Letter of Rec #045: The relief of yes, shelf stable salads and Newton's Third Law of fashion trends

Thoughts on food, clothes and being a mom but in the reverse order

The relief of yes

Sometime in March I started to let my kids have gummy bears before dinner. I was sick of saying no — the way I’d tense up and start to get harsh felt like postured strictness, performative rigidity that misaligned with how I have known myself and want to know myself a mother, woman, a person.

It started with gummy bears but traversed into a whole world of other former no’s. Some of the new yes’s reinforced the old no’s and gave them more gravitas when they were spoken, others showed me a softness and a generosity that changed the dynamic between me and my kids and myself.

I realized the harshness and rigidity I’d experience in the face of an arbitrary no was related to the extent that I’d somehow began to accept conventions of “good parenting” that I had not challenged, had not yet been able to learn for myself were right for the way I’m a parent. Which was not surprising when I reflect on it now because there is no one size fits all.

But what was interesting, I think, to realize in all of it is how much convention I’d accepted as truth, how much of the way I’ve been a parent has not reflected my me-hood, but the culture around me or the culture I’m from — the passed down tenets I’d assumed and shapeshifted around to establish feigned harmony with my environment.

But honestly, as far as the gummy bears before dinner, they never stopped my kids from eating their real meal. Hasn’t brought on a cavity though maybe it will, hasn’t provoked sugar comedowns that look like tantrums, or maybe it has in the slightest sense, but I don’t feel it as much as I do the more seamless flow that exists between us on days when the current is rough. So maybe it’s more like a trade off — I’m not really sure.

Raising children is such a sensitive and deeply personal process — in a way it’s like agreeing to have your principles, your style, your values splayed out in these exterior appendages that eventually break off and take what you give them for better or worse to go off and be people in their own worlds.

And this idea can be daunting when you think about your kids as extensions of you — I think it’s put me in control mode before: wanting to do x for y outcome or vice versa, to in a way unwittingly turn my kids into a sort of trophy that reflects my integrity but what I am really coming to learn — what might be the great revelation of the season is that the less I try to control an outcome, the less I try to massage what “no” or what rule will garner what result, giving up this idea that my kids are anything more than themselves being shepherded into their own experiences of adulthood, the easier it is to be a mom. To be with and enjoy my kids, to get to know them, to let them know me. The easier it is to be with me too.

They always say “you do the best you can.” I think this is true but for a long time I don’t think how I thought of best was my own — like I’d assumed an implicit definition at some point point and then would live against it, wondering why when “best” was achieved, I didn’t feel full. But you can’t live in someone else’s expression of integrity and expect that you’ll feel whole, you know? I think that’s what assuming conventions as truth without figuring out if they fit for you can do. They set you up to strive and then when you achieve, make you wonder why you don’t feel like you did.

Finding your own best then starting to live it, even or maybe especially when it feels different from what you have known — what you see around you in real time too, can start to change everything.

Around the coffee table

What’s the buzz at your cafe these days?