Month: March 2020

The Right Recipe

I’ve been cooking a lot lately. I bet you have too. Not that I didn’t cook before life as we knew it imploded, but it certainly wasn’t to the tune of three square meals a day, seven days a week, and a generous dishing of snacks in between.

Keeping it somewhat variable has been a challenge; provided that I can find a recipe that I am not so intimidated by, and given that I can then subsequently find the ingredients for said recipe, it’s been a little dicey (lame culinary pun intended). I am not my grandmother’s granddaughter; that woman could always throw a little of this and a little of that together and make magic happen.

I’m not into the imprecise types of recipes that hold a vague sense of direction like “dash” or “sprinkle”. No, I much prefer to be given the specific, to the quarter of a teaspoon, step-by-step directions.

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I’m like this in a lot of ways; I like to know the expectations, the rules, the “how-to” of it all.

I’m apparently much more confident in others’ ability to know the correct answer than in my own.

It occurred to me yesterday, as I was scrolling through Pinterest to find a specific recipe, that I feel as though someone has handed me an ambiguous, nebulous recipe for life. A “dash” of home-schooling with a “sprinkle” of parenting, a “good amount” of working from home and a “pinch” of house-wifery.

On the one hand, I want someone to lay out for me what exactly it is I should be doing, and when I should be doing it. Tell me the schedule for meal times and bedtimes. Tell me how many hours my kids should be working on school work, and not on their screens. When should we work in activities, exercise, family games, arts and crafts. When to focus on the parenting of my kids and when I might be able to make time for myself or my marriage. Give me the formula for that mix that equals success.

But I can no more take that recipe – even if there was one – and create the best stay-at-home, homeschooling, work-from-home mother than I can cook in a three-star Michelin restaurant just by virtue of someone handing me the instructions for the dish. What is working for other people right now would likely not work for me.

Along this journey that I have been on in self-development and personal growth I have stumbled more times trying to follow someone else’s recipe to the letter than I have succeeded. I have tried to emulate other people’s strategies, to the time, to the day, to the activity, and it has never worked quite how they made it appear for me. For awhile I kept searching, though.

Because someone’s gotta have their shit figured out a bit better than me, right? There has to be an adult out there who can point me in the right direction.

Maybe not.

This new world order has shown me that there is a ton of room for improving upon my need and propensity to know the rules and expectations, to understand where the boundary lines fall, and to not question why and even if they should exist in the first place.

We’ve all been given an invitation to undo our own certainties, and release our need for the assurances of others.

Perhaps this might just be the way to find our own best recipe; starting over from scratch, with the ingredients we have, as much or as little as we want to add, and creating something new and wonderful from the basic ingredients. Just like learning the basics of how to perfect a recipe, however, we’ll need time and a fair amount of failure to get a palatable first pass, not to mention to perfect the process. How we can best support our families, our spouses, our friends, ourselves; how we can build our parenting, our marriages, our friendships, our habits in new and better ways.

Good luck in your own kitchens, readers, and remember to throw in a generous amount of grace with each stir of your spoon.

Exhale

Last week was…weird? Discombobulated? I struggle to find a word that succinctly wraps it all up nice and neatly in an orderly, grammatical way.

I didn’t know how to respond to everything that was happening, and happening so quickly. So many shifts. I was conflicted, caught somewhere between acting like everything was normal, because on some level things felt normal, and at the same time knowing everything was far from normal. I didn’t know what to do or not do, and my actions mimicked the confusion. Some days I stayed in pajamas. Other days I got dressed. I didn’t monitor anyone’s screen time for hours on end, or I was micro-focused on it, there was no in between. I put off going to the grocery store (and as a serial meal planner, this might have felt the most unhinged). Underlying all of that was knowing that my girls felt similarly, had less of an ability to hang on to their own emotions, and I had to show them some modicum of normality amidst a complete lack of it.

I vacillated between wanting to drink all the bottles of wine because I felt stressed and overwhelmed, a dear old coping mechanism of mine, and sticking religiously with my hydration plan that I have cultivated which I know makes me feel nourished and clear-headed. I have Pinterested school schedules, and I have not given a damn about what my kids were doing in terms of routine. I have thought about going for a walk and then scrolled Facebook for the better part of two hours. I have been zen, and I have utterly and completely lost my shit over the smallest of things. I have subscribed to virtual yoga classes and not done a single one. I have stuck to my somewhat normal workout routine thanks to my local gym community, albeit virtually, only to turn around and eat half a bag of chips I discovered hiding in the back of our pantry. I have cleaned out all of the kitchen cabinets in a Marie Kondo effort, and I have napped.

And you know what? Every single one of those things were OK.

I gave myself a pass last week. There was so much coming at me that if I took it all in I knew I would hit system overload. This sudden and abrupt shift of all the time in the world felt like a gift and a curse; I simultaneously wanted to take advantage of it and do all the things but also internally railed against the need to be productive.

After allowing myself that time to wallow, however, I knew that I needed to be a bit more intentional. On Sunday, my typical weekly planning day, I told myself I would stick to the basics that I have been working on building, before life spiraled into the plot for a sci-fi novel. Focusing on what made me feel best – gratitude, sleep, movement, water intake and limiting alcohol, auditing my consumption of media and reading materials, as well as sticking with my nightly routine – and discarding those that just weren’t sticking, such as waking at 5am and journaling every day. I have no time or tolerance at this juncture for working hard at things that I don’t thrive in doing. Also, building unsustainable habits that work through a pandemic but not into the days that will be reminiscent of business-as-normal probably isn’t the best laid plan.

There’s plenty that I want to drink about, there are more than enough things that could keep me up at night, and I am definitely not going to make the homeschool teacher all-star team.

And there are definitely times, like yesterday after a trip to the grocery store where people in an otherwise genuinely friendly community hesitated to look each other in the eye much less say hello from a safe distance, where I pause to feel the emotions that I can’t deny are there, swirling all about.

This is not a time for rockstars. It took us years to groom our at-work skills. This is a time to lower the bar, do what you can to make yourself feel good, feel your emotions, and for the love of god, connect with your social networks. Those things will help you through the five thousandth “Mommmm”, the incomprehensible math work and the sheer chaos that will likely ensue from being sheltered-in-place with those you love so, so dearly (and yes, I am trying not to be sarcastic here).

This is not a time to pick up heavy things just for the sake of lifting.

There has been this increasing pressure to be productive with all of our time. To be “busy”. I think this might be the time for us all to take a pause on productivity and perhaps just connect with those things that make us feel good – not temporarily good, but nourished, cared-for and genuinely good.

My boss once gave me a card, after a particularly rough day I had, and the front simply said, “Exhale”. I still have it. It reminds me to take deep breaths.

On a regular day, I need that reminder often. Now, I need that tattooed on my forehead. Or perhaps my hand because, let’s face it, I’m not really taking the time to pause in the mirror.

This is temporary. And it’s uncomfortable. It’s challenging and hard and lonely and beautiful and peaceful. It’s so many things, and all the things all at once. Let’s just focus on getting through it as best as we can. Cry when you need to, smile when you can, and take some deep breaths.

 

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