I didn’t plan on a summer hiatus but that’s just what happened these last two months. We moved and then the next day flew to Ireland to visit family for 14 days. Now we are settling in to our new home and are, bit by bit, falling into the rhythms of daily life.

Returning to the news of two mass shootings sent me into a deep despair. Along with the rest of the country. Nothing I could imagine writing or saying feels meaningful on this subject anymore. As Jia Tolentino has written much about lately, whatever we say online must only be the first step in activism and not the political action within itself. We are all in this together - the panic, the paralysis, the sadness, and the fury. We seem to be in a perpetual state of national tragedy and I don’t want to get used to it.

We take on so much and most of us do it with grace. Getting on with life in the form of eating pizza, registering for summer camps, chatting about tv shows. But seeing our reality through the incredulous eyes of family and friends in Ireland was a reminder that we do not have it easy over here. We have daily anxieties that other parents find unfathomable (healthcare costs? Mass shootings? WTF). It was exhausting. And I was trying to be on vacation.

As my emotional self is still 2,749 miles due east I thought I would repost a contribution I made to Women of Sustenance. It is my Nana’s recipes for brown bread. What I miss most about my life in Ireland is being surrounded by so much history, my own personal history and the history of humankind. We visit with cousins and then Neolithic tombs.

So here it is… just to keep me going until I’m fully settled into the comfortable patterns of daily life…

With our second child came a wave of glorious relief. We were all done. I couldn’t believe we had been so lucky. Leading up to the birth it seemed improbable and audacious to expect not one, but two relatively healthy children. But here we were, at home, settling in, and this second baby was still sleepy and cuddly. My husband was home for two months after the baby was born, but with his first work trip came the departure of our quiet newborn and the introduction of a proper little person. He was slowly opening up to the world and was a lot less easy to ignore. Our toddler was not having it. 

Parenting for me (and maybe for you) is all about intense highs and lows, often within the span of an hour. In one instant, Enda and I would be playing or reading intently, I blink and Shay is screaming, Enda needs help on the potty, and what was moments before a peaceful household is now chaos. I would find myself wondering, “What were we thinking? Two kids? That’s crazy. Breastfeeding while playing legos? The worst.” I would breastfeed as discreetly as possible (“Oh this little thing here? It’s nothing!”) for fear of disrupting the flow of play with my toddler. Poor little Shay. All I wanted to do was crawl into bed and cuddle with this new person I was getting to know. But in reality I was completely focused on making things feel normal for my three year old.

When in doubt there is one thing that never fails to make me feel restored, as a mother and a person: baking bread. And this 4 ingredient recipe can be done in 15 minutes. Surely I can bounce a baby and distract a toddler for 15 minutes! 

My mother grew up in a large stone house built in the late 1700’s in Northern Ireland. The kitchen contained no modern conveniences (they didn’t have electricity until she was 7), a flagstone floor, and a heavy wooden latched door that led to the yard. It was in this kitchen that my Nana, every other day, would bake loaves of bread to sustain her brood of 6 children, a constant stream of patients waiting in my Grandfather’s surgery, and the inevitable neighbor or two just “popping in”.

In this tradition, I make her simple and delicious brown bread and think of all the women before me who nourished their families with the same love in the face of chaos. 

Nana’s brown bread

This recipe calls for buttermilk, which I make myself by adding lemon juice to milk. I usually pour the lemon juice into 2 cups of milk while stirring and then leave it until it curdles (this does not take very long but I do it about an hour before I plan to make the bread). 

3 cups of flour 

1 teaspoon of baking soda

Pinch of salt

Mix in buttermilk slowly from the center

Make sure there are no pockets of flour but maintain the lumps

If I have them handy, I replace one cup of flower with a mixture of flax and oatmeal.

In buttered and floured pan spoon in the batter

Pat the center so it dips a bit

Drizzle buttermilk over top

Bake 10 minutes at 400 degrees

Bake 50 minutes at 350 degrees

Aoife Nugent worked in film production and then arts management after receiving a masters degree from Pratt Institute. She and her family moved to Portland, Maine two years ago from Brooklyn. NY. She is currently staying home with her two boys, 5 months and 3 years old. She writes the blog www.nowthebeyond.com for and about parents with partners who travel.