There are certain Pakistani foods I only eat when I visit my parents in Texas.

That’s mostly because I don’t have the patience or skill to cook like my mom. She’s among those who have a gift of creating meals without a recipe that turn out masterfully. Food is her love language. I grew up with meals and desserts that took considerable time and effort to prepare.

She also taught me from a young age how to handle a hot pan, saute onions, prep meat and vegetables and season with a multitude of spices. It gave me a foundation for how to feed myself, and later, my family and friends. This is a skill I had largely ignored passing down to my own children. They are busier with school and activities than I was at their age. We eat more convenience foods since both my husband and I work. Rushed meals were a hallmark of pre-pandemic life.

The pandemic-induced slowdown in all our lives presented an opportunity to correct this oversight. I wanted my children, now teenagers, to learn kitchen skills beyond ramen, boxes of macaroni and brownie mix. Like so many other parents, I was sick of eating my own cooking and tired of thinking about what to make for dinner. And I was curious to see what they would come up with when tasked with this responsibility.

Lo and behold, they rose to the occasion. My son made beef short ribs in the slow cooker. He pulled off a perfect lasagna. He grilled burgers, made tacos and chicken wings. Even his humble grilled cheese sandwiches got an upgrade with French bread and four different types of cheese. 

Unsurprisingly, he gravitated toward making the foods a teenage boy would want to eat.

My daughter also stayed in her comfort zone. She started making cookies and cobblers from scratch instead of a mix, experimented with more shakes and smoothies and leveled up the snack food options in the house. She also made kabobs and a brisket.

Part of me was delighted with each new thing they turned out of the kitchen. But I also couldn’t help but notice how different their meal selections were from the curries and rice I had first learned to make.

Food is a big part of Pakistani culture, and I wanted to share this part of our heritage with them.

I pulled out a book in which I had written some of my mom’s recipes. Most don’t include specifics -- like measurements or times. She cooks from instinct and years of muscle memory. I had coaxed lists of ingredients from her and vague directions aided by years of watching her. But it had been a while since I attempted one of these dishes. I asked my son if he wanted to learn to make shaljum gosht -- a Kashmiri curry with turnips and goat meat that cooks for hours.

It’s one of my mom’s specialties.

He was game, so we got to work -- peeling large purple turnips, mincing ginger and garlic and cleaning bits of fat off the meat. I guesstimated the spices and instructed him on how to vigorously stir the pot while the meat browned. The smell of the simmering stew made me homesick in a way that was hard to put into words.

Because of the pandemic, we haven’t visited my parents since December. This is the longest I’ve gone in my life without seeing them. I’m hardly alone in this forced distancing.

I texted my family photos as my son stood in front of the bubbling pot on the stove. Everyone texted their encouragement.

My mom responded to him, “So proud of you. Can’t wait to come to St. Louis, so you and your sister can cook for me. That will be my real vacation.”

We can’t wait for that day, either, Mom.

I took a bite of the dish my son and I had made together.

It tasted like home.

If a 15-year-old girl told a teacher she suffered years of trauma and abuse and wanted to be emancipated from her parents, the teacher would have to seriously consider calling the state child abuse hotline to investigate the claims.

But if a young teenager confessed this to 458,000 strangers on Twitter, what happens to her?

Claudia Conway, the daughter of Kellyanne Conway, longtime senior adviser to the president, has made headlines for her social media posts criticizing her parents and calling out her mother’s political activity. Recently, her fairly typical teenage rebellion crossed into public cries for help.

Less than a day after Claudia posted about anguish online, her mother said she would leave her job at the White House by the end of the month, and her father, an outspoken critic of the administration, also announced a hiatus from Twitter and his political work. We can only imagine how horrible it must be for a teenager to try to navigate the public psychodrama of the Conway household. Her father has denounced her mother’s employer as evil, while her mother defends him as a savior.

Imagine trying to sort that out at 15. That’s an age when children are developmentally questioning what parents say, testing boundaries and building their own identities. The Conways are hardly alone in their political divisions. Relationships across the country have been strained or torn apart since the last presidential election. In the wake of our country’s polarization, couples have divorced, family members have been disowned and old friends defriended. People are experiencing real pain from the fallout.

The two months leading up to the next election are going to be particularly bad. Perhaps Claudia sensed that. She wrote that she was devastated that her mother was going to speak at the Republican National Convention and that her mother’s job had ruined her life.

Teenage emotions are intense and overwhelming. It’s painful to see a child unravel on social media. Her posts again raise the question of what our collective responsibility is when we witness such pleas. Her generation defaults to sharing vulnerability online. But when a child alleges abuse in such a public forum, how should responsible adults react?

Some people, especially those who agreed with Claudia’s political criticisms, tried to offer supportive messages. There are adolescents who may feel temporarily validated by a flood of encouragement from thousands of strangers on the internet. But that momentary relief is not going to solve underlying dysfunction or mental health issues within a family.

For me, Claudia’s most heartbreaking post was after she wrote about wanting emancipation and shared how she has suffered because of her mother’s job.

The next day she asked: “Why am I trending on Twitter right now?”

Her question revealed the innocence and naivete that even extremely online children have. Given her family’s proximity to power, their interpersonal conflict has been the subject of public fascination for years, especially in an age when personal drama is packaged and sold as spectacle.

Perhaps that commodification emboldened online zealots like Carmine Sabia, a self-described “conservative Christian” who tweeted to his 68,000 followers in response to Claudia’s posts. “Claudia Conway is an attention whore and she and her dad should be ashamed of what they have done to their family because of their selfishness,” he wrote.

A grown man publicly calling a 15-year-old girl a sexualized slur is vile. He’s projecting his own need for relevancy and attention onto a troubled child. And trying to score political points while doing it.

This kind of vicious reaction by the extreme right ought to serve as a wake-up call to Kellyanne: The movement she’s helped build is more than ready to eat its own children -- hers included.

I walked through Bellefontaine cemetery in St. Louis last week on a tour of the women troublemakers buried there.

The “good trouble” kind, as the late Rep. John Lewis would describe them.

A wreath-laying ceremony brought me to the cemetery, as members of the National Women’s Political Caucus of St. Louis honored suffragist Virginia Louisa Minor.

Most people know about the history-making case of Dred and Harriet Scott suing for their freedom from the man who enslaved them. But there was another historic decision that came out of the St. Louis Courthouse.

In 1872, Minor tried to register to vote in an upcoming election. As expected, the registrar in St. Louis refused to let her because she was a woman. Minor and her husband filed a civil suit, which eventually made it to the Supreme Court. They argued that the Constitution granted women citizenship, which also included the right to vote. The High Court disagreed.

The suffragists took that defeat in the legal system and shifted course to focus on legislative change. It took decades of fighting before America ratified the 19th Amendment, which said citizens could not be denied the vote on the basis of sex.

That happened 100 years ago this month. Of course, the men in power still found ways to stop women and people of color from voting -- poll taxes, intimidation and other suppression tactics.

It may seem like a long time ago, especially to girls and young women today. But it wasn’t that long ago at all. There are tens of thousands American women alive today for whom it was illegal to vote in their lifetime. It was just 55 years ago that the Voting Rights Act really opened the doors for people who had been shut out from participating in our democracy.

For girls who have grown up with vast educational opportunities and career possibilities, this recent history should help explain why there’s still a persistent, significant wage gap between women and men in this country, why America is the only industrialized country that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave, and why our country has never been able to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.

It wasn’t that long ago that women weren’t even considered worthy of the vote.

There has been a festive note to commemorations of the 19th Amendment anniversary, and that was the mood at the ceremony I attended, too. Obviously, there’s been progress.

In the last presidential election, a woman received nearly 3 million more votes than the man who took office. This year, a Black and Asian woman is on a major party ballot as the candidate for vice president for the first time. More women were elected to Congress in 2018 than ever before. And at the Bellefontaine ceremony I attended, Minor’s grave blessing was given by Ferguson Mayor Ella Jones: the first Black person and the first woman to lead the city that sparked another national movement for equal rights and justice.

But some of the obstacles suffragists faced a hundred years ago may sound recognizable.

There were an outspoken group of women who fought against their own right to vote. As more men got involved in the “Anti” movement, they argued for states’ rights and cast suffragists as socialists and “enemies of the state.”

That has a familiar ring to it.

The Antis were precursors to the conservative activist women who argued against the ERA. In this day and age, it’s hard to imagine what they found so objectionable in this language: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

It’s also easy to see the strategies of the modern-day Antis. Voters having to stand in lines for hours to cast a ballot during a global pandemic. Restrictive mail-in voting among those less likely to support the party in power. Fewer polling places, delayed ballots, “lost” mail.

The more things change.

I plan to bring my daughter, who will be voting in her first election in November, to place our “I voted” stickers on Minor’s gravestone. There’s something powerful in paying homage to the women who fought so hard to have us recognized as full citizens worthy of a voice.

To have our humanity recognized.

By the way, the county executive who denied Minor the right to vote is buried in the same cemetery.

I’ll wave as we walk by.