feeding & being fed

I wonder how many meals we've been given since Mike's diagnosis in July 2015? It's been twenty-eight months of blueberry baked oatmeal waiting on the porch, hefty Blue Apron deliveries full of surprises, frozen soups for some future chilly night thrust into my hands at the doorstep with a smile, perfectly selected take out (how do they know?) arriving right on time for dinner. It's been a long, grueling walk, but through it all, we've been very well fed.

Today I'm not at work, and I'm not at a medical appointment for Mike. I'm in my kitchen, watching the sun and shadow move across the bright pear pattern of the curtains, listening to the quiet bubble of a bolognese sauce I'm simmering. Some friends here run a farm-to-table restaurant in town, and for many months they have been delivering bags filled with beautiful local produce culled from the restaurant's weekly haul at night, on the way home from work, such that on a regular basis I stumble downstairs in the early morning to discover an overflowing bag of vegetables waiting on the doorstep: abundant lacy green carrot tops and lettuce leaves spilling over the top, the bottom weighed down with dusty potatoes and apples in varied hues.

The sight of this bag fills me with gratitude, wonder (how can they keep doing this for us?), and more than anything, excitement: it wakes up my mind, which immediately starts planning what I can do with all this gorgeous food, when I can cook it, what might work especially well for Mike. I unpack it all on the kitchen table, stand back and behold: it is art, it is potential. The last delivery included ground beef (they've taken on a grass fed cattle ranch) and I remembered the last bolognese sauce I made a la Marcella Hazan: long-simmered, saucy, satisfying, easy to swallow and easy to enjoy. He liked it.

I think the hardest times in our journey of one treatment after another have been those during which I couldn't feed Mike. When he can't swallow, or feels nauseated, or is just too sick to come down to dinner, I feel helpless. But a day like today? Time and quiet in which to chop and saute and simmer, imagining the pleasure the meal I'm preparing will bring, is balm to my harried soul.

We are particularly anxious right now. Mike has an admission date for his stem cell transplant next week, but there are three clinical tests between now and then that he needs to 'pass' in order for this to happen. We all caught a cold over Thanksgiving. He's definitely not at his best. What if they won't approve the transplant? What then? For that matter, what if they do? My mind is constantly looking ahead, anticipating child care needs, imagining various back bends in order to maintain my work schedule, planning Philadelphia overnights, worrying about the changes we need to make at home to create a safe post-transplant environment. Will I need to take FMLA to take care of him? Will I need more intensive child care? Will I have to forgo sleep, or exercise, or God forbid, cooking?

So in the midst of this inner scratching and scrambling and knot-tying, I am given the gift of this day at home with a gentle, slow-cooking project to anchor me back to myself and this moment - so full of good smells, sunshine, quiet neighborhood noises.

Cooking gives me a sense of agency. In the face of so much uncertainty and fear, I'm doing something. Creating a meal is something to hold onto, a practice to steady my shaky feet. And being fed gives me the feeling of being supported and cared for. It's beautiful. My awareness of my own need to cook for my family right now helps me to accept the bountiful gifts of food we've received - I know that feeding is important for the feeder, too. It calms our anxiety. It nourishes us, the very idea that we are nourishing others. It's not always easy to be so consistently on the receiving end, but when it comes to food, it makes so much sense that I can accept it peacefully, with gratitude.

I imagine all our friends enjoying the sense of steadiness and warmth that cooking gives me when they bring us a batch of cookies or a glass jar filled with saucy meatballs. They get to do something. I'm not the only one who loves Mike and my kids. Our friends and family should get to reap the soul benefits of doing something, too. I am less alone in this caring network of feeders and eaters.

Maybe that's why I am sometimes irrationally annoyed at my kids when they don't like something I cook. (This happens, incidentally, every other night). Don't they get it? I get to feed them. That's the deal. It helps me feel like myself, capable and grounded. When they take that power away with their pickiness, it's a real downer. Or why I feel particularly helpless when what I make just doesn't work for Mike - too hard to swallow, too off-putting. No, no, no! That's not how this is supposed to go. I get the pleasure and peace of nourishing you. Cooperate, people. Please.

I have not achieved enlightened selfless feeder status, obviously. Feeding a family under the best of circumstances can be a treacherous proposition. What question creates more dread in this mother's heart - what question is more laden with lurking whines - than what's for dinner, Mama? It's hard. Harder still with a cancer patient. But wow, wow wow wow, this morning is heavenly. Beautiful ingredients, time and space and quiet, and the anticipation of a happy family at dinner after the children are back from piano lessons and ballet class.

After that, who knows what's coming for us. But for tonight, we'll eat pasta.

good-enough ambitions

No offense Mama, but maybe I want to accomplish something more than just be a therapist or a college professor. I don't think you can understand.

This came up in one of many conversations about ambition, perfectionism, and grades held in our kitchen over the past weeks. I was suggesting a fixation on achievement and grades could be really detrimental for kids. Frances was suggesting that her drive to achieve, which would lead to great things, was a serious priority for her. It sounded to her that because I think the pressure to perform is bad, I don't consider the fruits of that pressure to be important. Mama thinks everyone should chill out and stop striving for success all the time. I couldn't understand because I don't strive myself.

Being a psychotherapist who works with college students, especially college students studying and living in a high-pressure, achievement-oriented institution, has made me fear all talk of grades. The word ‘extracurricular’ makes a tendon in my neck start to stiffen and ache. Sure, I see the students who struggle with depression and anxiety. But the perspective they offer is often similar, reflecting a larger culture in which every moment has to be accounted for, made productive, utilized to set one up for success in The Future (and ideally also documented in a flattering light on Instagram). A grade on a quiz leads to a grade in a class, which leads to a better or worse GPA, which determines study abroad programs, fellowships, grad schools, jobs, and who knows what else, which determines salary, status, and power, which determines...well, that's when it all gets hazy. It's unclear what all this scrambling is for. But basically, if you let one thing slip, you could end up homeless. These are high stakes.

I fear the college experience for many students is dominated by pressures to keep pace in this grueling marathon. And since I see the ravages of the race first hand, when I come home and hear worries about grades from my own children, I tend to overreact. I fear for them. I throw up my hands and say things like grades are meaningless! And talking about your GPA is soul-crushing! And that's it, we're going off the grid!

Super helpful, I know. Probably part of being so stirred-up and preachy about the gaping maw at the center of our achievement culture that threatens to swallow children whole is that I kind of do understand Frances’s point of view. Deeply. I like to get an A, too.

I think my initial ambivalence about psychotherapy, back when I was in graduate school and considering a more advocacy/policy–oriented social work path, was not merely a political suspicion of medicalizing social problems (poor people don’t need antidepressants, they need better paying jobs!). I think my own ambition revolted. A career comprised of countless private conversations conducted in a small room? Conversations that I couldn’t talk about with anyone else? No recognition, no fame, no objective marker of success or progress? No good grades? Geez. Just muddy human interaction, conducted in obscurity. 

So much for the world stage. 

But I was drawn to it, despite multifaceted ambivalence. As I got older I was able to notice with greater clarity how meaningful this work is, how relationships are a powerful means of transformation, how feelings really are my métier. I discovered how thrilling a series of private conversations can be.

I’m not famous, it's true. Thankfully I love my job.

But you guys. Sometimes I would like to be famous. Achieve something of note! Make big things happen. Create something beautiful.

I don’t think those kinds of things require scrambling on a harrowing hamster wheel for the first 25 years of life. However. You might need a bit of drive. I often find myself promoting a kind of counter cultural perspective: let go of internalized achievement pressure; find more stillness; make space for clarity, for the strangeness and wonder of every day; accept limitations - embrace them, even. Everything good will flow from that. But when I saw myself through Frances's eyes, I knew my own tangles twist deep inside still. Does my own mediocrity, complasence, fear of risk-taking, and general middle-aged fatigue sit hiding in a closet, trying not to be noticed, at the heart of my personal anti-achievement campaign? Good lord, am I just making excuses for myself?

I compare my kids' experience to my own all the time. I can't seem to help it. I sit with my feet in the chilly damp grass on Saturday mornings, watching Gabriel's soccer games, trying to keep my cool when he darts towards the ball. It's just a game, right? For fun? Right? I see Frances’s ambition crackling all around her and I marvel. Great things. Yes! Reach for great things. Beatrice is assertive in a way I still can't hack at age 40. She tells kids to get out of the way and let her have the slide to herself. What else will she commandeer?

I delight in their accomplishments, their bold expression. But you dear ones: don’t get hurt. Or suffer. Or become anxious. Or mad at yourself when you fall short of the A. Or fail to notice the mystery and beauty of life because you are so focused on forward motion. 

I want them to be happy. I want them to be brilliant. I want them to be happy exercising their brilliance. I want the world to see them and love them as I do.

I want to protect them from the cult of success, and I want them to try really, really hard, because it's good to try hard. Because the world becomes more rich and complicated and marvelous and part of you when you do.

I want to blow gently on their flames, enough to help them burn brighter, but not so fiercely that they flicker out.

I definitely don't want to pressure them into being famous novelists/comic book artists/dancers/physicians/singers/scientists as a means to vicariously satisfy my own ambitions. Please, if you ever catch me at that - tell me to give it a rest.

Like Frances said, I'm just a therapist. Just a therapist in a college in a town in Pennsylvania, doing part-time good-enough work. It's not the stuff of dreams. It's one piece of my life, and despite any deep down doubts about the relative quiet of my professional achievements, it brings an ever-shifting meaning and depth to my days. It's like my last post, about returning to the same place over and over that can never be the same. My work affords a similar sense of surprising newness within the confines of the same two chairs, the same four walls, every day.

Most importantly, it allows me to take care of my family, which is, I suppose, where most of my ambition finds expression anyway. What would Frances, or my twelve year old self, make of that?