• My father comes in and out of my life because we have a complicated relationship.
• But ever since I was 6, we’ve always connected in the kitchen. 
• He rarely comes around anymore, but I see him in the way my kids love eating and cooking.

My father taught me everything I know about garlic: how to set the side of a knife down on a clove, how to press down with the bottom of your palm to crush, and how to simultaneously remove its papery skin, as well as how the flavor of it intensifies as it’s minced. He taught me how to sear a steak and when to pull shrimp from the heat.

He also taught me that dads can break your heart.

My father and I first connected in the kitchen

My father eats with gusto. I imagine I acquired this same excitement for food from him, the same way I got a mouth that’s a perfect split between his and my mother’s.

I didn’t know most of that until I was 6 years old, which was when my father started coming around more regularly. Before that, he was around inconsistently because my parents were very young and unmarried.

I also learned that he wasn’t a classically trained chef but that he had experience working in kitchens. I got to witness him in action on occasion when he did a stint at a local Italian restaurant.

My mother would take me to visit, setting me at eye level with the checkered tablecloth, while my father set down a plate of pasta. While it felt like we were strangers, food was a bridge — a welcomed thing to take up the space between us as we worked wordlessly alongside each other as I stood in a chair at the counter.

While he didn’t understand my tender heart and highly sensitive emotions, he showed me the tenderest parts of a crab. As I grew up, I felt closest to my father while in the kitchen with him. I started to lose faith in my father, knowing our moments of connectedness were fleeting, so while we fried spring rolls on a chilly evening in October, the crackling of rice paper filling the silence, I made sure to catalog those moments in parts of my body that I could visit once he was gone again.

Our relationship was always touch and go, but it most recently cracked when I was in my 30s

When I started dating my then-fiancé in my early 30s, it became overwhelmingly clear just how different my father’s beliefs and values were from mine.

When I was eight months pregnant, I told my dad he couldn’t contact me anymore, bringing me to tears. I then snapped a photo of myself crying. In it, my eyes are bloodshot, and mascara streaks down my cheeks and creates little pools of squid ink near the corners of my mouth. I took that photo after having to once again put a protective barrier around myself, and now my baby.

I took the photo as a reminder to myself to avoid contact with him whenever I felt pulled to, whenever biology pulled us together. I succeeded and honored my boundaries, but I still missed him. Sometimes, I found myself in the kitchen, doing my best to recreate his red sauce, which is slick with fat from the pork and always a little spicy.

I welcomed him back into my life when my daughter was born

My father didn’t meet my daughter until she was 3 months old. He started to come around with some consistency.

He softened around her and fed her bottles, while I took the opportunity to feed myself. He loved her in a way I understood he wasn’t ever quite capable of loving me.

This has made the most sense to me after becoming a mother. My father isn’t just my dad but also a human with his own history and complexities. I do believe that most of the time as parents, we do the best we can.

There is a photo of my father and my firstborn sitting at a metal table in a subterranean gem of a Chinese restaurant in New York City. They are eating hand-pulled noodles off paper plates, a long noddle dangling from my then-2-year-old’s pursed lips, and him with his chile-oil-stained chopsticks hovered, reaching for another dumpling, a look of contentment on his face.

That photo reminds me that I had let my guard down again — for just long enough to bear witness to two pieces of myself reveling in a meal together. It’s another memory that I keep inside the soft place in my heart.

These days, my relationship with my father is still complicated

My oldest is now 7 and my youngest is 3. Both of them have been fed by my father and watched him and me dance around each other in the kitchen.

But these days, he isn’t around regularly. My kids ask about their Pop Pop, and I do my best to explain his absence and why it’s necessary.

I keep his physical and emotional self out of our lives, but I find him in my youngest’s affinity for snacking, my oldest’s expressive eating, and in the kitchen with us while I teach them to peel garlic.