Single Parent to an Inner Child. (I know.)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been especially attached to significant occasions, important dates, remarkable milestones, all that sort of thing. I was born nostalgic and (perhaps for that reason) I was the unofficial Minister for Creation and Curation of Memories in our family. I used to take books like Holiday Traditions Around The World (that’s a fake composite title, but it’s also the actual name of about 150 real books on Amazon) out of the library. I’d scour them for ideas, picking and choosing the ones that tickled my fancy, mixing and matching and interpreting them to suit myself. I came up with important! new! traditions! which I insisted on incorporating into our celebrations year after year. Every year the preparations became more complex and baroque. (This was all very well when I lived at home, taking full creative and executive responsibility. Ten years on, I’m pretty sure my mother still lovingly curses my name every year when she has to get up at 4am on a Sunday morning to wire hundreds of blossoms and chocolate to the “Easter Tree.”)

So. What does this have to do with anything? Well, I turned 30, generally considered a bit of a BFD. I expected that I'd have a lot to say about it, but I find that I don’t, really. Almost every meaningful date or happening in my life so far has been given the full melancholic/existential angst treatment in one notebook or blog or another. I generally fret and/or wonder about the same things every time, and I’ve gotten to the point where I already know what I’d say if I was going to say anything much about it. So, I won’t. It was a nice day in the end. A few people went out of their way to make it special for me, and it really was. If I was going to angst about my birthday, it would probably have a lot to do with what I’d imagined I’d have done/achieved/decided by 30 and haven't. And if I was going to do that, it would probably embarrassingly and inevitably involve something about children. So it’s a good thing I’m not going to write about that or it would make the following confession especially maudlin.

I’ll admit it. I am a single, childless, 30-year-old woman who reads mommy blogs. I don’t know if it’s escapism or masochism, but I have a reader full of professional mommy bloggers. (have you noticed that they all also seem to be professional freelance photographers as well?) Hardly a day goes by that I don’t pop in for a dose of glowing mothers and adorable children doing neat crafty things in perfectly styled surroundings. Sometimes I just like to look at the fluff, but sometimes I get a little wistful. One of the main criticisms of these blogs is that they create an unattainable, unrealistic ideal of parenthood which only serves to make mothers feel bad about themselves if they don’t measure up. I think there’s a point there. I know enough about actual parenting to realize that the reality involves a lot more poop and screaming and sleep-deprivation. I know that a lot of the time, perfect is beside the point. I know for a fact that real life is hard and complicated and full of unforeseen challenges and I know that for real parents, sometimes good enough is actually pretty damn heroic.

Wait, what’s my point? Oh yeah. So, sometimes I read these mommy blogs, and I feel a little sad that I don’t have any adorable little children or professional grade photography equipment. I think about my days as a teenager dreaming up wonderful traditions for my family and I think about what a fun and creative mommy I would have been. (I don’t even have kids and I'm already falling prey to the Mompetition, oh god.) I think about how much I’d love those little guys, what good care I’d take of them, what lovely, lavish dinners I would cook for them. (yeah. It’s really easy to win the Mompetition when your children are hypothetical.)

My point? Lord, my point! I’ve been writing this post in my head for a week and this is where I keep getting embarrassed because it starts sounding...well, you’ll see.

Home Alone was on television. I cried. I mean, I always cry, but it was more than the usual Home Alone crying. It was I-usually-save-this-kind-of-crying-for-therapy crying. I can tell you're laughing now, but in between the comedy capers, that movie actually holds some excruciating moments of loneliness.¹  I had a clear image of the broken-hearted little six year old who actually lives inside me, all alone, trying her very best to take care of me the only way she knows how, with chicken nuggets and toast. I started thinking about my imaginary children and the great care I take of them in my hypothetical life. I started thinking about that lonely little part of myself, who exists in my actual life, and really deserves to be taken better care of.

Okay, so we all have an inner child, but at this point I started digging around for my inner grown up. I mean, I've just turned 30. Seriously, I’ve got to have one in there somewhere. And honestly, what is she up to? Isn't she supposed to be running things around here? So I poked around, and I found her. And she was exhausted. She was fed up. She had locked herself in her room and she was saying:

“Leave me alone! Will you just give me a f*cking break? I can’t cope! This shit is hard! Working 75 hours a week with the flu while trying to process the grief of the loss of your love, your best friend, an extended family you adored, your home, five years of your twenties, your dreams, your hypothetical children AND your precious flesh-and-blood dog (for no understandable reason beyond “You've done nothing wrong, but I just don’t want you anymore” ) is REALLY REALLY HARD. I don’t have the energy for your needs right now. Go away! Just...get yourself some toast. Whatever. You’ll be fine. Now SHUT THE DAMN DOOR.”

This is probably be the most exquisitely self-absorbed expression of self-pity ever, but I really felt sorry for myself. For the six-year-old crying herself to sleep half-hungry in a heap of toast crumbs and for the thirty-year-old who has had enough and just doesn’t want to deal anymore.

I wouldn't tell a single mother at the end of her rope that she had to cook perfect blog-worthy gourmet meals every night of the week. But I wouldn't tell a lonely little girl she that she didn’t deserve a good dinner, either.

So. My point. Finally. If the whole focus of this experiment is to learn how to love myself better, then how do I take care of the needy part of myself who has to be cared for AND the exhausted part of myself who feels she has nothing left to give?

I decided to take my self-indulgent imagination literally and brainstorm. What if I did have that hypothetical child? But what if I wasn’t a perfect blog-mommy. What if I was me? Sad, exhausted, angry me? What would I do?

I’d settle for good enough. I wouldn’t leave the poor thing home alone to scrounge chicken nuggets and stale crackers. I’d find quick easy ways to get a little quality nutrition into her before we both collapsed into bed, hoping that tomorrow would be a better day.

That was a lot of paragraphs to get to my really-not-really-recipes. But here are the three solutions I've found work well to help me feel like I’m not criminally neglecting myself.

• Spinach. It would be nice if I would sauté up loads of fresh, seasonal veg on the 4 out of 5 days I eat pasta, but sometimes (a lot of the time) I just can’t. No problem. You don’t have to be Popeye to know that every loving parent tries to get as much spinach as possible into their offspring. I’m so proud of this discovery: I take two huge handfuls of baby spinach and put them into a strainer. Once my pasta is cooked, I pour it into the strainer. The boiling water instantly cooks the spinach perfectly, without any extra effort. Ta da! (Hypothetical) Mom of the Year! 
• Eggs. When Ramen is all I can manage, I break two eggs into it and stir it with a fork. This turns shitty college food into Real Protein Food. If even the act of boiling water is too hard, (don’t judge. Sometimes it is. We’re being real here.) then I crack two eggs into a mug and put them into the microwave. Less than three minutes, and ta da! Real Protein Food. (which can be put on toast.) 
• Hot Chocolate. No, wait. I buy the most fortified whole milk I can find. Then I put it in a mug, in the microwave. I make some toast. I take the milk out of the microwave and I stir in some Cadbury’s cocoa. I butter the toast. I dip the toast in the cocoa. It’s not everyday food, but I get protein, calcium, vitamins and iron. And toast. Sometimes I make a point of gently putting myself into a warm flannel nightgown before I sit down to my supper of cocoa and toast. I tell myself a story where I’m inside a Victorian children’s novel and I’m kept company by a rocking horse and a velveteen rabbit. It works.

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1 In a super shallow way, I can't tell you how happy it makes me that Macaulay Culkin is older than me. But two seconds after I feel happy about that, I remember with crystal clear precision the Christmas of 1990. I was at my ugliest, most awkward stage of childhood: a bundle of buck teeth and social anxiety. We went to the mall to see Santa. I sat on his lap and, trying to impress this man that I knew was not Santa but assumed would be making some judgment of my character, I asked for a Precious Moments Bible and a word-search activity book. The-Man-Being-Paid-Eight-Dollars-an-Hour-To-Impersonate-Santa saw right through me. I could sense him rolling his eyes beneath his stick-on-eyebrows at the goody two-shoes of the year. With what I was sure was bemused pity and disgust he patted me on the shoulder: "yeah, yeah right...okay. A bible. Sure." Now, I was being a bit of a poser, but the thing is, I actually did really want that bible. For a present, Mall Santa was giving out a promotional Home Alone poster which was a map marking out the booby traps from the film. There was a large tarantula printed on the corner, so I couldn't bring myself to put it up in my room. ^↩

An Awkward Silence

I borrowed this from the hilarious and very talented

Willa's World

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.
~Anne Lamott


I’ve missed writing here for the last little while, but I was feeling a little paralyzed. My ex sent a kindly-meant text message out of the blue which let me know in a roundabout way that he was reading the blog. It was a surprise because I’d asked for no contact, and also because I just didn’t expect him to find it, at least not so soon. It’s hardly “Dear Diary” and hardly a secret, but I hadn’t gone out of my way to put the existence of the blog out there. Obviously I could just write about all this in a private journal, but’s important for me to write for an audience. Maybe that makes me an attention whore, but that’s the way it is. Imagining a group of people listening to what I have to say not only eases my loneliness, it also keeps me from the worst depths of self-indulgence. I don’t know who I imagine this audience to be exactly, but I know for sure that I hadn’t imagined it including my ex-fiance.

As anthropologists, psychologists, and physicists agree, and as we pretty much all know by now, observing something changes it. (I believe it’s considered brilliant to make some witty reference to Schrodinger's cat at this point, so let’s just pretend that I did.¹) And the truth is, it changes things for me, knowing that he is reading.

I try really hard to write with honesty, from a real place. I try not to wallow in misery, but I also don’t shy away from talking about the really hard things I’m feeling. I don’t believe in using the internet as a slam book, and I never intended for this to be a venue where I would dissect in detail the private workings of my failed relationship. It is important to me that I write within the bounds of my own conscience and instincts around another person’s privacy, but it’s also very important to me that I can write freely within those bounds. If I start to fret that I'll cause someone pain, or if I start worrying that my words will be analyzed and taken to mean things that they don’t, or if my ego demands that I not let on to the person who left me that I am having anything but a wonderful time on my own, my writing is going to suffer. It’s a fact. Most of all, I never want to use this blog as a way to passive-aggressively communicate with my ex. I am the one who asked for no contact. If I have something to say to him, I know I can pick up the phone and say it to him in person, if I want to. The preceding paragraph may be a slight exception to this rule. 

So after getting that text, I spent some time wondering what to do. I thought about pass-wording the blog. I thought about quitting the blog I really didn’t want to do either of those things. Even in the few weeks I’ve been doing this, the writing (and the cooking) have become important to me. And I kind of need both of them for this to do me any good. If I don’t cook, I have nothing to write about. If I don’t have to write about it, the truth is, a lot of the time I won’t bother to cook. Witness the last week, where every single day my dinner has consisted of rice with butter and cheese, or toast with butter and cheese. Ridiculous.

So. I’m going to just keep writing here. I am going to try to stay true to my experience, no matter who may or may not be reading, and what happens after that is out of my hands. I won't insert barbs where they don't belong, but I won't blunt my truth, either. The fact is that whenever you write anything and send it out into the world, you no longer have control over who will read it, what they will think about it, or how it will affect them. You just have to let it go.

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1 As I am writing this there is a tv special about blimps playing in the background, and I admit that I always mix up the Hindenberg disaster and the Heisenberg principle.^↩

Questions I Frequently Ask Myself

This blog is too new and quiet to have a frequently asked questions page, but since starting it, I’ve been having lots and lots of conversations with myself about it. These are some themes that keep recurring:

Q. Aren’t you going to gain a load of weight cooking all these meals?

A. Not really. Sure, I probably won’t lose the 15 lbs I did last time, but my usual starvation approach to heartache generally gets me as far as exactly one pair of jeans in a smaller size. I feel then, just a little bit, in a shallow way, as if perhaps every cloud does have a silver lining. And pretty soon, maybe even due in part to that small confidence boost, I quickly return to Normal Human Size and I have to get rid of the stupid little jeans. It’s dumb. Also, when I’m not cooking, I eat terribly. TERRIBLY. Not a little bit terribly. Not an “oh, it’s so naughty, tee hee” sort of terribly. I eat the way seven-year-old-me naturally assumed I would eat when I was a grown up and finally allowed to make my own food choices. Which translates to a diet roughly composed of 50% chicken nuggets and 50% processed carbohydrates+cheese. Example? One day this week I was weepy and forlorn (okay, more than one day this week, but I am talking about a specific day) and I had no food in the house. I had no plan, I had no list, I just knew I needed food or there would be falling over.

I climbed onto my bicycle and headed into the cold wind and onto the brand new bike paths to the nearest grocery store. I was feeling exceedingly sorry for myself and all I wanted was a hug and possibly a blankie. But instead, here I was, forced to go to the grocery store ALL ALONE. I am telling you, it was a sad, sad, resentful little scene. I wandered through the store in an apathetic blur, throwing things into my basket at random. And would you like to know what I bought? Here is a complete list:

1 carton milk
1 six-pack of chocolate bars
2 packages of crackers
1 tub of “cheese product”
1 package processed cheese slices
1 box of sugary cereal
1 loaf of white bread.
1 gigantic tub of hot chocolate mix
1 package of sweet little pies

1 sweet potato. (Yeah. I don’t know either.)

The only reason there are not 48 boxes of Kraft mac and cheese on that list is because they DON’T EVEN SELL IT HERE WHICH IS SO UPSETTING. Anyway...

When I got home and unpacked it all I realized everything was brown, orange, or white, with very little nutritional value. I didn’t even buy the fortified versions of the cheese products! And yeah, that’s pretty much what I eat when I don’t make the effort to cook. That and the aforementioned chicken nuggets. The dream diet of a six year old. Consumed in large adult servings, at extremely odd hours.

When I take the time to plan a meal I generally get a lovely sensible creative adult head on me and I tend to buy aspirational ingredients. The kind of ingredients that increase your self esteem just by picking them up off the shelf. Things like, I dunno, quinoa. Artisanal vegetables. (is that a thing?) Eggs. Anyway, these things tend to be way healthier. And when I sit down at a table, I eat them more thoughtfully, so I eat a nice normal portion. Instead of, you know, eight slices of bread and nutella. In bed. So no. I don’t think I’m going to get fat from this project.

Q. Isn’t this going to cost a load of money?

A. Not really. It’s possible to go overboard on the aspirational ingredients, yes. And you forget how expensive it is to restart a kitchen over from scratch. When I moved out, I didn’t divide the spice rack. I probably should have just taken the whole thing, but I didn’t. You start to realize that it takes a bit of money to completely re-stock all the basics you used to just know you always had in the cupboard. New spices. New ketchup. New olive oil. New salt grinder. New stock cubes. New flour. New vinegars. It goes on and on. It doesn’t take too long, and if you do it bit by bit, it doesn’t cost the earth. But you do feel it.

And it’s possible for your grasp to exceed your reach (or is that the other way around? Tricksy idiom!) I made this mistake this week. Feeling a bit ashamed after my grocery store trip, I headed off to the weekend market full of resolutions, good intentions, and optimism. I got a little carried away and spent quite a bit of money on fancy organic meats, fully intending to cook up fantastic, creative meals. Didn’t happen. I didn’t want to cook. I just wanted to sit in bed and eat crackers and watch endless episodes of television on the internet. I didn’t want meat. And I forgot to put it in the freezer. After half a week in the fridge, it all went a bit funny. I hate to say it but I’m  a real princess about food or milk or anything that might even be the slightest bit “off”, and I just knew I couldn’t make myself eat it. I felt like it was disgraceful, but I just boiled it all up and fed it to the neighbourhood cat. I just let it go.

But in general, I don’t think it’s going to be that expensive. Shitty processed food is expensive, and chicken nuggets aren’t as cheap as you think. Also, because I’m cooking for one, I’m buying small quantities. I keep thinking of my favourite part of what is possibly one of the most severely gendered children’s books ever written: Little Men, by Louisa May Alcott. You can read the chapter for yourself here, but basically, a little girl is given a tiny little working kitchen to learn to cook in, and she makes everything in miniature. Her steak comes in “doll’s pounds”. And it’s kind off the same in my kitchen. I can afford to buy lovely things because I only need “doll’s pounds” of anything. And even cooking in miniature, I usually make too much, and it turns into lunch tomorrow. Any leftover ingredients are usually incorporated into the next night’s dinner. So it’s pretty economical.

Q. WTF are you doing writing a food blog? You have never aspired to being a food writer!

A. I don’t know that this really is a “food blog”, or whether any of this is really “food writing”. I make up some of the recipes, but there have been and will be a lot of general adaptations and borrowings, and I will be sure to attribute them properly. I’m not so food-motivated that I lie around thinking up new recipes and feel a burning urge to rush out and share them with the world. Thank god for those people, but I’m not really one. I like to be imaginative with food, but I’ve always been more of an eat-to-live than live-to-eat kind of girl.

So the food thing...it’s a project. It’s a focus for a hard time. It’s developing a new skill, and working on the whole “loving yourself” thing. (Ah, the warm security blanket of scare quotes.) All of those are antidotes to emotional pain. And it’s a frame for talking about stuff that’s a bit raw and heavy on its own. Writing about broken hearts is a hard thing. It’s easy to whine and wallow, and I’m not interested in that. I don’t want to write it, and you don’t want to read it. But I do believe heartbreak is a universal and deeply significant thing. And so is food. I dunno, it just kind of happened.

Q. Do you still miss him?

A. Yes.

I Am Going To Buy You a Sandwich OR The Sad Turkey Song

To Myself

You are riding the bus again
burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,
the sole passenger

with an overhead light on.
And I am with you.
I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,

the little lights off in the distance
(in one of those rooms we are
living) and I am the rain

and the others all
around you, and the loneliness you love,
and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe,

and the catastrophic dawn,
the nicotine crawling on your skin—
and when you begin

to cough I won’t cover my face,
and if you vomit this time I will hold you:
everything’s going to be fine

I will whisper.
It won’t always be like this.
I am going to buy you a sandwich. 

Franz Wright
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I am a few days behind. Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and I didn't cook. I took myself to a little diner in town and ordered turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce. They were very stingy with the stuffing, but very generous with the cranberry. I asked for more gravy, and I ate it all. 

As I chewed I was trying to be grateful. The day was full of little blessings, and also lots of rain. My shoes steamed. 

A song came on over the restaurant sound system. It is not a very common song, although it is more so now that it was covered by a popular singer. But you'll almost never hear it on the radio. 

Five years ago, when it was being sung by its writer, it was a hidden track on a CD. 

It is very very sentimental, for its content and for the context in which I first heard it. I know all sorts of songs hurt all sorts of people after a recent break up, but this was the one song in the universe that could have hurt me the most. 

We had talked about using it as a wedding song, but "the ending is too sad." (no need for a parenthetical comment here.)

I've certainly never heard it before if I wasn't playing it on purpose.

So it came on in the restaurant as I ate my turkey and tried to be thankful, and I tried to close my ears, but I cried a little bit. By which I mean my eyes filled up and I swallowed the turkey harder than I needed to swallow it.  It's melodramatic but it was one of those moments where your throat is closing up and the room is closing in and it feels like the end of the world, even though you know it's not and even though you are a grown woman who has been through all this many times before and not a fifteen-year-old. 

I told myself that it was a short song, and that I would survive it.

The new singer of the song added in an interminable (and frankly self indulgent) amount of repeats of the chorus, and still I told myself that it was only a matter of minutes before it would be over and I could breathe again and finish my lunch. 

And like a miracle, midway through the last line, the place went quiet. I was grateful for even that 20 seconds of the song I didn't have to listen to. 

And then someone fixed the CD player. And restarted the song from the beginning. 

I had to laugh, so I did, and I finished my lunch, and I gave thanks.

I am full of excuses for not cooking and writing properly this week, all of them good and having to do with an insane workload and the fact that this has just been a really hard week. I don't mind writing the truth about how I am feeling, but so much of it is just the dull grinding soreness of it all, and most of the time there is not a lot to say about it. It's just the sort of thing you need to wade through. The bravado of striking out on the new life has petered out a bit and I'm just plain sad. There was one night I ate three chocolate bars in a row for dinner. (I can give you that recipe) and I have been cooking a lot of pasta. But I do try to put something special in it, like artisan feta or rocket or something. 

And failing that, I buy myself a sandwich.

More next week. It's market day tomorrow. 

The Last Lamb Shanks OR The Saddest Food Blogger In The World

A week ago today, my fiance called it all off.

It wasn’t a total surprise. It was a long and difficult relationship, and this wasn't its first iteration. We’d been struggling. I didn’t think we were finished trying. He did. Anyway, on that day it felt like a total surprise. I guess it always is when something finally ends.

Earlier that afternoon I’d gotten off work with a few hours to spare. It was freezing cold and raining and the most November-miserable day imaginable. Before going home, I decided that today would be a great day for cooking lamb shanks. Old fashioned, rich, slow-cooked, nourishing and comforting. I hadn’t ever made them before, but in my head it was a perfect wintery wet day dinner. I did a bit of googling, synthesized some idea of a recipe in my mind, and headed out to the shops. I trotted around to the butcher, the wine merchant, and the grocer, (Yes, I live in Quainty McYuppieville) joyfully and recklessly slinging ingredients into my bag. I may even have been humming. I felt like a very competent little housewife with a serious case of the warm fuzzies already, and I hadn’t even opened the wine yet.

I got home and started chopping and mixing and cooking and tasting, full of love and hope. Sure, things had been tough. Sure, there was work to do. But we loved each other so much. We had couples therapy scheduled later that night, and I knew when we came home from that, these lamb shanks would be a metaphor for all the good things we still had going for us, for a future full of warmth and deliciousness and good smells. When he tasted these lamb shanks, he’d be inspired to do whatever it took to get us to that future. I was supremely proud of myself, envisioning how much praise and affection I would get from my man when he got home and tasted what I had wrought. I put the casserole into the oven with a self-satisfied glow. Now it just had to cook for three hours.

Well, in those three hours, my world fell apart. After some very, very, very, very unpleasant scenes, which I will spare us all, he reheated some lamb shanks. By all reports they were incredible. I couldn’t eat. In what I think was an attempt at humour, he asked if he could have the recipe.

In the fog of red wine and snotty crying and passive aggression that followed, I typed this up:
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The Last Lamb Shanks
(Adapted from this less emotional recipe)

4 lamb shanks
Fresh ground salt and pepper
Glug olive oil
2 bay leaves
3 sprigs fresh rosemary

1 large onion (sliced)
4 stalks celery (roughly chopped)
2 large carrots (sliced into ¼ inch rounds)
8 cloves garlic (minced)

2 bottles of red wine (one for the recipe, one for you)
2 cups beef stock
3 tbsp soft brown sugar
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Season the lamb shanks with huge amounts of salt and pepper and sprinkle all over with flour. Brown them in the oil in a frying pan over medium high heat until well browned and sealed. Think about the past. Open one of the bottles of wine, and pour a large glass.

Move the shanks to a large casserole dish and forget about them for a while. Forget the past for a while, too. If you are having trouble, pour another glass of wine and neck it.

Put all the veg and bay leaves and rosemary into the pan you were browning the lamb shanks in, and consider all of your possible failings and how they have led you to this sorry state of affairs. Remember to include things that you did by accident and things that you did long ago when you were young and f*cked up. Wonder if having been omniscient would have changed things. Give up, because there are no rhetorical questions in this recipe.

Check if the onions and stuff are caramelizing. If they are then pour in the whole bottle of wine you haven’t opened yet. Resist saving some for yourself. You already have a bottle. If you really want a drink, pour another glass from that first bottle. If you run out, the off-license is open until ten.

Add the beef stock, sugar and vinegar. Let it all boil gently for a few minutes to think about its sins. Think about your sins. Drink.

Is there any wine left in the first bottle? Drink it. You should probably go to the liquor store. Because this shit has to cook for three hours and that’s a long time. Despair a little bit. Stir the stuff in the pan for a very long time but not as long as the years you have invested in this relationship. Don’t think about that if you can help it. If you can’t help it then drink the rest of the first bottle or if it’s already gone, come back from the off-license with a new one and open it. Drink.

Are you back?
Okay, pour all this stuff over the lamb shanks in the casserole dish.

Put it in the oven at 160c and cook that shit for three hours, turning occasionally.When the meat falls off the bone, your relationship and the lamb shanks are finished.

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Okay, it was dark, but it made me laugh a little bit. I couldn’t believe that I was laughing in one of the worst moments of my life.

The next few days were a blur of vodka and cigarettes and apartment hunting and relationship autopsies and moving all your shit around in your new ex’s car in black plastic bags and crying very quietly in your new rented room and all the other usual grotesque fug of a break-up. I didn’t eat. Couldn’t eat. Was not interested in eating.

Eventually I had to eat. Lightheadedness, irritability and headaches all add depth and authenticity to the broken-hearted experience, but eventually the body rebels and tells you to get a grip and put some food into it before it gives you something to REALLY cry about. I went and got some food. Stupid, tasteless, crappy cheap food that I didn’t have to waste any time preparing. (I had a very busy schedule of misery planned, you see.) I shoveled it into my mouth resentfully, choking it down, with a hateful kind of pentameter chanting in my head:

Get IT in YOUR face YOU useLESS butt-HEAD
Eat THE stooPID food. (YOU will DIE aLONE)

And so on. Rinse/repeat every meal. That’s kind of how it's been all week, up until now. My friends (and therapist, natch) have all been amazing. They all have variations of the same great advice, that advice that you generally hear after breakups. One friend stated it particularly well:

“I wonder what you could accomplish if you redirected that passion into caring for yourself...you need to give yourself the love that you’ve been giving to other people, and you need to give yourself the space to learn how to do that.”

Which, yeah, makes a lot of sense. But to be honest, I just couldn’t think of HOW, practically, you’re supposed to go about that. I can’t just order myself to love myself. I could sit in front of the mirror and declare my undying devotion and adoration for myself, but I would feel stupid. I can’t sit beside myself on the couch and hold myself close, whispering sweet nothings into my own ear. The more I thought about it, the creepier and more insane and useless it all started to feel.

And then, a little voice said: food.

To which I said: shut up. Haven’t I already made it clear that I am not a comfort eater? That sadness makes my stomach crunch up into an angry bald ferret, twisting itself over and over with fury, biting its tail and spitting bile through its jagged little yellow teeth? I don’t WANT food, stupid. Food won’t make me feel loved. And just because I am turning thirty next month doesn’t make me Bridget Jones. So shut up.

And the little voice said: food. Just think about it, okay? And no one has mentioned your age, or Bridget Jones. Anyway, she was eight years older than you.

Which was nice to hear and made me feel a little better.  

So I did think about it.

I thought about how I’ve always made a joke about how much I hate cooking for one, that there’s no fun in it. How I’ve sneered at “Cooking for One” books, smugly shaking my head, thinking: Sad.

When I have no one to cook for, I eat yogurt and potato chips and cereal from the box. Not a whole lot else, really. Toast sometimes. 

Sad.

I thought about the passion and joy that I’ve always brought to cooking for people that I love. The thrill of planning it, preparing it, and serving it. The love and forgiveness and hope for the future that I had poured into those f*cking lamb shanks last f*cking Wednesday.

And I didn’t even eat them. 

How’s that for a metaphor, self? Got it? 

Okay then. I’ll cook for me. That’s how I’ll show myself how much I love myself. Every night that I am home, for the next, say, six months, I will plan and cook and eat a proper dinner. With proper ingredients. And I will eat it.

And I every day I will write about it, because that’s what I do. And because my sister told me to, and my sister is smart.

Bon appetit, self.