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.
Nate continued to care for me after his parents drove back home. He is a nurturer, like them. Dinner was some version of our gifted marinara with pasta at least once a week. I’d finish nursing Isla for the ninth time that day, then tuck into a bowl of garlicky sauce over linguini. While editing a novel on deadline and caring for a newborn, I’d demolish parboiled ravioli topped with the Romas, rich and slightly caramelized from their slow-roasting. I was nourished and comforted, cheered by the vivid red, even on days I was so stressed I barely registered what was on my plate.
As weeks passed and our energy restored bit by bit, the sauce became a base: for pantry puttanesca—with anchovies, capers, olives, and red pepper flakes, heaped with Parmesan. My taste buds and cravings lit up again. I wanted the sauce as Bolognese, and Nate—my favorite cook—obliged, finding all we needed in the fridge, browning a leftover turkey burger, sautéing onions and carrots and celery, the homey smell of the dish wafting through the house.
When Isla was three months old, she laughed for the first time. I turned in the finished draft of my book. Nate’s paternity leave ended. One night I puttered down to the kitchen, boiled water, and simmered the last of our sauce while Isla looked on from her bouncer. I couldn’t wait to travel to Livonia for the holidays, introducing Isla to the ease and warmth of the Malinowski clan, a gaggle of cousins in matching PJs from Grandma Karen. In Wayne’s greenhouse—where tomato seedings unfurled each spring—we’d gather for Christmas dinner, the trusses wound with twinkle lights and the long table laid with votives. In the middle of the cold dark field, the greenhouse would glow.
But for now, I rinsed the jar clean and read Karen’s final note aloud to Isla: “Your beautiful, loving Mama…her love for you is fierce and forever.”
