Recently, while running an errand without my kids, I got an alert that a package had arrived. I’d been waiting for this package: five boxes of chocolates I’d ordered to send as gifts. My kids are notorious for opening every package that arrives, and the moment I saw the alert, an image entered my mind: the package torn open, all five boxes of chocolates ravaged. I sorted through my worry. If I had to, I figured, I could gather what remained of the raided chocolates, stash them for myself in a Ziploc bag, and start over. I drove home curious about what I would find.
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Our favorite chicken right now is named Bigfoot—a Speckled Sussex who allows us to catch and hold her. Lately, she hops over the gate first thing in the morning to escape from the back pasture into our yard. One morning, she walked past me and immediately disappeared. I called to her and she answered, but I still couldn’t see her. I kept calling and she kept answering, instructing me where to find her. She had made a hideaway beneath an old piece of tin roofing. There, she had laid six eggs in the dirt. It felt wrong to take them from her, and so I left them there. Normally, when our chickens nest in their coop, their eggs roll down a gentle slope and land in a collection tray. They feel like public property there. But Bigfoot’s clutch of eggs felt personal. She’d shared her secret and I didn’t want to betray her.
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When I came home, my kids were sitting at the kitchen counter next to my package, which they had, of course, opened. It wasn’t quite the mess of chocolate-package-carnage that I feared, but they had raided the topmost box. “Those were supposed to be gifts,” I told them, and they looked genuinely sorry for a moment. Then they offered me a raspberry basil truffle, which they claimed was the best. Only now that I’m writing this do I realize it’s funny, my kids offering stolen chocolate back to me. I tried the raspberry basil and the lavender honeycomb, and by the next day, because I hadn’t bothered to hide the open box, the rest had disappeared. My eight-year-old claimed he had no idea what happened to them. Three full seconds later we erupted in laughter because that was such obvious bullshit.
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I miss eating alone. The other day, while I was making guacamole, a member of my family was standing behind me and eating it BEFORE I WAS EVEN DONE MAKING IT. This morning, I left the kitchen for a moment, and my dog stole my breakfast from the counter. Our pre-pandemic lives gave me more opportunities to feed only myself, to sit alone and savor. It can be a joy to feed others, but it can also be a joy to not worry about anyone else’s hunger. These days I am always home and always with my family, and if I’m hungry someone else is always hungry.
Like Bigfoot, I sneak away sometimes. I run an errand and make an extra stop to buy a sandwich and eat it alone in my car. I dispose of the trash like a criminal, not wanting to explain to anyone why I didn’t get them one too. Last week, I had a piece of cake that was packaged in a boring white carton. I hid it at the back of the refrigerator where it looked like forgotten leftovers. It waited for me there until everyone else fell asleep. It was a perfect piece of cake: equal parts sponge cake, ganache, and buttercream. The world is full of disappointing cakes, so a perfect cake is like a swim in a warm ocean or one of those unexpected sunsets where the light moves through the clouds to reveal colors you’d forgotten. I ate it with a spoon, uninterrupted.
Book Love
You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, launched this week. This book brings back for me the hours I spent on the floor of my bedroom poring over a copy of No More Masks I’d found in the attic. Reading the poems in that book felt like reading secrets. The poems in You Don’t Have to Be Everything read the same way—intimate, startling, and complicated. The book, divided into sections by theme, does beautiful job of validating the full emotional range that young women in our culture are so often taught to repress. I’m so excited this book exists.