I was eating a croissant this morning (one half with ham and cheese, the other with butter and strawberry jam) when I realized I’d become my mother.

Not in the dramatic, coming-of-age-movie sort of way. In the sandwich way. Which, depending on your relationship with food and your mother, might actually be more dramatic.

(Bear with me.)

When I was in third grade in Southern California, my mom packed my school lunches. She was Taiwanese. She came to the States as a young woman and approached American food with the cheerful logic of someone who saw no reason why ingredients that existed in the same refrigerator shouldn’t exist in the same sandwich. Ham. Cheese. Butter. Strawberry jam. Two slices of white bread. All of it, together, layered in there like the misbegotten love child of layer cake and lasagna.

No partitions. No structural planning. No zoning laws.

I couldn’t handle it.

I don’t mean emotionally — although… also, yes, emotionally. I mean texturally. The strawberry jam (Knott’s Berry Farm preserves with all the whole fruit lumps) was bleeding through the processed American cheese into the ham and the butter was trying its best to hold some kind of lipid barrier between the sweet side and the savory side but it was one fat layer against the full entropy of a sandwich which was striving to swallow the entire food pyramid. The center of that thing was a swamp. A well-meaning, culturally bewildered swamp.

Meanwhile, every other kid at the table was unwrapping their PB&J — a predictable, aggressively American classic, neatly cut into triangles, where everything knows its place and stays there. Or those Lunchables where each tidy stack of identically-sized crackers and ham had its own little plastic cubicle like ingredients under witness protection. Organized. Legible. The kind of lunch that didn’t require explanation.

Mine required explanation.

So I did what any self-respecting seven-year-old would do: I nibbled the edges. Just the crust perimeter, where the ingredients hadn’t fully merged yet. The safe zone. The demilitarized crust. Then I quietly disposed of the middle, ate my apple, and pretended everything was fine.

I never told her. I never asked for something different. Part of that was just being a kid who didn’t know how to say “I love you but your sandwich architecture is structurally unsound.” Part of it was that I couldn’t have articulated the actual problem even if I’d tried, because the problem wasn’t that she’d used the wrong ingredients — the problem was that she’d used the right ingredients according to a food logic I didn’t have access to yet.

Here’s what I didn’t understand at seven that I understand now, decades later, in a kitchen in Finland, eating a croissant: my mother wasn’t making weird sandwiches. She was making sandwiches from a completely different map.

In a lot of Asian cooking (and honestly, in plenty of European cooking too) sweet and savory aren’t enemies. They’re not even rivals. They’re roommates who get along fine and occasionally share groceries. The Scandinavians put lingonberry jam alongside meatballs and nobody blinks. (I wrote a whole post about this. The meatballs came home; the lingonberry got vetoed by my son.) The French invented the Monte Cristo, which is literally a ham and cheese sandwich that gets dipped in egg and served with jam. The entire concept of cheese and fruit exists because someone, somewhere, understood that sweet and salty are not a conflict — they’re a conversation.

My mom was operating on that instinct. The Taiwanese food she grew up with didn’t draw the hard line between sweet and savory that the American food of my youth did. Or, at least, not the same line in the same place. She put jam and ham in a sandwich because they were both food and they were both there, and from where she stood, that was sufficient logic.

She just didn’t have the American elementary school cafeteria context to know that a sandwich was supposed to commit. Ham and cheese OR jam and butter. Pick one. Never both. That was the unspoken rule, and she’d never eaten in an American school cafeteria, so how would she know? Nobody gives you the manual. (Nobody gives immigrant parents any of the manuals, but the sandwich one feels especially petty.)

So. This morning.

The boys were gone, the house was quiet, and I had exactly one croissant and two competing desires. I wanted ham and cheese. I also wanted strawberry jam with butter. And there was a version of me — the seven-year-old version, the one who ate the perimeter of her lunch and surrendered the middle — who would have picked one or the other, because that’s what you do. You choose a lane.

But I’m not seven anymore. And I’m not in a California cafeteria surrounded by Lunchables.

I split the croissant in half. Ham and cheese on one side, butter and jam on the other. Two little open-faced situations, sharing a plate, sharing a pastry, each half gets to be fully itself without having to negotiate with the other half’s jam.

And somewhere between the first bite of the ham side and the first bite of the jam side, I thought: oh.

I just made my mother’s sandwich.

Same ingredients. Same refusal to choose between sweet and savory when the correct answer is obviously, stubbornly, both. The only difference is the architecture. I gave it the zoning laws she never thought to implement because she didn’t know they were expected. She built a studio apartment; I built a duplex. Same building. Better floor plan.

I didn’t reject her sandwich. I just needed a few decades, a move to another continent, and a croissant to figure out that she was right.

There’s something about living abroad that shakes loose the food rules you absorbed as a kid. Or maybe it’s not the abroad part. Maybe it’s just time, and distance, and enough meals in enough kitchens that you stop sorting food into “normal” and “weird” and start sorting it into “works” and “doesn’t work.” My mom’s sandwich worked. It always worked. I just didn’t have the palate for it yet.

In Finland, I eat rye bread with butter and cheese and a slice of cucumber for breakfast and nobody thinks that’s a strange combination. Jam shows up next to meat on the same plate regularly. Cream goes in everything, on everything, as a foundational element of the cuisine.

The longer I live here, the more my mother’s sandwich makes sense. It wasn’t weird. It was just multilingual. My childhood cafeteria only spoke one language.

Mine speaks a few more now.