Words by Andrea Goto
Photography by Chia Chong
Styling by Libbie Summers
Model: Anna Heritage
Dad’s shift work at the tissue mill dictated what Mom cooked for dinner. Graveyard called for some form of casserole, day shift meant spaghetti, and swing shift—the only time Dad wasn’t home for dinner—Mom served lamb chops.
For some reason I never saw the chops go under the broiler, but they always came out the same: sizzling, shrunken, gray and greasy. A visible layer of oily film coated the kitchen. The smoky-meat smell lingered in my hair well into breakfast. At the dinner table, Mom would devour her chops, humming with delight, bits of charcoal embedded in her lipstick. My sister would shove her pinky finger through the center of crosscut bones, lapping out the marrow like the frosting from a Twinkie. I tolerated the piece that lie before me only because it was our unofficial “girls’ night dinner”—cause for celebration.
Dad didn’t eat lamb. Wouldn’t touch the stuff. This made our girls’ dinner seem even more subversive. It was, after all, one of the few times we wouldn’t listen to Dad complain about the temperature of his plate (he insisted it be preheated) or offer the same sage advice to every problem we ever encountered: “Tell ‘em to screw off, that’s what I’d do.” He was old school—the head of our home and the hearth. His 6’3” frame loomed over the table. He held court with a Budweiser in one massive hand and a fork in the other, dictating when we would eat, when we would talk, and when we would be excused from the table.
When Dad was at the mill, dinners were more relaxed. My sister and I laughed, burped and farted in spite of Mom’s futile protests, as she wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. We helped ourselves to seconds and left food on our plates without recourse. We talked about boys, fashion and Dad. And we ate lots of lamb.
It took me years to admit that the sound of slurping marrow made me dizzy, and the smell of broiled meat caused my mouth to fill with warm saliva. I took me years to admit that I didn’t like lamb.
I desperately wanted to be “one of the girls”—united with the females in my family by way of this sacred meal. But at some point, the ability to say what you like, what you want, and what you expect, was more attractive. The patriarchy beckoned. And so I pushed the plate of lamb away and figuratively scooted my chair closer to Dad.
Dad and I bonded over more things the older I got—we enjoyed watching sports, working out, manual labor, and shared the insufferable need to be right all the time and to have the last word. But not too long ago, Dad defected. He came around to lamb when he inadvertently sampled a roasted leg in a rosemary marinade. He told me I should try it. He told me that I’d love it.
I looked him in the eye, my feet firmly planted on the solid, unmoving ground on which he taught me to stand, and I refused—making me the new black sheep of the family.
Didn’t you love that story? We’d like to reintroduce you to one of our regular contributors…(drum roll)…Andrea Goto!
Andrea Goto teaches writing at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work in journalism, humor writing and memoir, reflects her fascination by the strange, messy beauty of real life and the people she encounters along the way. She is the associate editor at Savannah Magazine and a regular contributor to ModernMom.com. You can also follow Andrea and her parenting (mis)adventures on her blog, Mom Without Makeup. She currently lives in Savannah, Georgia, with a sack-lunch obsessed daughter, a husband who subsists entirely on processed food and a cat in the early stages of kidney failure.
