Sometimes Food Is Not Like Life...

The words have been blocked for the last month or so, my mental and emotional resources having been delegated to the task of achieving peace about a situation over which I have less control and more anxiety than I’d like…

This post has *NOTHING* to do with spaghetti,
but that's what I made for dinner last night.

One unintended blessing in divorced parenting is the release of liability over the ex’s personality or character by way of their parenting style, among other things. No more having to edit, defend, explain, soften, justify or repackage the ideas of someone who, as it turns out, doesn’t share your values about the things that really matter.

The flip side curse is the loss of influence over the environment in which your children live and the messages they receive while they’re not with you. This is not to say that I don’t recognize my flaws as a parent. But hopefully by this age, I have made some conscious and thoughtful choices about the legacy I want to leave my children, naturally believing those things and ideas I consciously choose are better than the ones I don’t.  And it’s not to say that the ex doesn’t also believe that his conscious choices, often at odds with my own, are superior to their alternatives.  If the tween could have met, I suppose we’d still be together.

But all choices in life are made to the exclusion of others.  And the most important ones seem, without fail, to come with a healthy serving of the kind of pain that comes with growth and good change. True, it’s painful in moments when I miss my kids. But the choice to seek a better and truer life, for myself, and ultimately a better and truer example of living, for my children, had to be made at the expense of being an everyday presence in their lives. 

And when I do feel that pang that comes with the realization of their absence, I remind myself that worthwhile decisions often come with a heavy and constant price, almost as if to remind us how precious the outcome. While I can no longer live under the same roof with my children every day, they can now witness a much more healthy relationship than the one that would have been their reality, and ultimately the model for their future relationships, had I gone back.

WTF does this have to do with food??? Nothing, really.  I could make some overwrought analogy between food and life in this instance, but it feels lower than cheap to trivialize the heartache that visits everyone, particularly the children, when a marriage of 11 years falls apart irreparably. But I write to let it pass through me, so I can look, think and move forward and get back to the business of not writing so much about my personal drama.

Soooo… Let’s just call this entry one of those odd little rosemary-lemon palate cleansing sorbets that comes in the middle of your six course meal so you, rather, * I *, can let go of the flavors of the last three courses and refresh myself for the next.

(And you doubted my ability to squeeze a feeble food analogy into this post…)


shinae