Pouring Perfectly Good Coffee Down the Sink

Parenting philosophies from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

I made it a point to not read a ton of parenting books when I became pregnant with my first child. I’m prone to anxiety, and I didn’t want to overwhelm myself with extra things to worry about. I had a few trusted online resources I turned to for specific questions, and I read What to Expect and The Whole-Brain Child, but for the most part I steered clear of books that promised to make me a better mom in thirty-six easy steps.

Despite my avoidance of self-help parenting books, I’ve been an avid reader my whole life, and as I thought about what kind of parent I wanted to be, a few principles from my favorite novels came to mind. In particular, I found myself thinking a lot about the first chapter from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as I was navigating the first toddler years.

Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story about Francie Nolan, an Irish-American girl growing up in New York City around the turn of the twentieth century. The Nolan children meet the reader while selling junk to the rag man for a few cents, wholly unsupervised (it’s 1912, after all.) They live in a tenement where their mother Katie is a janitress. Before Katie goes out to work every day, she makes a big pot of black coffee, strengthened with “a lump of chicory” and lets the children help themselves to it throughout the day. At mealtimes Katie serves up the coffee, reheated and stronger than before, with condensed milk. “Francie loved coffee but seldom drank it,” the narrator tells us in chapter one. Instead, she enjoys the smell and the warmth; “from time to time, she’d smell the bitter sweetness of it. That was better than drinking it. At the end of the meal, it went down the sink.”

Katie’s two sisters, opinionated as sisters always are, like to lecture Katie about waste. Who can afford to throw coffee down the sink? Certainly not the Nolans. But this is how Katie sees it:

“Francie is entitled to one cup each meal like the rest. If it makes her feel better to throw it away rather than to drink it, all right.”

I’ve come back to this idea many times as I’ve been working my way through five years of picky eating. My oldest son struggled with milk at first, necessitating many anxious weight checks at the pediatrician and a growth percentile that remained stubbornly in the single digits. I combo-fed him, nursing and pumping and giving formula before bed, and untold ounces of breast milk and formula went down the drain after sitting too long in a half-drunk bottle. It hurt– financially, for the wasted formula (which isn’t cheap), and physically for the mastitis I ended up getting when he was four months old. When this phase ended and he began table food, I kept a careful list of the foods he had tried. You’re supposed to offer one hundred by the baby’s first birthday. (Did Francie Nolan taste one hundred different foods in her whole first decade?) I entered each one in my notes app– sweet potatoes yes, avocado yes, peas no (he spat them), peaches no (he threw them), bananas maybe (he threw those too but he didn’t cry while doing it). I wiped countless splats of puree off the floor, did my own throwing of half-gnawed strawberries during the brief dabble with baby-led weaning (didn’t work for us, I was too nervous).

We weren’t dirt poor like the Nolans– in comparison, our centrally heated and air conditioned townhome would have been opulence to them– but we had a tight grocery budget in those days and we still do today. I tried to get creative, offering only tiny dabs of food at a time and keeping the rest back for later, scrupulous about keeping any food marred with saliva from breeding bacteria in the fridge.

Then I had my second baby, and most of the scrupulosity went out the window. I reheated foods from time to time with a little less angst, but I cleaned up the floor with a lot more. My younger son is a gleeful thrower, a mess-maker who creates for the sheer love of art and not to express any real distaste with the meal offered. Blueberries, mashed into a pulp– trash. Noodles shoved beneath the high chair seat– trash.

Over and over, I have had to remind myself: my children are lucky. They are safe. They are fed. Yes, if they waste an entire avocado then that’s it until the next time I go shopping. I can’t run to the store every day to get their favorites. But they have nourishment. I am not, like Katie Nolan, mashing stale bread into a pulp and baking it in the oven with minced onion and ketchup. We have nutritious food in abundance, and if we have to throw out some that didn’t get eaten– well, I bought it and prepared it for them, didn’t I? They are entitled to do with it as they please. Picky eating ends eventually, and a few table rules about trying a new thing before demanding dessert will not harm anyone.

I’ve also had to remind myself not to get hung up on the fact that one portion went down the sink– if my baby was hungry later, I’d make him more food. We’re reaching the age with my preschooler now where he can’t simply ignore food at mealtimes and then request that I make something else an hour later, but a few base staples like crackers, fruit and cheese are almost always available. We may not be wealthy, but we are lucky enough to have a fridge and pantry full. So what if half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich gets wasted?

Katie Nolan’s defense of Francie’s poured-out milk and coffee ended with this:

“I think it’s good that people like us can waste something once in a while and get the feeling of how it would be to have lots of money and not worry about scrounging.”

This queer point of view satisfied mama and pleased Francie. It was one of the links between the ground-down poor and the wasteful rich. The girl felt that even if she had less than anybody in Williamsburg, somehow she had more. She was richer because she had something to waste. She ate her sugar bun slowly, reluctant to have done with its sweet taste, while the coffee got ice-cold. Regally, she poured it down the sink drain feeling casually extravagant. After that, she was ready to go to Losher’s for the family’s semi-weekly supply of stale bread.

Sometimes when I am worried about money, paying bills and saying no to invitations, I think about Katie Nolan and how hard she scrounged for her children. She gave them the gift of creativity, of moments of abundance and the feeling of decadence. It wasn't a thing or a cup of coffee or a “core memory” as the Instagram influencers are so fond of touting so much as it was a place of softness and indulgence, gentleness and grace in a world that was going to be very hard on them.

This early vignette in the novel speaks to the rest of Francie’s story: grinding poverty, yes, but a mother who thought deeply about things and tried her best to give her children everything she could. Francie would remember the deprivations of her childhood but she would remember them in the light of her mother’s safety and understanding.

That’s what I want to give my kids: a warm memory of childhood, indistinct and vague though it may be, of things to eat on the table and a mother who loved them so much she couldn’t breathe for it sometimes. Perhaps they will remember a perpetually sticky floor under the dining table, too; so be it.

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