In The Fourth Trimester, we ask parents: What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby? This month it’s never-ending tomato sauce from author Anna Noyes.
While I labored for nearly 50 hours, my mother-in-law, Karen, cooked and canned a giant batch of marinara with the last of August’s harvest. She calmed her nerves by roasting tomatoes and chopping onions, garlic, and peppers from her garden. Then she wrote her new granddaughter notes attached to the lids of the mason jars: “Isla’s sauce, established 9.2.22…Made with love. Grandma needed to keep very busy while she waited for you to arrive.”
My husband, Nate, and I named our daughter Isla Wayne, her middle name a tribute to her grandfather. A full-time engineer for over 40 years, Wayne’s true passion—alongside family—is his tomato farm. Wayne and Karen live in Livonia, NY, in a Victorian home with a view of rolling fields, deer, and greenhouses. People drive across the county to buy jewel-bright quarts and bushels from their stand. Karen’s kitchen shelves are lined with jars of this bounty, reserved whole in their juice, as sauce or salsa. Her calling is toward nurturing: first their five children, now their 11 grandchildren. She is always thinking of ways to make the entire lot of us feel special and known—as she did for Isla before she was even born.
From the moment we met nearly eight years ago, I was welcomed into the Malinowski’s boisterous family as if I’d always belonged. Karen and Wayne leapt up to hug me. I laughed with Nate’s four sisters around a firepit. The toddlers who became my nieces and nephews called me Aunt Anna, settling in my lap. I remember slicing one of Wayne’s tomatoes while cooking alongside Nate, popping a sweet, tart slice into my mouth. The best tomato I’d ever eaten.
Two weeks postpartum, our first visitors were Karen and Wayne, along with them 12 jars of marinara clinking together in a giant cardboard box. My happiness felt holy, but I was nervous to be seen, even by family. A traumatic labor and delivery had left my body undone and I could barely walk. At my most vulnerable, I relaxed into their kindness. As always, there was no pressure to impress or posture. Karen cooked a simple spaghetti and popped open the first lid. Nate put the corresponding note to Isla on our bedroom mantle: “You, my sweetness, are the firstborn of my firstborn.”
I devoured the pasta in bed, where my midwives had advised me to rest, not worried if sauce spattered the sheets. I have never been so hungry. My left thigh, nerve-damaged by the birth, remained numb. My leg had buckled while carrying Isla into our house for the first time. My episiotomy stitches were slow to mend. My whole body ached. Our bedroom was on the second floor, removed from the kitchen and heart of the house. But Karen, Wayne, and Nate joined me for bedside meals, passing Isla between us or watching over her as she slept. I did not feel alone—in the steep learning curve of motherhood or in my overwhelming love for this new being.
