Founder's Circle
My daughter Aanika graduates next week. She’s 22.
She was also our harshest critic when Fred and I started making cheese in our kitchen. The first taste tester. She told us, plainly, when something was off. She helped us tweak the recipes you eat now. The notes you taste, she pushed for those.
I’ve been thinking about that this week, with Mother’s Day coming. The version of Rebel Cheese that exists today exists partly because she didn’t let us settle.
She also has Obie.
Obie is a mix we rescued eight years ago. Heartworm. Arthritis. The vet said weeks, maybe a couple months. He’s still here. He can barely walk now and he coughs a lot, and Aanika gets up early and takes care of him in a way I had to watch to understand. She knew what he needed before he did. That’s the only word for what she does for him: mothering.
Watching her with Obie is part of how I learned mothering isn’t biology.
I had stepmoms growing up. I had friends’ moms who put me up when I was waiting to ship out to the Navy and didn’t have anywhere else to go. They fed me, gave me a bed, helped me find work. None of them had to.
There was also Sarge, a black pug. He came before any of this, when it was still Fred and me figuring out what we were going to do with our lives. He’s the reason we couldn’t keep eating animals once we’d understood what that meant. A lot of the reasons Rebel Cheese exists trace back to him.
Mother’s Day is a lot of things at once. It’s celebration, and it’s grief. People I love have lost their moms. People I love can’t have kids and wanted to. People I love have hard, complicated mothers and have to figure out what to do with this weekend.
If today is hard for you, for any of those reasons, I see you. I’ve been you for some of them.
If you have a mother figure in your life who isn’t your mother, hit reply on the email and tell me about her. I’d love to hear.
Happy Mother’s Day, in all its forms,
KirstenCo-founder, Rebel Cheese
Aanika and Obie.
Me and Sarge.
