Baking Kept Me Sane During Those First Few Years of Motherhood

I was standing at the counter, my back turned to my baby in her bouncy seat, trying to do what any new mother will tell you is impossible: finish a single task. I just needed to get the banana bread into the pan before the baby’s mild fussing turned into all-out wails and I was forced to abandon the bowl of raw batter.

Still in my pajamas and already covered in flour, I picked up a slim packet of something called Backpulver that I had picked up in the supermarket near our flat in Vienna. Was it baking soda? Baking powder? Neither? I didn’t have a clue, but I threw it into the batter, dug the wooden spoon back in for another swirl, and got the whole thing into our tiny European oven just as the baby started to scream.

I picked her up. We waited, together, for the bread to rise, for its glorious smell to fill our little flat.

Our Favorite Banana Bread

Before becoming a mother, the idea that I’d call myself a baker was as likely as calling myself a climate scientist. I was a writer, a teacher. I barely cooked, let alone baked (or even, let’s be honest, made my own coffee). But sometime in the first few months of my daughter’s life, I turned to it as a kind of salvation. Mixing butter and sugar and salt—the simplicity and straightforwardness of it—brought me tremendous, unexpected comfort, a calm I couldn’t find elsewhere.

It wasn't only new motherhood that had me craving comfort. In the year before my daughter was born, I moved with my new husband from Brooklyn, where I had lived for 12 years, to Vienna, Austria, for his job. I spoke no German, had no friends. I had a teaching job, but I dreaded every moment of it. I got pregnant within a month of our arrival, so my first year was spent in various states of nausea and discomfort (physical, cultural, linguistic).

Once the baby arrived, I felt lost on an almost existential scale. Nothing anchored me to any prior reality: not old friends or a job to return to, not a familiar neighborhood or relatives nearby. Not even my mother tongue. If the baby spiked a fever, could I make myself understood by the pediatrician’s secretary over the phone? If I needed to fill a prescription, could I communicate with the pharmacist? (Apparently all my fears were medical.) Even going out to dinner—or the grocery store: see Backpulver—meant facing a menu full of unfamiliar food in a foreign language.

And there was more. What I quickly discovered, as all new mothers do, is that motherhood is a sometimes torturous loop of tasks that never end: the nursing and changing and rocking and pushing of the stroller and nightly wake-ups. It is a blur of hours that bleed into each other until you’ve lost all track of day or night. Just getting out of the house can feel impossible. Nothing, but nothing, is ever finished.

But baking, that I could do. Unlike making dinner or doing the laundry or going grocery shopping, baking was not a chore. It was not obligatory. It was a choice. It was something—unlike writing—that someone who hadn't slept much could succeed at and (bonus!) even do without leaving the house. Plus, the act itself could occupy an entire, long wintry afternoon. For this was the thing, wasn’t it, about early motherhood? How to occupy all those hours? My daughter and I visited the swings and the sandpit; we schlepped to the zoo, the insectarium, the museums; we went to playdates. But still there was more time to fill.

We had one of those minuscule European kitchens that would not accommodate more than one person at a time, so in those first few months I put my daughter in her bouncy chair on the floor at the lip of the doorway while I worked. Although I moved quickly (how long could she sit there happily?), it felt relatively peaceful, meditative, these brief moments to myself, my back turned to my baby, hands immersed in a bowl.

And baking gave me such a sense of accomplishment. In one afternoon, a banana bread could be finished and warm the entire flat. Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies could come out round and perfect, or even wobbly and oval, and still taste delicious with a cup of Earl Grey tea. They could be dispensed on the playground to moans of satisfaction and gratitude. They could be eaten as a reward for dealing with a baby who hadn’t slept through the night in weeks. Once sitting on the counter, they could be shoved into my mouth without any prep, or even a plate. These treats were almost all, I should admit, my mother’s old recipes, so it was also a way to hold onto a little piece of home.

Salted-Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

In retrospect, it seems obvious that baking would be a source of comfort. There were so few instructions for motherhood—or maybe there were too many, and all too contradictory—but a recipe could be followed, step by boring step. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Then add flour, baking powder, salt. Someone else was telling me what to do and I was almost guaranteed that it would work (unlike with, say, sleep training). Bake at 350 for 50-60 minutes. Yes, yes, I could do this, even if I had to convert fahrenheit into celsius. No, I didn’t need to question it, or second-guess myself.

I could turn on the timer. I could hear it tick away the minutes. I would know something delicious was coming our way. Something that proved we were doing more—so much more—than just surviving.