Raising Girls and Making Piroshkis

Piroshkis might be straightforward - filling, dough, egg wash - but puberty isn't, and neither is parenting.

When we made our list of favorite meals in preparation for spending Christmas in our beloved cabin #33 at La Push I was surprised when my 12-year old asked for an encore of piroshkis.  Last year's were bland and dry, the pie dough tough and mealy at the same time, but she said she loved them. I added them to our list and tried to think of how to alter the recipe to make them better.

The day after Christmas I diced onion and browned meat for said piroshkis while the girls brought the World Wrestling Federation to life in their bedroom of our small cabin, young bodies flung from the bed off the log walls and to the floor, shrieking voices making the lights swing on their chains. Like parents do I marched into their room and said, "Go outside!"  My nine-year old put her coat on and went outside.  My 12-year old spiraled into a hysterical anger that included every wrong done since 2003, said she was not going outside because it was cold and slammed shut her bedroom door.

My husband took the dog and the nine-year old to the beach.  I was left making piroshkis - ironic piroshkis of love! - with a twelve-year old assigned an hour of bedroom imprisonment for calling her parents "jerks."

Minutes 0-15: hysterical sobbing and various things like, "...doesn't make any sense!!!!"
Minutes 16-20: daughter cleverly escapes bedroom lockdown because she has to "go to the bathroom."
Minutes 21-30: daughter emerges from bathroom and declares she's going to beach, tries to be Marshawn Lynch in getting to door / end zone.
Minutes 31-45: daughter returns to room crying hysterically, calling me a "hypocrite" for not letting her go to beach.
Minutes 46-60: daughter plays quietly in her room with journal, Legos, imagining her mother's gruesome death, pretending she's Adele, etc..

Meanwhile, I made piroshkis. As I rolled the dough and my daughter made her "I'm taking back my life!" escape attempts, I wrestled with the urge to dismiss her hysteria as hormone-driven emotional mindlessness, because that's what we're trained to do with adolescent girls.  We're trained to see them as witless passengers on some hormonal roller coaster. This makes us discount them, their feelings, and whatever objective they're fighting for. Adolescent boys get angry and we think, "My god!  He's exhibiting emotion!  This must be important!"  Adolescent girls get angry and we think, "Hello hormones!"  It's not okay.

I spooned filling - filling more moist than last year's because of a liberal addition of leftover fat from Christmas Day's prime rib - into circles of dough and thought about what it is to be female in our culture, how we minimize female rage by attributing it to hormones, how we think it's funny when young women attempt to exhibit power and autonomy by throwing tantrums - tantrums thrown because they haven't yet learned how to harness anger into persuasion and change.  We see their aggression as an entertaining lack of control, like how we laugh at videos of poor people fighting over discounted T.V.s on Black Friday.  My daughter wasn't flung into hysteria by her hormones, she was angry that her mother interrupted a really good wrestling match with some random order to go outside.

Unlike piroshkis, which can be quickly improved by adding a quarter cup of fat, approaching an adolescent girl's misbehavior from a feminist's perspective is complicated.  I had to hold my daughter accountable for her unacceptable and disrespectful language toward her parents but at the same time I had to recognize her anger and teach her how to express it more effectively.

Inspired by my brilliance in crafting a pastry brush from a torn paper towel for glossing the piroshkis with egg wash, I went into my daughter's room to debrief the situation once her hour was up.

Here's how I imagined it would go:
Me:  blah blah respect blah blah anger blah blah articulate your needs
My daughter:  Oh mother, you're so right.  I'm sorry.  I love you.

Here's how it went:
Me:blah blah respect blah blah anger blah blah articulate your needs
My daughter: Okay. Sorry. So can I go to the beach now?

You can control a piroshki's moistness, but you can't control the reaction of a strong-willed young woman.  So I confirmed she had heard me, which she claimed to have done, and sent her to the beach.

After all this I was exhausted, drained from trying to overcome the sexism of my era and be the best mother the species has ever seen.  How much easier it would have been to have just slapped her, kind of a "You're strong, I'm strong!" mothering strategy that suddenly seemed both feminist and effective. I pulled the piroshkis out of the oven expecting them to be a worn-out mess, beaten by conflict, over-worked and leathery, but they were perfect. Juicy, savory, with a crust both flaky and toothsome.  A hundred times better than last year's.

I ate one, looking out the huge picture window at my loved ones playing on the beach, thinking how next year I might do a better job of getting my kids outside, my daughter might do a better job of arguing her case, and we'd have someone other than Donald Trump in the White House.

Failing those lofty ambitions, at least I could make a really good piroshki.