Personal Forgiveness
I am so there.
I am in the middle of that week where DH has worked late, the kids have been screaming messes, my inbox is overflowing and I have hard work deadlines to meet next week. Not to mention that last week was the same high stress at work, and we hosted my folks all weekend. This was a true blessing, but instead of taking Sunday to rest, I threw a party and cooked a from-scratch meal from CSA and farmer’s market ingredients for 7 adults and 4 kids. Don’t misread me, I didn’t mind having the party (I was thrilled-it was really fun), but now here I am with no clean laundry (laundry machines are 12 floors downstairs) and a freezer full of rock hard meat, blog posts to write, thank you notes from the kid’s birthdays, soup and other real food kid staples to make, on top of the daily child rearing responsibilities I have before and after work, and I have exactly 2 hours a day to do these tasks. And the bonus? With the 6 hours of sleep I am getting every night and the frenetic pace of my everyday life I am feeling really run down, and maybe a little bitter.
I understand why parents turn to take out and lunchables. I am so there! I am not some magical meal planning fairy. I encounter the same real world obstacles you do. My kids ate salami sandwiches for dinner twice last week. But when someone jumped in front of my subway train last Thursday triggering the train’s emergency brakes and trapping me underground in a 100 degree tin can for over an hour, what was I going to do? I give my kids dinner every night, the baby sitter does breakfast and lunch. She works a 10 and a half hour day, so when I waltz in an hour late, she is pretty much out of tricks.
I committed to eating real food and not turning to processed foods. I keep easy things (like whole wheat bread for sandwiches) at hand, but lately walking into the kitchen is daunting. I have a bowl full of tomatoes sitting on my table and one kid that eats them and one that doesn’t. In fact in the last two weeks it seems that my kids are eating exactly opposite things, so someone is always screaming. And if you want to tell me ‘keep with it, it takes 30 times before a child likes something’. That’s all well and good, but I am not sure how to get my three year old to try something without physically prying open his mouth and shoving it in (and that didn’t go so well…and no, I am not kidding).
Right under the header for my blog I show my mission statement. The most important part of that is NO JUDGMENT. Where I am right now is why. I took a client to lunch the other day and all I can wonder is whether or not my hamburger was made from grass fed meat (it probably wasn’t), or if the aioli was made from olive oil or soybean oil (probably GMO soybeans) and while I am positive that the french fries were real potatoes and not frozen, they too were probably fried in GMO soybean oil. But I did pass on the ketchup with HFCS, at least that was clearly written on the label.
Everyday I try to make the healthiest choices for me and my family. This week I had no energy and a fridge full of weird food. So what did I make? Pasta. I sauteed some tomatoes and garlic in olive oil and then poured in some white wine. Then I threw in a can of chickpeas and a bit of fresh parsely. I finished it with a handful of feta cheese. It sounds really good right? Well it wasn’t. The kids HATED it and even I didn’t care for it. Thing 1 tried one chickpea, but only after he saw the cat eat one. He hated it and spit it out on the table for me to clean up. This just wasn’t a winning recipe, the whole bean and pasta combo was really misguided.
But today I forgive myself, I did the best with what I had. I didn’t order in. Small victories. I am going to take this one day at a time. A wise Weight Watcher’s leader once said to me ‘If you forgot to brush your teeth one night, would you never brush your teeth again?’ This is really true, taking care of ourselves is day in and day out. Don’t stop now, everything good thing you do counts in bettering your life. Even if you only make a couple of changes like going to whole wheat bread and grass fed meat, you are better off than you were before. And I won’t judge you for just being where you are today.
Christa O’Brien is a full-time working mom of two young boys. The Table of Promise is her blog about food, family and trying to get the whole crew off processed foods.
