Palačinkes and Police
Childhood Easter Memories
When I was a young girl my favorite thing about Easter, outside of the chocolate bunny and cadbury creme eggs that would be hiding somewhere in my house, was my grandma's palačinkes.
Palačinkes are the Croatian/Serbian version of crepes. They are a simple batter of flour, milk, eggs, and club soda, pan fried, then filled with a ricotta cheese mixture, and baked. My grandma would always make my family a big pan of them to eat on Easter Sunday. Every year we would eat Palm Sunday dinner with my dad’s side of the family. I knew the palačinkes would soon be in our refrigerator, calling to me. I would spend the next 6 nights sneaking into the kitchen and gently undoing the foil wrapping they were under so I could take one without anyone noticing…until Easter Sunday when my parents went to bake them and saw the pan half empty. Oops.
When I was 10 my parents decided if I was going to eat all the palačinkes, I was going to participate in making the palačinkes. The day before Palm Sunday I spent the afternoon in my grandmother’s kitchen learning how to make my favorite homemade easter treat. It wasn’t very hard, but it was quite time consuming because you had to do every pancake one at a time, and keep the consistency extremely thin, creating the possibility of tearing them if you were impatient in flipping them.
This was the day I also learned that she was frying our palačinkes in lard. If you know anything about the health trends of the 80’s and early 90’s, you’d know that fat was the devil. Margarine, and all its synthetic “heart-healthy” chemicals, the saviour. Cooking with lard made me freak out because I thought it was a terribly gross thing to use, but my grandma insisted it was much better for us than this made up margarine that my mom was using.
Five years later my Easter experience became way more traumatizing than learning my grandma cooked our food in lard.
I was a sophmore in highschool. My parents had just separated, and my dad was living with my grandma. Things were extremely contentious between my mom and dad. We didn’t know it at the time, but my mom was bi-polar. She was living in a reality that didn’t align with ours, and that disconnect led to a lot of messy, and upsetting situations. She was refusing to let my dad see us, and had obtained a restraining order to keep him from trying. I was 15, my brothers 8, and 7, and my sister just 1 year old.
Most of my life my mom has been uber religious, spending the bulk of my youth in an evangelical Christian church, but at this point had gone back to catholicism. It was Easter Sunday, and before heading out to church that morning I asked about seeing our dad, because we all missed him, and it was Easter. I thought maybe, out of the kindness of her heart, and the magical rising of the dead man, she would agree to let him pick us up to go out for Easter brunch with him. Surprisingly, she said yes.
I called him, so excited because I knew that he was missing us too, and told him the good news. “Mom says you can pick us up after church. We’ll be home right after the service”. He told me he’d have grandma and would come pick us up afterwards.
After sitting through church service, we were in the car driving home, and I said something about the time dad would be arriving to get us. I was flabbergasted at my mother’s response. She coldly says “no he’s not. He’s not allowed at the house and he will not be taking you. I’m calling the police”. I couldn’t understand. I begged and pleaded, reminding her that she agreed to this, and I already told him. She refused to acknowledge that conversation ever happened, and stood firm that he was going to violate a restraining order by coming near our home… just a couple of weeks ago it was his home too.
Once we got home I ran inside to call my dad, to warn him. I was so mad at her because I felt like she set him up for this, but I was also really scared. I didn’t want him to get in trouble when he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong. He thought she said it was okay to go there. I told him it was okay.
The phone at my grandma's house rang, and rang, and rang, and rang. We didn’t all have cell phones then, so once he left his house there was no way to reach him. We lived 15 minutes apart, so if he was coming when he said he was, it was too late.
I went upstairs to my room with the cordless phone so that if he did answer my mom wouldn’t hear the conversation. But we never got to have the conversation, because as I stood in my bedroom, which looked over the front of the house, I saw my dad pull up in his car. His mother, sitting in the passenger seat. And then I saw the police arrive.
He had gotten out of the car because he thought he was about to hug his kids for the first time in days. Instead, he was approached by police officers as my mother yelled at him from the porch, and his 80-something year old mother watched, confused. I stood sobbing in my bedroom, feeling responsible for the unfolding of events that had just occurred in front of me. I don’t know why I didn’t run down there and try to explain everything to the police. I just stood, frozen, and absolutely devastated.
I watched as my father was arrested on Easter Sunday. And I thought it was all my fault. What I would have given to have just been in trouble for eating all the palačinkes again.
This is so heartbreaking! 💔 I hope writing it out was therapeutic for you.