I know that grief is accepting the reality of what is. Grief’s job is to aid a person in coming to terms with the way things really are, so that they can move forward. Grief is a gift from God because it has that purpose. Without it, we would all be condemned to a life of continually denying reality, arguing or protesting against reality, and never growing from the realities we experience. Grief is the price paid for love. My head knows this. My heart, however, is resisting and moaning and groaning and throwing a toddler-sized tantrum about it right now.
My reality is that Ryan is gone and lately I have wanted to retreat back into the early stages of grief, the ones where I was in denial of his absence and I could imagine my joy at having him walk in the door at any moment. I want it so badly that it becomes almost difficult to function in my current reality, the sucky reality where Ryan never walks in through a door again. These thoughts have been overwhelming me lately and honestly make it difficult to function fully in my current situation or to connect with those I love around me. And in order to snap out of the daydream I fall into, I have to force myself back to my current reality and then I am finding myself angry. I am angry with the state of my current reality. I am angry that depression robbed me of my husband and “broke” my family. I am angry that I have to navigate this stupid single parenting thing day after day. I am angry that I feel alone. I am angry that I feel angry because I do not even like anger. My default emotion is almost never anger at anything or anyone - annoyance maybe or disappointment, but I can probably count the number of times I have been truly angry in my life on one hand. But here is grief bringing me through unexpected and unwanted anger. And then not wanting to sit in that kind of destructive emotion, I switch to sadness. And that is when the tears flow. Maybe it is a pity party I need to have before I can pick my head back up and try again.
But this seems to be the cycle of grief I am currently in. One of allowing myself to revert temporarily back to denial, followed by anger, and then just a deep sadness. It must be that I need to relearn some of those grief lessons or get unstuck again, I do not know for sure. But it is exhausting and it feels like a step backward, which is discouraging.
Currently my grief seems to be “stuck” around food. Ryan loved to cook and he was amazing at it. He rarely had time to cook but on weekends he would often put together some amazing and complex dish like chicken parmesan or a chicken kiev. He also made the most amazing carrot cake, chocolate mousse, or creme brûlée, always from scratch and always leaving behind a messy kitchen that I really did not mind cleaning up after, even though I sometimes wondered if he purposefully tried to use every kitchen utensil possible in his cooking and baking! But to be fair, he often offered to help clean afterwards and I almost always said I did not mind the clean up at all if he did the cooking! I have always seen cooking as a chore that just has to be done, but Ryan saw being in the kitchen as a joy and stress relief, and he liked that something yummy came out of it. And on weekdays I would start dinner, knowing that if Ryan was home from work early enough, he would gladly help finish the cooking or add a little something to what I started to improve it. It was a huge blessing to me.
Ryan was a picky eater, and so are both my kids, so it was always a comfort to know that I was not alone cooking for three others who might dislike what I put together. Instead, we had a pretty regular rotation of family favorites, almost completely picked by Ryan, and we just stuck to those recipes, occasionally adding a new one, retiring one we overused, and often being adjusted by Ryan to make it better. We even have a family cookbook binder Ryan and I put together years ago which contains those recipes typed out and the changes he made over the years. It had a picture of Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” logo on the front because Ryan loved that cooking show - it was a great show that mixed cooking with science and humor. Yes, we were food nerds.
After his death, I had a really hard time cooking again because all of our family recipes were really Ryan’s recipes. I could not step in the kitchen and make anything without remembering how Ryan made it. At some point, however, I realized my picky eater children were missing their favorite “comfort” foods so I tried to make a few familiar dishes. The first time I made our family sweet and sour chicken, I cried over it. It is a recipe Ryan tweaked so many times until it became what it is now. I only attempted it one other time sometime last year and then gave up on that one. It is too emotionally exhausting for me to go through the steps to make it and even more exhausting trying to eat it. So for the last year and a half, the kids and I have eaten a few of the simplest dishes I can stand to recreate, namely their mac & cheese and enchiladas, along with a few new items I have come up with, usually against Kate and Charlie’s will. This is intermixed with more take-out than I care to admit to and those all too often evening dinners of sandwiches, a frozen meal heated up, or sometimes simply a bowl of cereal... Sometimes I just make food for the kids while I blend myself a smoothie and call it a night.
Even lunches are difficult because all too often over the years Ryan would come home during his lunch break to eat with us, or lunch consist of leftovers from whatever delicious meal we had together from dinner. And dang it, even breakfast has a food memory. Ryan’s scrambled eggs were amazing. If he was home at breakfast, I would often get the eggs out and ask him to scramble them for me. It was an ongoing joke because try as I would, my eggs just never came out like his! The kids would agree. But now they are stuck with mom’s second rate eggs and even though they eat them without complaining, I have to know that they think of daddy’s eggs when having to eat mine. Sigh. And when you are a stay at home mom and you homeschool, you do not get a break from planning any meal. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are all family meals and so the food reminder hits me several times a day.
What I would not give to just have meals show up!! To not have to think about the planning, grocery list, prepping, and cooking! It has been so emotionally exhausting to me and there is not a day that goes by that I can just skip thinking about food because, apparently, it is something our bodies need daily... Did I mention that Ryan and I would usually grocery shop together on weekend mornings, without kids? It was like a mini unromantic date and I loved it. It is amazing to me how feeding myself and my kids has been such a huge source of stress to me all these months. It seems so silly and trivial, but it has hands down been the biggest stress to me and cooking is still obviously the one grief trigger that hits me the most often. It is probably because I have not really dealt with it. I have not come up with a new “family routine” for meals, it has just been something scrapped together with no real plan or consistency. So that is my goal right now, to somehow face this stupid food hurdle.
It really was brought to my attention when I was sick a few weeks ago and Charlie took it upon himself to make me breakfast one morning. He surprised me with a plate of freshly made pancakes and a glass of orange juice brought to me in bed! It was the sweetest thing and exactly what Ryan would have done if he was here. I have no doubt Charlie watched his daddy take care of me and he tries to step into that role in any way he can. It is both sweet and completely heartbreaking. But after praising him for the pancakes - which were cooked perfectly - he has started asking to do be able to cook other things. Right now he’s experimenting with different pancake and waffle recipes. His best has been a strawberry waffle he made with strawberry purée mixed in. He is so much Ryan’s son. But enlisting Charlie’s help, I picked out some new recipes to try to learn together and twice a week agreed Charlie to be the chef, as we cook something new together. My hope is that this will both help him get past being so picky and also hopefully jump start me out of this stupid food grief funk that I have been in for far, far too long.
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| the hilarious Alton Brown from “Good Eats” |
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| view from hills of Santa Barbara at sunset |
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