KJZZ partners with the Arizona Republic to bring you the Arizona Storytellers series. We record the live events and share them with you on the radio. Storytellers share stories about our community or the life events that have shaped them.

Alex Gould/The Republic

Willa Eigo shares her story at the Tempe Center for the Arts on Oct. 12, 2022.

Willa Eigo says her house smelled like garlic and rosemary when she was a kid. Her dad stayed at home while her mom worked. Willa and her dad would make things together — cereal, mac and cheese and steamed spinach — but the pasta is what she remembers most. Anytime her dad told her to pick some rosemary from the bush in their front yard, she knew her favorite meal was on the menu.

Spaghetti with red sauce and meatballs for dinner — it was one of my favorite meals. And it didn’t matter that usually — sorry Dad — he used store-bought pasta and jarred red sauce and frozen meatballs. I still really loved it.

My childhood was really ideal. My parents have been married for over 30 years. They met in college and they got married and they had kids and they stayed together somehow. And I always kind of expected that I would have a similar trajectory in my own love life.

When I met my husband, Chris, I fell in love with him almost instantly. Now, Chris had two kids from a previous marriage and up until that point I had never thought about the idea of marrying someone who had been married before or marrying someone who had kids.

A couple of months into dating, we found ourselves at my house and it’s late and he’s hungry and I have almost nothing in my pantry. But I look around and I find a box of spaghetti and a bottle of red sauce and a bag of frozen meatballs, and I heat all of this up for him. And when I tell you that this man looked at me like I had just made him a five star meal, I am not joking. He was just blown away by my ability to perfectly heat up three ingredients.

At this point in my life, I was not the kind of person who liked cooking for myself, let alone anyone else, but I started cooking more regularly for him. And every time he showed such an appreciation for anything good or bad that I would make. So that’s why I decided to marry him.

And his kids, Henry and Hannah, became my step-kids. The truth is that there’s a grief that comes with becoming a step-mom, and I hadn’t thought about it before, but the choice about when or how to become a mother was completely taken off the table when I married Chris.

The biggest thing that I remember from my childhood was how rarely I felt like a kid in a good way. My parents went out of their way to make sure that they talked to me and treated me like I was an adult. There was a lot of mutual respect in our household. I actually remember once, when I was around 13, my mom made some joke about a boy I had a crush on. She realized she had hurt my feelings and so she came over to me later and apologized. That was so big to me because most adults I know are awful at apologizing to other adults but my parents were big enough to know when they needed to apologize to a kid. And that’s the kind of parent that I wanted to be.

When the kids first moved in and we all were living together, there was a lot of stress as you can imagine. One of the most stressful parts of my day every day was meal time. I didn't know what to cook. I didn’t know if they’d like me or if they’d like it at all. I tried to cater our meals towards things that the kids liked because I realize that they, like most children, are the pickiest eaters on the face of the planet. So I would make a lot of things like mac and cheese, or chicken nuggets or pizza, but sometimes they wouldn’t even eat that. One day I’m standing in the kitchen, struggling with what to cook and the kids walk in and they ask if they can help me. I have never really cooked with kids before, but I found a box of spaghetti and a bottle of red sauce and a bag of frozen meatballs. I pull out a stepstool, and I boil a big pot of hot water and I start talking Henry and Hannah through the process of making spaghetti. They throw in the pasta and stir in the sauce, and they even help me set the table.

And suddenly the house smells like garlic and rosemary again like I did when I was a kid and I told them about my dad, Tim, and how we used to do this together. And I love it. And they eat it. And cooking becomes something that we get to do together.

I don’t worry as much anymore about what kind of a parent I’ll be, but I do wonder a little bit about what they’ll remember about me from their childhoods. I hope that they remember that I was someone who always treated them with respect. I hope that they remember that, despite my own doubts about my parenting, I never let it get in the way of me being a good parent. And I hope that they remember that I was the one who taught them to always have a box of spaghetti and a bottle of red sauce and a bag of frozen meatballs, on hand just in case. Thank you.