also like: Must redeem within 90 days.
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See full terms and conditions and this month's choices. Katie Davis moved to Uganda over a decade ago with no idea that this would be the place that God chose to build her home and her family. Today, she is wife to Benji and mom to her fourteen favorite people. Katie and her family invest their lives in empowering the people of Uganda with education, medical care, and spiritual discipleship. She is also the founder of Amazima Ministries, an organization that cares for vulnerable children and families in Uganda. Tell us what you like, so we can send you books you'll love.
Sign up and get a free eBook! I understood that he was concerned how the Co-parent would react to my sadness playing out in front of the Princess. I had openly cried in front of the Princess. It had gotten back to the Co-parent, and the Engineer made it clear to me that concerns had been raised. The Engineer was unhappy with me for many reasons, I have no doubt and had canceled our birthday dinner reservations. And after we returned, I began to feel like a ghost in my own home—insubstantial but still hanging around for some reason, haunting everyone or, at the very least, annoying them.
No one seemed recognizable to me. What scared me most was that I was beginning not to recognize myself, either. A few nights later, the Engineer and the Princess came storming into the house. When the Engineer came out, he was furious. I stirred a pot as he told me about the clarinet-tutor situation; as he was talking I had the overpowering sensation that I was seeing him from miles away, through a tunnel much too small for me to fit through.
No matter how much I yearned to be over there with him—in a place where you could be mad about something like a clarinet tutor—I could not go into the tunnel. I bought a bottle of wine and took it to a hotel room across the street, hoping to grieve. Instead, in one of those grand moments of sweeping clarity that usually come only with alcohol, the universal truth serum, I sent a text to the Engineer saying that I thought we should break up.
I remember feeling triumphant, light, released. And he must have felt the same way because when I tried to take it back the next day, it was too late. At first it was all relatively friendly. He wanted me out in two weeks but I was pretty sure it would be impossible to find a new place to live in Chicago in two weeks.
I had just buried my brother, was crushed by shame and guilt, and suddenly it became blindingly obvious that I had absolutely nothing to show for my life. I had lost, quite literally, almost everything I had in the world. The blue Bombay bottle held an almost soulful, spiritual allure. I closed the freezer. I had always credited my move to Chicago with changing my life after more than a decade of genetic, creeping, high-functioning alcoholism Why am I this way?
Should I stop drinking? How can I keep doing this?
Southern Discomfort
Open a bottle of wine. The slower midwestern pace had allowed me to face the truth about my life and do the things I needed to fix it. Alcoholism is like charisma: People tend to want to hear exactly why you quit, in great detail, a lot more than they want to know why you ever drank so much. It was so comfortable there. I began dabbling in white wine a little over a year into our relationship. I thought he was worried about me, and maybe he was.
It never seemed to occur to him that he was part of the equation.
A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption
Nonetheless, he asked me to marry him the very next week. The possibility that my occasional social drinking could swerve, without much warning, into full-blown alcoholic behavior did not dissuade him from openly wanting me to be able to have cocktails with him. But it was my responsibility. I knew that some kind of jerky behavior would always be the reward for the stupid, unforgivable risk I took having those few glasses of wine with him.
No matter how good you seem to be at drinking, when you have the gene it always leads to the same place, eventually. After the breakup, as my life started to spark and smell like smoke, I poured alcohol on it and watched it burst into blazes, as if I were preparing cherries jubilee for a crowd. Sometimes only a flaming dish can serve as the proper ending to a dramatic meal.
One night I drank several glasses of sauvignon blanc and, in a fit of uncensored self-pity, broadcast the details of my wrecked life on Facebook for the unsolicited elucidation of around so-called friends. Pouring out my heart, I wept a bit while I typed, pausing to gaze out my floor-to-ceiling windows at Lake Michigan, a landscape where clouds and moonlight cast strange shadows across giant chunks of ice that rubbed together and made mournful creaking sounds that seemed to come from deep inside the earth.
It was the modern-day version of going down to the river, rending my garments, beating my breast. It went something like this: I have almost no money, no job, no home, no car, no child to pick up after school, no dog to feed, no one to care for. I am cold and alone. I went to bed, unconcerned about webcasting my plight. It had seemed like the only thing to do. The morning after my pathetic post, I swallowed my slightly hungover dread and logged on to receive a remarkable surprise: The little Facebook comment button displayed a big number, but it was not the sign of a virtual scolding.
It had never occurred to me that people wanted to stay in touch with me. We had spent lots of evenings together, waiting for hours in the hallway or the band room, doing our homework, until the extras were required to stand on the high school stage, sing and dance in the chorus, say a line or two, then go sit in the hall again.
Since then, skinny, boyish John had grown big muscles and acquired a weathered face after years stationed in Iraq. He was writing from a war zone, and in his Facebook photos he was dirty and sweating, with dusty trucks and sand in the background. I was on the thirty-fifth floor of a Helmut Jahn high-rise in Chicago, overlooking gorgeous Lake Michigan.
In my pictures I was clean and smiling, wearing red lipstick and standing on a street in Barcelona, or posing with our sweet Labrador retriever as she stretched out on our large comfortable bed. Beyond the kind, cordial notes—sweet pats on my back—personal stories arrived detailing sorrows that were not my own.
She had a constant hum of happiness that was leavened with a sharp sarcastic edge that made her seem ideal to me. But she was writing to tell me how her longtime husband left her for another woman. And how much it hurt to take him back, despite her love and sense of relief.
The Comfort Food Diaries
I remembered how lucky I was to have my remaining siblings. Former New Yorker coworkers encouraged me to move back to New York City and offered to help me find a new job. One high school classmate even offered me money he was my ninth-grade date for the homecoming dance; his gesture was pretty embarrassing, but so disarmingly sweet. And so many people wrote simply to say they were thinking of me. I honestly could not discern straightforward human kindness any longer.
But one thing was certain: I grabbed on to this opportunity as if it were a giant piece of driftwood in the ocean, bobbing toward me as I flailed miles from shore. A lot of these people were terrific home cooks or food writers or chefs or cooking instructors or plain old food lovers, so their suggestions leaned heavily in a culinary direction. Eileen then suggested I embark on a culinary tour to see them all. It was the moment of crisis in a Mickey Rooney—Judy Garland movie. Except rather than gathering around the barn to put on a show, my friends and I were in separate homes, miles apart, staring at glowing computer screens, alone but together.
Their offers seemed to me extraordinarily generous. We often hear about the isolating, numbing qualities of the internet, but in my case it had an inverse effect, perhaps because I was already feeling both numb and isolated. Either way, Facebook saved me.
I wondered what secrets they would reveal to me about how to become a happy, healthy person, with a happy, healthy family, in a world that seemed awfully forbidding from where I was sitting. These are perfect for country ham biscuits, the sandwich of the South. They are what I imagined having in my knapsack as I ventured out into a different world, hopefully one in which connection and solace and renewed love were possible.
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