Alissa Timoshkina - motherhood’s power & nurture

Our idea of mothers in the modern day is distorted by the numerous single-layered visuals and stories that are portrayed to us. Some mothers in the public sphere are beginning to redefine this complex role.

Alissa awakens, in me, the grace and power of the mother. She is all but small: a force of creativity and nourishment. It makes me wonder if it’s The Mother who will eventually push the scale down toward peace and balance.
Our world today doesn’t honour these women who are truly pillars of our societies. So I want to invite you to reflect upon your own mother or, in her absence, to your closer caregiver and give thanks for the life and nurture that has been given to you.

Tanya Gervasi: What kind of nourishment does the mother need and want?

Alissa Timoshkina: I'd say first of all the community of other mothers and other women. At least to me, that was a really essential part of coming to make sense of the new experience. It's such a big turn and a big reconfiguration of womanhood, so having the access to and the support of other women is such a huge part of having that comfort and that emotional and energetic nourishment. That was really key for me. Then of course, I guess there’s the overall part of resources. A kind of knowing who to turn to and having a sort of “scientific knowledge” and an understanding of what your body goes through, therefore what kind of needs you might have and what you can do to support yourself, mentally and physically. So definitely access to verified and reputable resources to understand from a different perspective - like psychological, hormonal, physiological perspective - what motherhood is and how it works, and what you can do to support yourself.

And then, of course, the food. The actual, literal nourishment through food and having, that kind of goes back to the previous 2 points, the community. And perhaps having someone within your close community who can offer you food and support you through understanding what your body needs at the time and what kind of food would be the most beneficial for you.

If you don't have the capacity for whichever reason to cook yourself, having someone who knows, or to whom you can communicate what you need knowing they'll be able to provide that for you, it’s amazing.

This actually ties to another question that I had. Your Russian dumplings’ cooking class gave way to a reflection - it's a dream of mine to learn to make them from scratch but that's something my grandma never did. And I'm from Belarus so we have lots of foods in common with Siberia, but everything with kneading was not her thing at all. So I’ve been wanting to learn to make dumplings and at the same time have been obsessed with only passing down family recipes - since the day I realised my grandma won’t live forever and if I don't learn now I will never eat my favourite foods again.

I started a little book with only my grandma's recipes, soon started writing my mom’s own recipes too. And then I also started writing my own successful cooking experiments along with the favourite recipes learned from other women outside of my family: they were girlfriends, at times strangers, other times moms and grandmas of my ex’s. All of that with time becomes sort of part of me and if cooked regularly will be embedded in my own family tradition and my children will think of these foods as my own and pass them down in their turn. Yet… in every tradition there’s innumerable women’s hands. 

Not everyone is blessed with a mother or a grandmother who passed down family recipes, or family traditions… and in the end perhaps it doesn’t even matter, what matters is this power women have to unknowingly mother strangers. I mean obviously you don't know everyone who comes to learn what you do. But it made me think of how yeah like perhaps some of your recipes become part of someone else's heritage.

I'd love to know who taught you to cook, who opened that door for you and kept it open?

I love that. That's really wonderful and really resonates with the idea that throughout all the horrors that are happening in Ukraine right now, it's hard not to kind of keep referring to it all the time, but throughout the war I just kept thinking and became more certain of how women, womanhood and femininity, is so strikingly the opposite of the war. 

Motherhood is all about nurturing, preserving, creating something new, and passing something on, whereas what's happening now with our rotting kind of patriarchal old outdated values is literally such a stark contrast being all about destruction and erasure. So it's beautiful to think about it in terms of food, and what we're doing with food right now is precisely creating new connections for people through food and making those recipes which now become a part of their heritage, a part of their lived and embodied experience connected to what's happening in the world right now.

So going back to your question about who those people were for me.. well, it's most definitely my great grandmother and I speak about her a lot. She was a very special person in my life. I think from her I learned  just so much. It just so happened that she was my main caregiver when I was little, and she just was such a fascinating person just because she happened to have lived during the most terrifying yet fascinating times in the twentieth century: she witnessed everything from the Soviet Revolution to the two WW, the holocaust and the fall of the Soviet Union. She taught me so much not intentionally, just by sharing her stories and by being around her all the time I've absorbed so much. She actually never had a university degree, so she didn't have a clear cut career, she worked as a nurse at some point. Then she also worked as a cook in cantines so nothing fancy but for quite a long time she cooked for a living, so she was kind of a professional cook in the family. 

She was a great feeder, and both me and my mom kind of grew up eating her food, and she loved feeding! Even though I was quite young when she lived with us and I didn't really cook with her as in she didn't give me lessons, I was around her all the time and I observed her cooking pretty much every day. 
Also I think the layout of the Soviets flat with its kitchen being like a kind of a living room, people tend to spend naturally so much time there. She was definitely the first person who created a connection to food for me.

And then my mom of course, like my grandmother, cooked lots as well, and I've spent a lot of time in the kitchen with her. Again, my grandma never taught me to cook anything specific, but it was my mom who I remember kind of playing doing cooking classes, and she would do cooking demos for me. She loved performing so she would always play being a chef who’s explaining how to cook stuff and I’d be interviewing her. So she was definitely the person who passed on specific recipes and I actually learned things from her. Then when I was a bit older, we started cooking together.

But of course as you said it so beautifully, there's so many other people, mostly women who teach you almost unknowingly. A big influence for me is my dear friend Olia Hercules, and her mom, who are both incredible cooks, and Olia is a professional chef now. Cooking and eating with her was quite a big part of my professional and personal journey. It was at the time when I started being almost obsessed with cooking and toying with the idea of whether I could actually do it for a living, thanks to spending more time with Olia Hercules who has this insane energy and an infectious passion for cooking.

Spending time with her and helping her out at some of her catering jobs and events, I just felt like: Oh my God, this is just the best thing ever! And I felt so alive and so purposeful and kind of more myself than I was when I was doing my academic work. Lecturing and stuff just felt so unnatural and just kind of not me. 

I think being around her and cooking with her was a really big part of why I've decided to change my career and kind of take that step to pursue cooking professionally.

She definitely is one of the big influences in my life. And funny enough, my mom was called Olga, her mom was called Olga, and she is Olga, so there’s some kind of mystical symbolism about the Olgas in my life, and obviously have a very big impact on me.

That's wonderful! You said that motherhood and mothers are in a way completely the opposite of war and destruction. Yet when I observe your activism with Cook For Ukraine I sense a power, or a sort of fortitude to perhaps not go to war, but channeled into holding the ground. Like planting one’s feet as to declare we’re not moving.  So I feel there’s a force - and you use it too now - which is not silent nor weak. You recognise a threat and rise up to it.

For sure, you know it's a fascinating topic and quite complex. I don't know if I can kind of make sense of it in one sentence. Womanhood, or like women's essence, is so complex and of course it might be a bit heteronormative to talk about womanhood in only one way because there's so many other people who identify differently and don't see it either man or women. But kind of in the more esoteric sense I guess I know that energy, that woman's energy is, on the one hand, very focused on nurture, preservation and creation. And using the analogy of childbirth, you're creating the next generation so it's very progressive at the same time that it aims to preserve stuff. But then, on the other hand, there's so much fierce and powerful energy that I mean just the act of giving birth is mind blowing, it’s intense and painful. It’s beyond any adjectives that I have to describe it but at the same time so fucking empowering. it's unbelievably empowering and it's strong, to give birth in whichever way you do it's quite a statement of power and of owning your body and owning what you're doing.

The woman's very essence is strong and even very feisty.  I don’t know, maybe I'm going too esoteric, I mean there’s so many goddesses in the Eastern yogic philosophy such as the Goddess of Death, Kali, who holds a sense of destruction but it's kind of the destruction that paves the way for something new rather than that kind of complete erasure and oblivion and darkness of the war that we're experiencing right now.

So even in the act of destruction there's some kind of new energy that comes out of that, and that's what I just love about this whole concept of womanhood. It embraces so many different opposed notions but at the same time it still has a coherent project about it, and coherent story of what it's doing. 

I feel that Cook For Ukraine, for both Olia and I, was an immediate reaction to the war breakthrough. There was no thought in it. We just strongly felt we had to do something and it took us obviously a while to kind of understand the concept and then decide how to talk about it. We both felt and kind of talked about in separate interviews at the same time about the sense that it's really essential to us that it is women who are doing it. As precisely that contrast of women who nurture and produce life or support life as opposed to Putin's regime which is just the most rotten, outdated patriarchal stance on vision of the world and vision of how the world should be.

And also using food as a means of doing that has something very feminist about. There’s a whole outdated notion that a woman's place is in the kitchen, and I actually find it really empowering that we take that existing framework and discourse, which is highly sexist and highly outdated, and actually turn it into a statement of activism, empowering women both in times of peace -  to own their place in the kitchen and to use that place for their creativity, for career or just for personal fulfilment - and especially right now in times of war when a kitchen becomes the place of political activism.

I was talking to a wonderful woman, Olga Koutseridi, who’s originally from Mariupol but lived in Texas for a while doing the most incredible baking. She has a PhD in the history of grains and is like a bread connoisseur, so she's been doing it before the war but now it was really powerful how she said that up to two months ago working with the dough and baking was part of her creative, professional and intellectual life but now it became a form of activism: just being in her kitchen making bread is raising awareness and is raising money. 

That’s activism for her right now. It feels powerful how this most ancient skill, and art form, and overall such a social activity that women have been doing for centuries to nourish their communities and their families, has now become a statement of political activism: a way to not only make your voice heard and speak out against the war, which super important in itself, but also raise funds to make a visible and tangible difference to help the people who are directly affected by this male centric patriarchal war.

It just felt so special, and it's precisely what we're doing with Cook For Ukraine.

When I studied Gastronomic Sciences, I learned soon enough that food is political. Also moving the women out of the kitchens in a way just deteriorated even the health of people and divided families, with this fictitious concept of empowering them to be more outside, because otherwise you're not worth as much as men who are these breadwinners. As if being a breadwinner makes you more valuable mentally rather than creating an environment where your children blossom and you are happy, your husband is also happy. It took me a while to understand how my mom, by staying at home and taking care of us, the house and our food, was doing the most precious thing because it taught me for example the importance of beauty and order. And I’m grateful that there was fresh food and home cooked meals every day. You know she always made sure everything was perfect. Today I know how freaking valuable that is. 

Yeah, same, I found it quite hard actually, for me, since my mom too was and still is a stay at home mom. I lived the same as you're just saying about your mom like the house was always beautiful and there's three course meals every day, all was clean and that put so much value into our lives. However, I think, for my mom it was really hard for her to acknowledge that and to accept it. So there was always so much torment that she hasn't achieved anything, and feeling not seen nor valuing her own contribution as an achievement.

And you know you can sense that really strongly, like that kind of undertone of anxiety and unhappiness about this kind of tangent of darkness to it.

I think I've really inherited that so I've struggled a lot myself, becoming a mom and kind of wondering where my career is going - especially during Lockdown when I wasn't doing my usual kind of thing out with people hosting events. I really struggled with that as well. And I found it quite damaging how women by not allowing themselves to just blossom and have that choice of blossoming in the house sphere, miss seeing cooking as something that is both a house chore and an equally really fulfilling beautiful meditative experience.

Now we have this strong dilemma between having to be working and making money, or else we think less of ourselves if we just stay at home looking after the house and the children.  This is what real feminism is about and should be really encouraging and allowing the woman to blossom in whichever field she is in.

So it was very interesting because I thought I'm so open minded about it yet I found myself struggling in that kind of “old age my mom's mindset”: am I just a housewife now and what am I doing in my life?

I now tell my mom much more often how much I appreciate what she’s done and how that impacted my brothers and myself. We grew up taking everything for granted but actually it wasn't. So I’m consciously changing my mindset about stay at home moms and women because I remember I was very harsh in my judgment. I thought intellect is everything, and I admired my father for being a CEO and so powerful. But not everyone is made for that hustle.

I think it equally applies to men. Some men, you know, thrive in the domestic realm and they don't want the conventional stress of going to work, and the pressure of having to earn a living.

So it’s about time to liberate everyone, both men and women, from this unhelpful stereotype of who does what in the house, and what it means to cook for the family, or what it means to make money for the family.

You were born in Russia. What did your childhood look like? And what did you dream of becoming?

My childhood. Well, I was born in the late Soviet period, and I lived with my great grandmother and my parents. So my mom's granny basically lived with us until I was probably eight or ten years old. Obviously her parents were around as well, so I had lots of caregivers, which was quite nice, I mean you know how they say with each generation if you're raised by your grandparents, they're a lot more mellow and allow you to do more stuff, so if you're raised by your great-grandmother that's a whole next level.

And I was allowed to do all sorts of things, it was fun. I have the most fond memories of hanging out with her, playing games, and again being in the kitchen when she was cooking. She would always like to do lots of baking so there was always that lovely sense of vanilla, or you know, when you're baking sweet buns or something with cinnamon, there was always this really lovely sense in the flat.

Even though the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 80s were quite tough in terms of economy and finance, I don't really remember, and maybe I was fortunate that my family kind of had a bit of financial stability. I mean in terms of food I don't remember drastic food shortages in our family. I do remember having to queue and long queues and stuff like that.

Growing up in Siberia was quite fun to have the snow, such a wonderful experience of playing in the snow as a kid - the fresh snow which is high and taller than you, just falling in the big pile of snow was quite fun. So I do have some lovely memories of that but my parents were always very kind of geared towards moving away from Russia. I remember, when I was little, they once tried to apply for a residence permit in South Africa of all places.

And I was learning English from when I was 3, I had a private tutor for English classes. So there was always that kind of feeling, even though our life was quite good, we weren’t politically persecuted nor were we in the most dire financial situation… there was always a feeling like this is not good enough and that  life abroad is better. With this constant feeling of “we have to leave”, weirdly my dream when I was little, like the vector of thinking about myself in the future, was always connected to living abroad.

As soon as I was old enough to understand what it meant to live abroad and what it actually looked like in practical terms to be moving away, I was quite keen to go to live and study in the UK. When we had the financial means to go and learn the language, from the age of 9 I would go every summer to a language school and live with a host family in the UK. It was a very deliberate and purposeful step towards moving abroad. 

Then when I was 14 I announced I was ready to move and my parents were worried I was still too young, but I insisted on being sent to a boarding school in the UK. At 15 I finally moved and even though my whole life was pretty much geared towards that, it was quite a shock and quite traumatic in many ways. Even though my English language skills were exceptional for Russian standards and I was the best in my class, it wasn’t good enough here. I had to adjust, and that took a while..
But here I am so grateful to be here and not in Russia right now. 

What nurtures you and strengthens you? How do you replenish yourself?

Well, cooking for sure. Obviously, in the most direct sense.

But sadly I haven't been in the right kind of mind and emotional state to really enjoy cooking but usually it's a tried and tested means. You know, whenever there's some kind of a difficult time in my life or I'm just feeling shitty from the long day, cooking - but not kind of cooking on autopilot rather really arriving in the kitchen, and just taking a moment to be present and connect to what I'm doing - is the most wonderful grounding practice for sure.

 I love meditation, it has really helped me through the lockdown and handling my own career ups and downs. Hence in the last 2 years I've taken on the study of yogic philosophy and also neuroscience, so kind of what meditation does to you from a scientific point of view.

I love this scientific and spiritual understanding of consciousness and your body, and how it affects your well-being and everything around you. 

Especially in the last two and a half years, without being able to travel or see friends as much, just cooking for my own small family and spending time at the table kind of listening to an interesting lecture about consciousness or about yogic philosophy that's been really nurturing and really supportive.

Luckily, now we’re out of the lockdown lifestyle, I feel being with people and sharing meals with friends is such an amazing source of energy and it’s kind of funny how you forget how good it feels to be surrounded by friends, because during the pandemic there was no way of really being out much and spending time with friends and you think, “Okay, that's fine, I can do it”.  But now that it’s back to normal, thank God, how did I manage to spend those two years without such vital charging moments that are so essential to me?  Like you know, having a drink with a friend and sharing meals and hosting events.
That's quite a source of energy for me for sure.

So you're not an academic, but it looks like you keep on studying.

It's funny, I guess it is just my personality type and I love it. I get a bit obsessed and I delve really deep into it. So objectively right now I don't have an academic career anymore but I like nutrition and especially women's health related nutrition, so I delve deep into that. And then I like meditation and yogic philosophy so it's definitely something that I geek in that sense.