Liz Busby
Self-Portrait in Cookies
In fourth grade, my 14-months-younger sister did a Famous Americans report on Debbie Fields, founder of Mrs. Fields’ Cookies. She made cookies to give out after her report, which made her a smash hit. In the months afterward, she would work her way through every recipe in the Mrs. Field’s Cookbook—lacey oatmeal cookies, windowpane cookies, lemon drizzles—each one turning out delicious.
It was her thing, and I was happy to eat the results. But somehow her success in this area translated to defining myself as the one who couldn’t cook. I suppose it’s the casualty of having a sister just a year younger than you: we were always defining ourselves at opposite ends of everything. My sister took French for her language requirement because it was the language of food and continued to work her way through fancy pies and homemade rolls. I took practical Spanish and stayed out of the kitchen except on my required night to help with dinner. Any mistakes made, I blamed on my innate character as someone who couldn’t cook.
The first thing I made on my own was macaroni and cheese. It was the first time I had been assigned to babysit my younger siblings while my parents were out. I felt grown up and determined to do everything right. How hard could it really be?
What came to the table was more like a soup: limp noodles floating in pale yellow water. I had no idea what I had done wrong until my sister pointed out one tiny word nestled between longer sentences:
“Drain.”
These feelings were made worse by the tasks assigned in the Young Women’s Personal Progress program. Bake a loaf of bread and take it to someone. Learn how to plan meals for your family. One sister taught us how to make a box cake mix taste better by using Sprite instead of water. My feminist-minded best friend complained that we should be learning woodworking and how to change a tire like the boys. I didn’t enjoy these activities myself, but I thought that was because I was innately bad at cooking. Deep down, I knew that my eternal progression didn’t hinge on my baking skills, but sometimes, it sure felt like it.
It was her thing, and I was happy to eat the results. But somehow her success in this area translated to defining myself as the one who couldn’t cook. I suppose it’s the casualty of having a sister just a year younger than you: we were always defining ourselves at opposite ends of everything. My sister took French for her language requirement because it was the language of food and continued to work her way through fancy pies and homemade rolls. I took practical Spanish and stayed out of the kitchen except on my required night to help with dinner. Any mistakes made, I blamed on my innate character as someone who couldn’t cook.
The first thing I made on my own was macaroni and cheese. It was the first time I had been assigned to babysit my younger siblings while my parents were out. I felt grown up and determined to do everything right. How hard could it really be?
What came to the table was more like a soup: limp noodles floating in pale yellow water. I had no idea what I had done wrong until my sister pointed out one tiny word nestled between longer sentences:
“Drain.”
These feelings were made worse by the tasks assigned in the Young Women’s Personal Progress program. Bake a loaf of bread and take it to someone. Learn how to plan meals for your family. One sister taught us how to make a box cake mix taste better by using Sprite instead of water. My feminist-minded best friend complained that we should be learning woodworking and how to change a tire like the boys. I didn’t enjoy these activities myself, but I thought that was because I was innately bad at cooking. Deep down, I knew that my eternal progression didn’t hinge on my baking skills, but sometimes, it sure felt like it.
#
There’s a legend in our family of the time Mom took us to the library just after she had put cookies into the oven. Weekly library outings were one of my favorite parts of the summer, a chance to pick out new adventures. My mom had an MA in English and loved reading as much as we did, so we would usually spend hours at the library.
We returned home to smoke billowing out of the oven and the fire alarm going off. The forgotten cookies retrieved from the oven looked like charcoal briquettes.
From then on, I don’t remember Mom ever making cookies. In fact, my dad soon became famous for his chocolate chip cookie recipe—his secret was creaming the sugar and butter by hand, never with a mixer. To look at my dad, you would never guess that he loved to flood every place he visited with warm chocolate chip cookies. His six-foot-four frame towered over the kitchen cupboards. His face sported a gruff beard below a balding head. I spent much of my childhood watching him break up fights while refereeing church basketball games. Yet he would frequently tie on an apron and armed with only a bowl, a fork, and a baking stone, churn out dozens of cookies in an afternoon.
Mom had never really been much of a cook anyway. Our family meals were mostly box dinners and canned chili and tacos with plain ground beef and ketchup. Perhaps this is why I was content to define myself as someone who couldn’t cook. I was a scholarly woman, like my mom. Of course I couldn’t cook; my time was absorbed with better things. Cooking was reserved for those who were girly girls, like my cousin who sewed her own clothes and went to all the school dances with a large group of friends. Those who focused on grades, who wrote quirky poetry in small notebooks, who solved math puzzles for fun didn’t need to understand the kitchen.
We returned home to smoke billowing out of the oven and the fire alarm going off. The forgotten cookies retrieved from the oven looked like charcoal briquettes.
From then on, I don’t remember Mom ever making cookies. In fact, my dad soon became famous for his chocolate chip cookie recipe—his secret was creaming the sugar and butter by hand, never with a mixer. To look at my dad, you would never guess that he loved to flood every place he visited with warm chocolate chip cookies. His six-foot-four frame towered over the kitchen cupboards. His face sported a gruff beard below a balding head. I spent much of my childhood watching him break up fights while refereeing church basketball games. Yet he would frequently tie on an apron and armed with only a bowl, a fork, and a baking stone, churn out dozens of cookies in an afternoon.
Mom had never really been much of a cook anyway. Our family meals were mostly box dinners and canned chili and tacos with plain ground beef and ketchup. Perhaps this is why I was content to define myself as someone who couldn’t cook. I was a scholarly woman, like my mom. Of course I couldn’t cook; my time was absorbed with better things. Cooking was reserved for those who were girly girls, like my cousin who sewed her own clothes and went to all the school dances with a large group of friends. Those who focused on grades, who wrote quirky poetry in small notebooks, who solved math puzzles for fun didn’t need to understand the kitchen.
#
The strange thing is I never saw the conflict between my non-cooking identity and my enjoyment of Pie Night.
Pie Night was an official family event the night before Thanksgiving at my maternal grandmother’s house. All of my aunts and female cousins would meet to order takeout and make the pies for tomorrow. We would crowd around the long white melamine island of her kitchen, mixing up pie crust in a long assembly line.
No, assembly line is much too orderly to describe what happened: Bowls being passed from person to person, and being abandoned to watch a song from White Christmas or grab a slice of pizza. Flour and shortening being slid across the counter to the next person who needed them. Batches that had to be started over because no one knew whether the salt had been added or not. We’d just keep churning out batches of dough until someone did a count and found that we’d made 4 more than we needed.
The dough was a simple shortening-based recipe from the 1950s. First, make a paste of ice water and flour. Then cut in the shortening into the remaining flour seasoned with salt. Combine the two mixtures by hand until just crumbly; never overmix or the crust won’t be flaky. Divide into two clumps. Beg someone whose hands haven’t been turned into pie crust clubs to pull out two plastic wrap sheets. Lay one ball on each, carefully extracting your hands. Wrap and flatten slightly and add to the stack in the fridge.
We’d roll out crust after crust, filling glass dishes, ceramic dishes, old tins from Marie Calendar’s, and the occasional tart pan. Edges were crimped or marked with a fork, lattices were braided, and extra pie crust was made into pie crust cookies dusted with cinnamon sugar. Giant batches of pumpkin filling would overflow the largest bowl available. Dozens of apples were spun through an apple slicer by children’s arm power, and they’d go away with a long string of apple peel to munch on.
Mixed through all this was laughter, discussion of plans for the Thanksgiving morning, movies and shows we’d watched, shopping tips, and catching up on each other’s lives. I was shocked when as a young adult I heard on a cooking show that pie crust was difficult to master. No one had ever told me that what we were doing was hard. Though I had come to my first pie night with a little trepidation about whether I’d mess it up, all fear was soon forgotten in the camaraderie, the festivity of doing it together. Though my sister was still always the one proposing we make a French silk pie or try a more elaborate lattice, I felt competent at Pie Night. There wasn’t any room to question whether I was good or bad at cooking: everyone helped, period, and the credit went to us all.
Pie Night was an official family event the night before Thanksgiving at my maternal grandmother’s house. All of my aunts and female cousins would meet to order takeout and make the pies for tomorrow. We would crowd around the long white melamine island of her kitchen, mixing up pie crust in a long assembly line.
No, assembly line is much too orderly to describe what happened: Bowls being passed from person to person, and being abandoned to watch a song from White Christmas or grab a slice of pizza. Flour and shortening being slid across the counter to the next person who needed them. Batches that had to be started over because no one knew whether the salt had been added or not. We’d just keep churning out batches of dough until someone did a count and found that we’d made 4 more than we needed.
The dough was a simple shortening-based recipe from the 1950s. First, make a paste of ice water and flour. Then cut in the shortening into the remaining flour seasoned with salt. Combine the two mixtures by hand until just crumbly; never overmix or the crust won’t be flaky. Divide into two clumps. Beg someone whose hands haven’t been turned into pie crust clubs to pull out two plastic wrap sheets. Lay one ball on each, carefully extracting your hands. Wrap and flatten slightly and add to the stack in the fridge.
We’d roll out crust after crust, filling glass dishes, ceramic dishes, old tins from Marie Calendar’s, and the occasional tart pan. Edges were crimped or marked with a fork, lattices were braided, and extra pie crust was made into pie crust cookies dusted with cinnamon sugar. Giant batches of pumpkin filling would overflow the largest bowl available. Dozens of apples were spun through an apple slicer by children’s arm power, and they’d go away with a long string of apple peel to munch on.
Mixed through all this was laughter, discussion of plans for the Thanksgiving morning, movies and shows we’d watched, shopping tips, and catching up on each other’s lives. I was shocked when as a young adult I heard on a cooking show that pie crust was difficult to master. No one had ever told me that what we were doing was hard. Though I had come to my first pie night with a little trepidation about whether I’d mess it up, all fear was soon forgotten in the camaraderie, the festivity of doing it together. Though my sister was still always the one proposing we make a French silk pie or try a more elaborate lattice, I felt competent at Pie Night. There wasn’t any room to question whether I was good or bad at cooking: everyone helped, period, and the credit went to us all.
#
I first determined I would need to learn how to cook in my second year of college. When I moved out of the dorms with their never-ending cafeteria buffet to a run-down apartment building, I knew I would have to face my fear of the kitchen. I couldn’t imagine how anyone had the time to cook three meals a day. My days were packed with classes and two part-time jobs; how was I going to find the time to make food? But I also couldn’t afford to eat out, so something would have to be done.
I came at cooking sideways with my nerd skills. I made spreadsheets. I found websites where you could enter the ingredients you had and it would spit out something to make with them. My roommates educated me in some things, like the graduate student who taught me that ground beef can be cooked in ways other than in a large bowl in a microwave. (None of them successfully taught me to do my own dishes though, which I still feel guilty about 15 years later.)
My mind’s dichotomy between the domestic and the academic finally broke when I came across the television show Good Eats on our apartment cable. Alton Brown’s cooking show is in the vein of Bill Nye the Science Guy with the wacky demonstration models and scientific explanations. That’s when I realized that cooking wasn’t un-similar to the reactions I was managing in organic chemistry. It was all about measuring, understanding why things worked the way they did, and what mattered (or didn’t) to the outcome. Cooking wasn’t a magical gift for Disney princesses and perfectly quaffed housewives. Baking was a replicable result, one that could be learned and managed through attention to detail.
After I got married and graduated from BYU, I started a systematic study of Alton Brown’s work, watching grainy pirated episodes of Good Eats on YouTube while feeding our newborn. Season by season, I learned about the Maillard reaction that makes both browned meat and muffins taste so good, why washing mushrooms was not only just fine but necessary, the differences between the muffin method and the cookie method, and how to spatchcock a chicken. Gradually many of the previously canned or frozen products I’d once used were replaced with fresh produce and from-scratch sauces.
When we left Utah for Seattle to follow my husband’s work, the food I missed the most was my dad’s chocolate chip cookies. On visits back to Utah, I tried to get his recipe, but it was annoyingly vague in the way that ancestral recipes are. “Two scoops of brown sugar. Blend. Add flour and baking powder.” The main thing I gleaned was the importance of blending the butter and sugars by hand with a fork (something that seemed impossible, due to my impatience at waiting for butter to come to room temperature) and using half dark and half semisweet chocolate chips.
I set about applying my dad’s techniques to various cookie recipes but to no avail. Even Alton Brown’s extensive tutorial on how to produce three different types of cookies didn’t unravel the mystery. The infographics of various cookie troubles on Pinterest couldn’t diagnose the problem either. To this day, I still can’t make a chocolate chip cookie to match the one in my childhood memories.
I came at cooking sideways with my nerd skills. I made spreadsheets. I found websites where you could enter the ingredients you had and it would spit out something to make with them. My roommates educated me in some things, like the graduate student who taught me that ground beef can be cooked in ways other than in a large bowl in a microwave. (None of them successfully taught me to do my own dishes though, which I still feel guilty about 15 years later.)
My mind’s dichotomy between the domestic and the academic finally broke when I came across the television show Good Eats on our apartment cable. Alton Brown’s cooking show is in the vein of Bill Nye the Science Guy with the wacky demonstration models and scientific explanations. That’s when I realized that cooking wasn’t un-similar to the reactions I was managing in organic chemistry. It was all about measuring, understanding why things worked the way they did, and what mattered (or didn’t) to the outcome. Cooking wasn’t a magical gift for Disney princesses and perfectly quaffed housewives. Baking was a replicable result, one that could be learned and managed through attention to detail.
After I got married and graduated from BYU, I started a systematic study of Alton Brown’s work, watching grainy pirated episodes of Good Eats on YouTube while feeding our newborn. Season by season, I learned about the Maillard reaction that makes both browned meat and muffins taste so good, why washing mushrooms was not only just fine but necessary, the differences between the muffin method and the cookie method, and how to spatchcock a chicken. Gradually many of the previously canned or frozen products I’d once used were replaced with fresh produce and from-scratch sauces.
When we left Utah for Seattle to follow my husband’s work, the food I missed the most was my dad’s chocolate chip cookies. On visits back to Utah, I tried to get his recipe, but it was annoyingly vague in the way that ancestral recipes are. “Two scoops of brown sugar. Blend. Add flour and baking powder.” The main thing I gleaned was the importance of blending the butter and sugars by hand with a fork (something that seemed impossible, due to my impatience at waiting for butter to come to room temperature) and using half dark and half semisweet chocolate chips.
I set about applying my dad’s techniques to various cookie recipes but to no avail. Even Alton Brown’s extensive tutorial on how to produce three different types of cookies didn’t unravel the mystery. The infographics of various cookie troubles on Pinterest couldn’t diagnose the problem either. To this day, I still can’t make a chocolate chip cookie to match the one in my childhood memories.
#
As a stay-at-home mom, I assumed that baking with my kids was part of the job description, a homey activity where my kids would learn about math, nutrition, chemistry, and family traditions all while finishing with a delicious snack. I undertook it almost as a revenge against my mother for not teaching me how to bake properly. “See? I will do motherhood correctly!” I had visions of my son standing by my side on his little kitchen stool, patiently pouring flour and licking spoons happily but neatly.
Turns out, baking with toddlers is nothing at all like that.
He would plunge the measuring cup into the flour bin, and white powder would suddenly be all over the counter and floor and the air and my dark red shirt. The cup would always be too full or too empty and half of it wouldn’t make it into the bowl anyway. He couldn’t stand the loud noise of the mixer and fled the kitchen in terror. And I couldn’t handle the mis-matched sizes of his cookie dough balls and ended up sneakily re-rolling them myself.
It took twice as long as usual and he was asleep before the first batch had cooled enough to eat.
Only after many more years of experience—and the resultant tempering of my perfectionism—I was able to actually bake with my kids without yelling at them.
Turns out, baking with toddlers is nothing at all like that.
He would plunge the measuring cup into the flour bin, and white powder would suddenly be all over the counter and floor and the air and my dark red shirt. The cup would always be too full or too empty and half of it wouldn’t make it into the bowl anyway. He couldn’t stand the loud noise of the mixer and fled the kitchen in terror. And I couldn’t handle the mis-matched sizes of his cookie dough balls and ended up sneakily re-rolling them myself.
It took twice as long as usual and he was asleep before the first batch had cooled enough to eat.
Only after many more years of experience—and the resultant tempering of my perfectionism—I was able to actually bake with my kids without yelling at them.
#
Now, when we would travel “home” for the holidays, the food my mom cooked no longer seemed adequate. The food that they so often ordered-in would make my stomach hurt. I would gently question the types of food we were eating and be pushed aside because it was the holidays, so who cared. When we finally moved back to Utah, I was excited to exert some control again over the food at family gatherings.’
So I spent the month of December making a different kind of cookies every few days and freezing them in plastic bags to be brought out for the holidays: gingerbread decorated by the kids, snowball cookies, pressed cookies in the shapes of little trees and wreaths, hazelnut cinnamon cookie sandwiches with caramel-filled cut-outs.
On Christmas Eve, I arranged the cookies on a platter and proudly placed them on the family buffet. My sister brought in her homemade eclairs. As she stacked the pastries high on the tiered silver serving dish, we nodded acknowledgement of each other’s efforts, like two competitors shaking hands before the final scores were shown. Then Mom came over and began making a fuss over both of our contributions. “I’m so proud my daughters both turned out to be such good cooks. It’s good you’re here to bake these things that I could never make.”
This phrase made me squirm. Why did it make me so uncomfortable? I wanted to say anyone could do it, that she could do it if she really wanted to. That being able to cook is a choice. It’s all learned skill. But saying that downplays the amount of work I have put into learning how to bake bread in the shape of a star or make homemade yogurt. I should be proud of my efforts and be grateful that she appreciated me.
Maybe it’s because her words felt like a condemnation of her own worth as a mother. Maybe it’s because deep in my heart, I had agreed with that condemnation. I resented other kids who grew up with fabulous homemade memories while we got by with hamburger helper and frozen chicken. Maybe it’s a manifestation of the same old perception that those who make the time to cook from scratch are more morally virtuous than others. A perception that I thought I’d scrubbed from myself but keeps reappearing like an old laundry stain.
So I spent the month of December making a different kind of cookies every few days and freezing them in plastic bags to be brought out for the holidays: gingerbread decorated by the kids, snowball cookies, pressed cookies in the shapes of little trees and wreaths, hazelnut cinnamon cookie sandwiches with caramel-filled cut-outs.
On Christmas Eve, I arranged the cookies on a platter and proudly placed them on the family buffet. My sister brought in her homemade eclairs. As she stacked the pastries high on the tiered silver serving dish, we nodded acknowledgement of each other’s efforts, like two competitors shaking hands before the final scores were shown. Then Mom came over and began making a fuss over both of our contributions. “I’m so proud my daughters both turned out to be such good cooks. It’s good you’re here to bake these things that I could never make.”
This phrase made me squirm. Why did it make me so uncomfortable? I wanted to say anyone could do it, that she could do it if she really wanted to. That being able to cook is a choice. It’s all learned skill. But saying that downplays the amount of work I have put into learning how to bake bread in the shape of a star or make homemade yogurt. I should be proud of my efforts and be grateful that she appreciated me.
Maybe it’s because her words felt like a condemnation of her own worth as a mother. Maybe it’s because deep in my heart, I had agreed with that condemnation. I resented other kids who grew up with fabulous homemade memories while we got by with hamburger helper and frozen chicken. Maybe it’s a manifestation of the same old perception that those who make the time to cook from scratch are more morally virtuous than others. A perception that I thought I’d scrubbed from myself but keeps reappearing like an old laundry stain.
#
Cooking has experienced an elevated status in recent years, culminating in The Great British Baking Show as mainstream television. Families cheer together as middle-aged mothers, young college students, and zealous engineers scramble to bake perfect sets of shortbread cookies or a three-tier cake themed after their hometown. My kids have seen so much of the show that they will tease me that my bread is “under proofed” when I bring it to the table (though it is most definitely not) and check for soggy bottoms on their Thanksgiving pies.
The thing that shocked me out of the constant escalation came out casually one Sunday night on the weekly family phone call with my in-laws.
One of my nieces had decided to go vegetarian, and it had made life hard for her mother, a stay-at-home mom a little younger than me. “Ordering meal kits has made it so much easier to find meals that all of us can eat. And I only have to pick up a few things when I go shopping, which makes it much easier to get done with a baby and toddler. It’s really reducing my stress a lot.”
My sister-in-law, about to start her job as a professor in the fall, agreed, “Yes, I don’t know how we’d get dinner on the table without it.”
I hesitantly stepped in, “Isn’t it tons more expensive?”
“Not really,” they both chimed in, and began comparing the notes on the merits of various brands they had tried. I kept grasping at straws trying to figure out what was wrong here. It made sense for my professional sister-in-law to buy meal kits, but how could it be justified if you were at home all day. It seemed morally wrong somehow not to plan your own meals for your family, like cheating at motherhood.
It took me months to admit the real problem: I was jealous.
Even all these years after my sister’s Famous Americans report, I was still basing my worth and the worth of other mothers on their food. If a family we invited over for dinner brought a store-bought side dish, I wondered what was wrong at home. I sneered at the Costco cookies at the church party. I had become a food snob.
And yet, I was so tired of all of it. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for 13 years, years I worked on perfecting the craft of cooking, of making a meal with no pre-made sauces and only fresh vegetables, because it seemed the only thing to do. The right way.
But does virtue really come in making your own pasta sauce over buying one ready-made? I could make homemade naan to go with the butter chicken I’ve cooked and veggies I’ve chopped, but would the outcome be worth the time and mess? Even after all the cookies I’ve made over the years, my husband still prefers Oreos to almost any other cookie. And I was exhausted, spending an hour cooking dinner every night, only to find that at least half of my kids found it completely inedible. Why was I doing it? Who was I proving myself to?
And so I begin the work again of unwinding my self-worth from cooking. I cross off the elaborate meals that require preparing three recipes simultaneously. I buy the flatbread and the tortillas and the baguettes that I am perfectly capable of making myself. I allow myself to make a boxed mac and cheese for my kids’ lunch. I buy the occasional meal kit.
I feed my kids the store-bought cookies.
Liz Busby is a writer of speculative fiction and creative nonfiction, as well as book reviews and other literary criticism, particularly about the intersection between Mormonism and science fiction/fantasy. Currently, she is a stay-at-home mom who enjoys long-distance running, knitting, and escape rooms. Liz recently moved from Bellevue, Washington, back to her home state of Utah, where she lives in Highland with her husband, George, and their four children.
The thing that shocked me out of the constant escalation came out casually one Sunday night on the weekly family phone call with my in-laws.
One of my nieces had decided to go vegetarian, and it had made life hard for her mother, a stay-at-home mom a little younger than me. “Ordering meal kits has made it so much easier to find meals that all of us can eat. And I only have to pick up a few things when I go shopping, which makes it much easier to get done with a baby and toddler. It’s really reducing my stress a lot.”
My sister-in-law, about to start her job as a professor in the fall, agreed, “Yes, I don’t know how we’d get dinner on the table without it.”
I hesitantly stepped in, “Isn’t it tons more expensive?”
“Not really,” they both chimed in, and began comparing the notes on the merits of various brands they had tried. I kept grasping at straws trying to figure out what was wrong here. It made sense for my professional sister-in-law to buy meal kits, but how could it be justified if you were at home all day. It seemed morally wrong somehow not to plan your own meals for your family, like cheating at motherhood.
It took me months to admit the real problem: I was jealous.
Even all these years after my sister’s Famous Americans report, I was still basing my worth and the worth of other mothers on their food. If a family we invited over for dinner brought a store-bought side dish, I wondered what was wrong at home. I sneered at the Costco cookies at the church party. I had become a food snob.
And yet, I was so tired of all of it. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for 13 years, years I worked on perfecting the craft of cooking, of making a meal with no pre-made sauces and only fresh vegetables, because it seemed the only thing to do. The right way.
But does virtue really come in making your own pasta sauce over buying one ready-made? I could make homemade naan to go with the butter chicken I’ve cooked and veggies I’ve chopped, but would the outcome be worth the time and mess? Even after all the cookies I’ve made over the years, my husband still prefers Oreos to almost any other cookie. And I was exhausted, spending an hour cooking dinner every night, only to find that at least half of my kids found it completely inedible. Why was I doing it? Who was I proving myself to?
And so I begin the work again of unwinding my self-worth from cooking. I cross off the elaborate meals that require preparing three recipes simultaneously. I buy the flatbread and the tortillas and the baguettes that I am perfectly capable of making myself. I allow myself to make a boxed mac and cheese for my kids’ lunch. I buy the occasional meal kit.
I feed my kids the store-bought cookies.
Liz Busby is a writer of speculative fiction and creative nonfiction, as well as book reviews and other literary criticism, particularly about the intersection between Mormonism and science fiction/fantasy. Currently, she is a stay-at-home mom who enjoys long-distance running, knitting, and escape rooms. Liz recently moved from Bellevue, Washington, back to her home state of Utah, where she lives in Highland with her husband, George, and their four children.