Open Letter To An Accidental Reader...

Reading google search terms can be such a piercing look into the souls of the people doing the searching.  This morning, I checked my blogger stats to see that someone found this post by searching

"are you a bad mom if you don't cook?"

I can't remember them verbatim, but the Gods know that in my darkest moments, I've typed some very specific, searching, even desperate, words into that little white google text box hoping against hope to find someone out there who not only felt the way I did, but might even choose to use the exact same words to express their feelings.

If you ever change your mind about cooking, these green beans
in oyster sauce are a perennial hit with kids. :)

And the crazy wonderful thing about this interconnection we call the web is that, at least enough times to matter, I did. And in moments, feeling surrounded by people who knew me but didn't really know me and who needed me to again be things I was unable to be for them because I was in a state of near catatonic and yet deeply painful depression, I felt un-alone. 

I realize lots of people have lived greater horrors, sadnesses, and tragedies than those four years that were the most difficult of the thirty-eight I've lived so far. But those hardships were very real and personal to me, and I truly believe that were it not for the kind of assistance, kindness, acceptance, and clean slate only strangers can afford you, I would not be here, in this place, and in this way, today. Many of those strangers, some of them now good friends, one of them the love of my life, would not have entered my life but through the portal that is the internet.

And so to the mom who found me thusly, if I am privileged to have somehow inspired you to come back and consider becoming a mom who does cook (or at least likes to read about it), I want to say that you're not the only person who wonders, perhaps even often, if they are something other or less than they should be. And for what it's worth, I personally think anyone worth knowing does at least wonder it from time to time.

Oh, and, also for what it's worth, not cooking doesn't make you a bad mom. But caring if it does might mean you're a better one than you think.

With love,

shinae