It's Not Just A Sauce
It's been a while since I've written here, and that's because I write most of my work on Patreon.
My intention in 2022 is to give you all a little sampling of what I'm creating in Patreon each month, and if you feel so inclined to support me and my work, I would greatly appreciate you considering joining.
But I'll talk more about why I love the platform of Patreon another day. Today, I want to share with you a piece that spilled through my fingers while journaling this morning called, It's Not Just a Sauce.
I should preface by saying yesterday meant a great deal to me. One of my most cherished moments in this lifetime I think. I think this entry explains, to the best of my ability, why.
10/3/21 - Journal Entry
Yesterday, mom taught me to make the family pasta sauce. We call it sugo, because I don't know, that's just what we've always called it.
I wish I could tell you that's what they properly call it in Italy, but aside from said sugo recipe, a collection of other recipes, a few furniture items, and some phrases mumbled enough times to commit it to memory, not much was passed down.
So this sugo, is not just a sauce, it's more.
It's heritage. Ancestry. Honor. Legacy.
It's a rite of passage.
It's my mom and her mother and her mother's mother and beyond.
Someone on Tiktok pointed out that last names come from the father so therefore, womxn don't really have a last name.
It's not just a sauce.
Its ingredients carry the energy of life.
It's a name with no letters.
It's a medicine.
A memory.
A story.
Lore.
It's a symbol of connection.
While we might not, as womxn have a last name of our own, we have something unchangeable; a bond to the earth, whose breath gave us life.
Her language is woven into recipes and memories and celebrated on tongues.
Her language connects us to abundance, bounty, gratitude, and honor.
Her language teaches us how to respect the body of a mother.
Perhaps we need not a mother's last name because we needn't identify with that which we inherently are.
I am Jenna, I am human.
The identity is spoken in recipes you cannot measure, taught by listening to words not heard by the ear but by the heart; instinct passed through the belly; the language of a body.
It's written, the way a tree writes its story through rings inside its trunks.
It's in our DNA like seeds that live in the fruit of a tomato that grows on a vine.
It's not just a sauce.
It's a reminder that I am never lost and neither are you, because how can one be lost when their body is a child held in the womb that is the belly of this earth?
Just as a recipe is passed on so is the reminder of our connection to strength and a level of resilience only a womxn could know.
We don't have a last name of our own because those names were created by man to draw lines in sands and justify swords in stomachs of their brothers.
It's not just a sauce.
It's an invisible, unbreakable thread that reminds me that I am a woman, gifted life from something immortal and birthed through the precious chalice of mortality. Entrusted with remembering who I am, where I come from, and what I am to do. To remember who we are. Who we truly are.
It is my bond, my belonging, my treasure to protect.
It's not just a sauce, it's my last name.
xx
J