Mothers and Memories with Padma Lakshmi: The Moth Podcast

As a story director, I talk to a lot of people who say they want to tell a story but don't know where to start. A tip I give them, get specific.

“What's a moment that meant something to you?”

Your first home run, that road trip with your dad, the time you bombed at the talent show.

Start there, then build on that foundation. You can find tips to help you identify those moments along with prompts to inspire them in the moths new guided journal My Life in Stories. Whether you want to find your own story, reflect on your life or even give it a gift. You can order your copy at the moth.org/mylifeinstories.

That's the moth.org/mylifeinstories. Now do your podcast and a lesson from time to time. For 2009, I bring you your Mittags Pause with Sushi in Sroyen. A lesson. For €1.99, I add a little bit of ice cream.

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Good for all. Hi there, and welcome to the moth. I'm Padma Lakshmi, a moth story teller, writer, and the creator in host of America's culinary cup. I was also honored to be the moth storyteller of the year in 2020.

I'm also a mother, and I'm excited to host the special Mother's Day themed episode. The three stories you'll hear are all about motherhood, but they're about more than that. They're about the memories mothers and their children share, and the legacy we leave behind once our kids grow up. Our first storyteller is Mary Matt, who told us on stage at a sold-out main stage show

in Cincinnati. Here's Mary, live at the moth. Thank you. My 83-year-old mother still lives in the woods where I grew up. She does not have the internet, but she's heard of it.

She will ask me to do very uncomfortable things for her online, sometimes just tasks. She gives me, show call me up, and often there's not a hello, it'll just go like, "Hey, get on your hand, computer, and look me up, why is my cat looking at it's fur off?" Oh, oh, oh, I wanted to get online there and see how much booze can I have with this new medication.

“I want to do these things for my mom, it's important for me to help her because she has”

not had an easy life.

Her health is bad, money has always been tight, and just seeing my mom go from depressed

to happy for an hour is a gift. Plus, my dad had enough nerve to pass away before I had any means to help him out. So consequently, I am a little overzealous at wanting to help my mother. For example, I will pay somebody to mow my yard, and then I will drive a four-hour round trip to mow my mother's yard.

Yeah, in therapy, I learned that this is called codependency, and it's not a good thing, but I am really good at it. The therapist has tried her best, she has given me assignments, read the book, "Codependency No More by Melody Baity." Hey, how about we make a hand-drawn poster of the tips of how not to be codependent.

And I remember going home and digging in my junk drawer for colored pencils, and I squiggle out guidelines like detach with love, put your own air mask on first, boundaries are good. And I hung it on my wall, and I mostly forgot about it. A few years ago, at Thanksgiving, I went to visit my mom, just me and her, and my mom pulls out of her worn-out, woolly bathrobe, and official looking, trifled document, perolescent,

and had milder stains on it, it smelled like the basement.

“She says, here, I want you to sell these for me, and I'm like, well, what are they?”

It's a couple burial plots I'm not going to use anymore. Oh boy, yep, that is not enough information and also too much information. My mom didn't even realize she owned these plots, she didn't remember.

need them because she doesn't live in this town where the cemetery is located anymore.

“In fact, she's never lived in this town, and now she lives even farther away, two hours”

away. So, she also realized that they'd be worth way more than when she bought them in the 1960s, you know, almost 60 years ago. And then I envision myself selling these plots and returning home a hero like, come on, Jan, we're going to pay off all your bills, and then we're going to the

seafood buffet at the casino. So, she says, all right, get on Greg's list and sell them

for me then. Maybe there is a Greg's list. And then she adds, unless you want to use them, I don't,

“I don't want to, I don't live in this town either, in a bit of fear crept into my head.”

What if I don't sell these? Will I have to get buried in cool rabbits? Because I know me and I know my codependency, and that is something I would do. But then I also remembered, I had

already had a little bit of success with online sales. The previous year, I had sold a

camper running on Facebook marketplace, and after that transaction, I fashion myself a business woman. I thought, you know, not everybody owns a camper, but everybody's going to die. It's a built-in market. So then I go home and I realize there are other challenges. It's just not a fun sale. When you're a scrolling Facebook marketplace, you're not looking for graves. You're looking for whimsical items like vintage wallpaper or leather doodles, or a fog machine.

Yeah. And I also noticed upon examination of the deed that these are full sizes. Nobody's getting full-sized buried anymore. cremation is very popular. Full-sized buried is a production. They lay it out for display, but with cremation it's easy. It's like, oh, let's forget this ever happened. Burn the evidence, you know? Yeah.

“But I'm in, I promised, you know, I read online that you need to take a picture of the item you”

are trying to sell on the internet. And it turns out you cannot just Google maps your way to the tranquillity gardens, row 40, plats, three and five. Oh, yeah, three and five. It got harder. Is the creeper in platform? But I'm in, I promised. So I just locate the cemetery in general. And I find the cemetery office, which looks like every other suburban home that is sprouted up, since she's bought these, you know, a beige vinyl-sided split-level ranch. And I go inside the

man brings out some paper maps, nothing's online, just some charts and some maps, the unfolds on many points to where he thinks these sites might be on the grounds. And he says, oh, nobody's going in there for a while. And I'm like, what? Yeah, I know because we've been hoarding them. And then he takes out a pricing sheet. And he silently points to what these gravesites are worth.

for my mother. I'm like, we're going to the seafood buffet twice. I can see it.

“So I go out there. I snap my photo. Don't even bother. You can just take a picture of a sad”

field anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. And then, I get home and I figure, well, I'll put it in, I'll put on Craigslist. I put it in general sales because I didn't know, I had no idea. And I thought, oh, this photo, it's so depressing. I'm going to really have to jazz it up with the ad copy.

If I want to turn heads, right? And so I captioned it, looking for your forever home.

Quiet neighbors, Minneapolis adjacent. And then I just sat back and waited for that sweet,

“sweet, cemetery resale money to come roll in here. Two weeks went by. Nothing. Three weeks went by.”

No word, nothing. I thought, you know, the cemetery guy said it could take a while. And I'm like, well, yeah, I took me a month to sell the camper running. So this song seems normal. And then I change the caption to be a little more respectful. In case I offended anybody. And I waited six months went by, nobody. You know, and at that time, somebody suggested, well, have you checked the spam box on your email? And I thought, oh, no, probably dozens of people have died. And yeah,

and they're all trying to contact me, and it's in my junk mail. So I look, and I, there, nothing. There's still nothing, nobody. And then about a year in, after not hearing one word, I wake up in the morning, having these little panics. I grew up poor. These are worth thousands of dollars. I cannot waste these sites. But this fear prompted me to up my game in marketing. And I printed out hard copy flyers. I printed

them, and I drove to Cune Rapids again. Looking for bullets in boards. There are no bullets in boards. In Cune Rapids, Minnesota. I had a long talk with the 19 year old's grocery store manager about the benefits of bulletin boards for older people. Nobody cares. I took out a classified ad in the penny saver. That's a hard copy publication. And still nothing, nothing. I failed. I did all that. And I know my mom will still love me, even though I'm not a cemetery resale mogul.

She's just, she doesn't probably even remember I'm trying to sell him. She's just crocheting her

hats living her life. But I feel horrible. I gave up basically. And then for me, when I give up,

“it's sometimes a good thing because my brain slows down. I think more calmly. I remember that”

how not to be codependent, hand-drawn poster on my wall. And I think, yeah, maybe I don't want to waste these burial plots. But I also don't want to waste all the work. I've done on myself, right? I have tools. I have mental and emotional tools. I have red books. I have paid for therapy on a sliding scale. Okay? I don't have to get buried in the plots. My mom accidentally purchased in the 1960s. And neither do you. If it should ever come up. And this may seem like an obvious choice to most of

you in here. But for me, it's a big step. That being said, if you are looking for your forever home and plots 3 and 5 are next to each other. By the way, it's just a weird numbering system. We figured

That was Mary Mac. Mary's a voiceover actress and stand-up comedian from the upper upper midwest,

“which makes sense because not only was that story engaging, her delivery was impeccable.”

She plans to spend a good deal of the next year getting a book of her essays ready for the general public to hopefully enjoy. The cemetery plots are still for sale. Mary's wonderful story got me thinking about my own mom and the memories I have with her. When I got married at the right

old age of 34, my mom insisted I wear this very ornate gold necklace. I'd never ever wanted to

wear it before. And I knew I'd never ever want to wear it afterwards. In fact, I didn't even want to wear that thing at my wedding. But I did because, you know, she's my mom and I guess it was her day two. I still have that necklace and it's burning a hole in my safe. And with gold prices so high right

“now, I'm really itching to sell it. Make myself something I'd really wear. But I can't for now.”

Anyway, our next story is from part of the Anant Narayan, who told this at a Los Angeles Wednesday. Here's part of the life of the mom. Are you okay, Miss? The flight attendant asks.

And I can see why he's concerned. We're six hours into a 14 hour plane ride and in all that time,

I haven't stopped crying. Great big golfing sobs like a con catcher breath. In fact, I haven't stopped crying since my sister's phone call the night before. I asked me to go on that plane. A few months, a couple of months prior, my 15-year-old son had traveled to India from the United States where we live to visit my sister, his aunt and his grandparents. A couple of weeks before he had started to feel really unwell. So some doctors visits and tests revealed that my

15-year-old son had lymphoma, he had cancer. And so I bid goodbye to my husband and my daughter back home, not knowing when I would see them again. And I boarded that plane. When the plane landed, my sister came out to meet me at the airport and right away we went to the hospital and there were further tests and further visits with the doctors and the doctors, they sat me down and they said it would not be possible or safe for my son at that moment to travel back to the

United States safely for treatment. He had two liters of fluid that surrounded his heart and so the plane journey would not be advisable. They said that he would need surgery and chemotherapy right away and they would make the call after that. The doctors, they also asked if it would be possible for my son and I to move closer to the hospital because the commute would be

“quite hard on him during treatments. I was actually overwhelmed. How is I going to get through this?”

I thought to myself, how were we going to get through this? The next week, my son and I went to look at an apartment. The apartment was on the seventh floor of a 14-story building that was next to the hospital and as we walked in, I took in the white tiled floors and the kitchen that fell a little bit too small and my son, he threw open all the doors to the closets and the rooms trying to decide which bedroom would be his and as I stood there, I thought to myself, please God,

please let this be a place of healing for us. I watched as my son slid the balcony door open in the apartment and he turned around and he looked at me and he goes, "Ma, come see!" So I go over to see what he's pointing at and I look down and down from the balcony on the grounds of this apartment complex is a great, big, beautiful, blue pool and he looks at me and he says, "Ma, it's a swimming pool.

You can finally learn how to swim." A little background here. As a child, I never really learned how to

swim. As a teenager, I tried to take lessons and I managed to make it through too. The first time, the first day, we went in and the instructor said to all of us who were there for the lessons, "Well, today I'm going to teach you how to float." Now, floating, that isn't swimming, you don't go anywhere,

and I learned how to kick my feet off the floor of the pool and keep my back perfectly straight.

My face was outside the water and I could look around, I could take a breath and I thought to myself, "Well, this isn't so bad, so I went back the next day." On the second day, the instructor said,

“"Well, today we're going to actually start learning how to swim." And to do that, you have to put”

your face inside the water. I climbed into the pool and walked over to the edge and started to put my face under the water as the instructor told us to. And I was utterly overwhelmed. Water started rushing up my nose and into my ears and my eyes open, but I couldn't see two feet in front of me. And started to panic, my feet start lifting off the floor of the pool as my head goes in and I'm

losing control and I think hell no, and I splashed out of that pool and I never went back.

So I'd never really learned how to swim and he or we were in the balcony and my son looks up at me and he says, "Ma, promise me that if we rent this apartment, that you'll go down there and swim every single day." Here he was going through what was probably the most difficult thing in his

“life and he was there taking care of me. So I looked up at him and I said, "Okay, I promise you,”

I will. I'll go to that pool every single day, but you promise me that when I look up from the pool, you'll be sitting up here at this balcony." So I can keep my eyes on you and he said, "It's a deal." So we rented this apartment and over the next few days, our routine went something like this. Every afternoon my son would say, "Ma, it's time for you to go swim." And I'd say, "Okay, I pick up my towel and I take the elevator down to the ground floor, walk out to the pool,

and put my towel aside, climb into the water. I'd kick my feet back the way I remembered how to and I'd keep my back perfectly straight and I'd train my eyes right over to that balcony. And my son would be sitting up there and he'd wave down at me and I'd wave up at him and in this way our days followed one after another until it was time for surgery. On the day of the surgery, the day before the surgery, I went to the hospital and

had to go down into a basement area where there was a counter and there was a medical assistance sitting there. And the medical assistant he handed me a clipboard of forms and he said, "You'll need these when you go and see the surgeon." So I took the forms with me and I walked into the surgeon's office and as I sat there the surgeon started to explain to me what they would have to do during the surgery. The surgeon said he would need to insert a needle into the skin around my son's heart

or the tissue around my son's heart to get the fluid out. And he said that anytime you do something like that, something invasive like putting a needle into the heart that there's a very real chance that the heart might just stop. There was a chance that my son might die. He wanted me to sign those forms to show him that I understood that these were the risks. I didn't understand. My mind went completely blank and a great fear seized me and I picked up that those forms

and shook my signature across the pages and I handed the clipboard back to him. The next day my son was wheeled in for surgery and surgery went fine. He came out fine and right away they had him going to chemotherapy. The chemotherapy ward had a series of beds and there was a chair next to each bed and while my son was there in his bed I would sit next to him and hold his hand and as the chemotherapy kind of flowed into his veins through the tubes and his arms. I'd sit there

for hours holding his hand never leaving his side. The nurses they'd fuss at me and they'd say

“you have to go eat or drink something go to the cafeteria and I resented them for this because”

the only real control I had was to be there by my son's side. I did go to the cafeteria. I'd probably ate things and drank something. I don't really quite remember. I do remember getting these small cups of milky tea that was calledingly hot and they probably burned the roof of my mouth but I gulp them down and I'd rush right back to my son's side again. A few weeks of chemotherapy treatments you know later the doctor said to us that

now was a period of waiting and watching to see if my son had responded well enough for us to

so we went back to the apartment. As we walked into the apartment I supported my son was feeling

“rather weak. We walked into his bedroom and I helped him into his bed and pulled the covers over”

him and turned over and started to close the blind so he could catch some sleep and as I turned to leave the bedroom I heard him say in a kind of quieter voice. "Muh" I turned around and he said "We're back at the apartment. It's time for you to go swim." Yes, yes I said I will. I picked up my towel and turned around and took that elevator like I had so many times before I went to the bottom floor and walked over to the pool. I placed my towel

by the side of the pool and climbed into the water I kicked my feet back and kept my back straight. My head came out of the water and my eyes trained immediately over to that balcony but my son wasn't sitting up there. Of course he's not up there I thought he's he's in bed but a great

“wave of panic and fear seemed to brush over me and the tears they started flowing out the sides of”

my eyes and back into the water and I thought to myself what if what if one day I look up at that balcony

and I never see my son again. I climbed out of that pool that day and went back upstairs to my son

and we waited a couple more weeks to see how he would do and the doctors they met us and they said he's well enough to take the flight back home. You can go back home to the United States and you know continue his treatments there. So we got on the plane to come back home and it was very nearly summer again and summer rolled around and we were invited to go to a poolside and my son and I went over and I changed into my bathing suit and as I walked out I saw him

sitting on a lounge chair by the side of the pool scrolling through his phone and I looked at him I started to climb into the water it felt really cool climbed up over my waist to my chest and turning this time I put my face under the water water started to rush up my nose and into my years I started to feel that familiar panic. I couldn't see two feet in front of me. My feet started to climb off the ground and I felt the loss of control but this time this time I kicked. I kicked

and I plunged my arms out of that pool and into the water and I propelled myself forward a few strokes later I came up sputtering and gasping and I heard loud laughter and I looked over and it was my sun sitting by the side of the pool just laughing his head off he looked at me and he said "Mau look you're doing it you're swimming thank you" That was part of the Amelth Nanayan part of the currently teaches at the University of North Carolina

School of the Arts her affiliation with the month began through the Mods Education Program and the story you just heard was published in the Mods A Point of Beauty. When we reached out to her she told us that the events of the story took place over five years ago. My son she says who is a part of the story is now wonderfully healthy and happy. I'm still a pretty bad swimmer though being in the water has slowly evolved into a nerve-wracking joy. I feel like the stuff

our children actually remember isn't the stuff we planned. It's small moments that you never

expected would be important. For instance when my daughter was younger I got a call from her third grade teacher who was moved enough to want to read me a paragraph my daughter had written in class about me going in the water. You see like poverty my I can't swim either I'm terrible at it

“I'm nervous but my daughter loves the water and the truth is I'm never going to be comfortable in the”

water and my daughter knows that because she started the paragraph off with my mom is not the outdoorsy type. In fact she's the kind of mom that will take you to Paris or to a Broadway show but not to the ocean. She's right after the break a story about motherhood, food and memory back in a moment.

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To tell me that my mom has died and it comes as a bit of a shock because two weeks ago she had been perfectly healthy and then she got diagnosed with cancer and she passed away quite quickly and grief is a funny thing because me and my mom we had a very difficult relationship. We both

“loved each other intensely and the only way that we could really show our love for each other was by”

bickering all the time by about really small things. I do what a lot of people do when they're faced with problems and I moved to another city. I leave London where I've grown up and I'm moved to Bristol to make a new home. London feels dead to me at this point because my mom is no longer there, something has changed, something with the meal, with my family and I just can't

be here anymore. The first time I walk into my new house in Bristol, the first thing I notice

is that it stinks. It's been occupied by some hippie students because it is Bristol and so

“between growing pulses by the kitchen sink and burning incense and lots and lots of cats. It smells”

like it's a house that belongs to someone else. It definitely doesn't smell like my house. I don't feel like I'm at home. I'm caught in this in between. I'm morning for my mom every single day. It feels like this heavy thing on top of me and I moved cities and I don't know

anyone and I just cannot wash the cat's shit out of the carpet and I go home to visit my dad.

It's been a year since my mom died and there's one weekend where I go to visit him. Maybe it's maybe it's because I've moved into a new space that I suddenly look at my childhood home with fresh eyes but the moment I walk into my childhood home it feels so familiar and yet it feels different because in the years since my mom has died, the house has kind of been locked in stasis. You know, there's still laundry in the basket left over from when she was alive. Her clothes

is still in the dirty clothes are still in the laundry basket. Her handbag is still at the bottom of the stairs. While it looks like my childhood home it also looks very clean. Nothing has been used. It feels like a museum like say there was a recreation of our house in the tape modern or tape bring which would be a weird thing to to see. It feels like a museum to how things used to be.

“The kitchen looks unused. The only place that kind of has any life is the lounge area where”

my dad sits and listens to Bollywood songs really loudly. I got upstairs and I'm lying on my childhood bed and something feels different this time because when I grew up my bedroom was on top of the kitchen and so I grew up with the sounds of Bollywood music and I grew up with the sounds of the pressure cooker and I grew up with the smell of onions and cumin and garlic and ginger and chilies in the air. You know my mom was a fan believer in me and my sister removing

our school uniforms every time we came home from school because she didn't want our clothes to smell like like the food that she was cooking. She said don't give the white people ammunition just wear house clothes and we respected that. But I was lying there and everything felt stale. It didn't feel like my home and I'm already feeling unstuck because Bristol doesn't feel like my home and here I am on my childhood bed and my childhood home and this doesn't feel like my home. I'm hungry

and so I go downstairs and I look in the fridge and it's empty except for cancer fosters and catch up because my dad is now a singleton and that his fridge reflects that and I open up the

think oh my god here is my mom's food. So I take out a top-aware box it's got a Honda one which is

“like this really delicious savory pancake and I put it in the microwave to defrost and I'm standing”

there waiting for it to heat up and something happens to that really stale sterile room. It starts to smell like my mom's kitchen again the spices are making the air come alive and

it feels like my home and I eat the the Honda one it's delicious as it always was and I think

I need to learn how to make this hound wall. I'm disappointed in myself because every you know you had years and years and my mom trying to get me to cook. I had years and years of my mom trying to teach me how to cook like her. When I left home she tried to get me to learn how to make basic John Amosala and Paner and stuff like that and I just I was just like well I'll just come home and get leftovers or be fine and she was like no I won't always be around and I was an idiot

and I never learned and I know that she was disappointed in that and here I am now

“ruining those decisions and I really wanted her how to make hound wall. I remember that my”

mum told me she got the recipe from Salamase. I haven't seen Salamase since my mum's funeral

so knowing that my mum's handbag is on the butt at the bottom of the stairs I go and look through the handbag to find her address books I can phone Salamase and say hey Salamase can you teach me how to make hound wall and I find a stack of papers in my mum's handbag and I open one of them and it's a shopping list you know it has things like weetabix and onions and cumin powder and chili and cheese and you know really mundane things that you get for the big shop on it

but there's something about seeing my mum's handwriting that makes me crumble and makes me feel

the heaviness crush over me again because seeing that ink on the page you know that ink

came from a pen that was connected to a finger that was connected to our arms that was arm that was connected to a brain and seeing a handwriting and smelling at her foot the smell of her food still lingering in the air it feels like she's a real person you know when when someone dies and you romanticise them they become the really good things and they're really bad things that used to wind you up and you forget about the really mundane things like

when they wrote shopping lists or when they made hound wall and I take one of those shopping lists home I phone Salamase I get the recipe and what when I get back to Bristol I decide I'm going to do this shop I'm going to do my mum's big shop which is silly because we already have cheese and we already have wheat of bakes but I feel like I need to do this so I go to the shop and I buy all the things that are on the list making sure they also add in things that I need to make

hound wall and I go home and I'm looking at Salamase's instructions to make hound wall and I think God I really wish I knew how to cook okay let's do this it just

“says mix all this stuff up in a bowl I can do that so I get everything out because that's how”

I cook you cook when you don't know how to cook you get everything out so you can stare at it everything in a bowl and I'm following the instructions very robotically and the last thing you have to do is temper some sesame seeds and mustard seeds and cumin seeds together so I Google temper I then Google temper cooking and I for some reason I decided to get a big frying pan out to temper these sesame seeds and mustard seeds and cumin seeds and I

so I put the pan on and I like the hob and let it do what it's doing I get distracted putting the mixture out into a baking tray and I don't notice that I've been tempering a bit too long and the pan is smoking the smoke alarm starts to go off and I panic I don't want to do I don't do I turn the hob off the way what do I do so I I gravity towel and I'm between the smoke alarm trying to wave the smoke away from the smoke alarm and I'm and the hob trying to wave the smoke away

from the hob and the tea towel catches fire because I'm an idiot and now I've got a tea towel

so I open the back door because that seems like a sensible thing to do I open the back door I

“throw the tea towel out onto the into the garden I turn off the hob and I take the pan out”

take the pan off the hob and I run outside and I leave on the ground outside making sure I don't stand on the smoldering tea towel then find another tea towel and I try and wave the smoke

away from the smoke alarm and I'm really just a year and a bit grief just suddenly crashes over me

my mum is gone she won't be able to show me how to cook this stuff I can't follow simple recipes

“and she's gone and her food is gone and I'm not sure how I'm gonna honour her in this new home”

and so I sit down on the middle of the kitchen floor and I cry the smoke alarm is still going on

and I look up because there's a smell in the air and somewhere amidst the smell of smoke

and burnt sesame seeds and mustard seeds and cumin seeds there is also the smell of onions and garlic and ginger and chili and my house smells like my mum's kitchen

“and for a second just for a second it starts to feel like home thank you”

that was Nikkei's chocolate Nikkei's is the author of three novels as well as editor of a recent collection of essays about race and immigration called the Good Immigrant Nikkei's story really brings home the point that food can bring us closer to the people we love even when they can't actually be with us that brings us to the end of our episode thanks so much for joining us and if you can don't forget to give your mom a call

Emmy nominated Padma Lakshmi is internationally known as a writer entrepreneur and food expert she's currently host and judge for America's culinary cup and is the author of Padma's All America Mary Mack story was directed by Michelle Jolowski. Parvathi an unskneurian story was directed by Chloe Saman Nikkei's Shukla's story was directed by Mack Bowls, additional audio mixing by Davy Sumner. This episode of The Muff podcast was produced by Sarah

Austin Genes, Sarah Jane Johnson and me, Mark Salinger. The rest of the most leadership team includes Gina Duncan, Christina Norman, Marina Cluchay, Jennifer Hickson, Jordan Cardinalae, Caledonia Karen's, Kate Tellers, Susanne Rest and Patricia Orenya. The Muff podcast is presented by Odyssey, special thanks to their executive producer Leah Ries Dennis. All Muff stories are true as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast information on pitching your own

story and everything else, go to our website themoth.org