I Was Estranged From My Husband’s Mother. Then He Got Sick—And She Came to Cook

It was Christmas the first time I ever saw my mother-in-law, Croce, in Los Angeles. She had just arrived on a transcontinental flight from the mountains of her rural home in Sicily. She knew no English. She had no driver’s license and had never worn pants a day in her life. She also had not attended my wedding in Florence seven years prior. Old World values and marriage to a Black American woman had caused the final rift between her son and her husband, and she had taken her husband’s side. Now that reality remained unspoken between us, even as we faced a common foe—the cancer threatening her son’s life.

Croce entered my house in Silver Lake with a suitcase full of food and a singular mission to care for her firstborn child and only son. I could see that behind the wheels of cheese, braided garlic strands, jars of tomato sauce, dried figs, and bags of almonds picked from the trees of her northern coast, she also brought an immeasurable amount of grief. Grief so formidable that it threatened to crowd me out of my own home.

I had always loved Christmas. But that year my husband Saro’s cancer spun my world on a dangerous new axis. Barely out of my 20s, nothing in my marriage or life had prepared me for caregiving on this scale, with these stakes. And now I was doing it with my husband’s parents, who by all accounts seemed determined to define their family by what it was not—not interracial, not international. The fact of that shone as bright as the lights on the tree.

That first night, as my in-laws and Saro chatted away in Sicilian, a language so different from Italian that I didn’t understand it at all, I stored the food Croce brought under her watchful eye. She had already asked me three times why I didn’t have curtains on the kitchen windows. Could these people ever be family to me? I glanced at the calendar, calculating how many days until I’d drive them back to the airport.

Two days later Croce made a traditional Sicilian dinner of marinated eggplant, stewed chickpeas, pasta, and batter-fried cardoons. I washed the dishes, then headed upstairs to research the benefits of a macrobiotic diet for cancer patients. But Croce had a different plan. She pulled her bag of homegrown figs from the pantry and handed them to me. “Get a bowl and remove the stems,” she said, half in Italian, half in Sicilian. She was going to make cuccidati.

“Coo-chee who?” It was the first time I’d heard the funny-sounding name. But she was sure that the buttery fig-filled Sicilian Christmas cookies would make her son happy. 

So we sat side by side at the table, pinching fig stems in silence. It was the first time I’d been close enough to take in the faint spots on the smooth skin of her hands. She rolled down her knee-high nylons, a sign of exhaustion that quietly endeared her to me. We were both just trying to manage.