I used to cook. A lot. With 10 children needing three meals a day, 365 days a year, not to mention holidays and birthdays and tea parties and potlucks every week and hospitality…I got just a little burned out on cooking (pun intended).
My daughters are amazing cooks and if they see this may take umbrage at calling the meals I made in the day “cooking.” I admit that there was a lot of repetition and trying to follow the K.I.S.S. rule (Keep It Simple, Stupid) to keep from losing my mind with all the other stuff that also needed to be done. Like laundry.
I often thought that if I could only have a cook, all the other household chores would be a breeze. Just thinking about what to make, shopping for it, storing it, cleaning up afterward, even though as my children grew they all participated in this, too, was daunting and exhausting. When people today discuss the mental and emotional load mothers carry, I know exactly what they mean.
Someone has to plan and execute these things, even if they have help.
Even though I kept it simple, I got pretty good at making some things. I baked bread for many years, made from grain I ground in an electric wheat grinder, like the Little Red Hen, kind of. I made some impressive home-made pizzas, excited about the “pizza bubbles” the cheese made as I perfected how to keep the crust from burning while melting the top so that it was even better than what we brought home from Papa Murphy’s after grueling day-long shopping trips.
Along with canning food, drying food, making giant pots of applesauce to freeze, making jam, and the aforementioned bread baking, I also made yogurt. Honestly, I sometimes enjoyed doing these things–there’s something satisfying in the pop of the lid on top of the jam jar to indicate it sealed properly–but it was a LOT of work. Because our family was immersed in patriarchy, some of the chores the kids did ended up being unfairly gendered, so the girls worked in the kitchen as they got older, taking over some of the cooking, which I welcomed.
Everyone, though, took a turn each week, doing the unending dishes, even the boys.
When we discovered the America’s Test Kitchen cookbooks, filled with tips about what worked and didn’t work in the testing process, the girls loved finding new things to create, breaking us out of the rut of the endless chili/tacos/stew/spaghetti/minestrone soup that we were stuck in. I enjoyed their creativity and gladly bought ingredients for the new things they wanted to make. They became excellent and natural cooks, something I never was as I didn’t have the bandwidth to explore culinary adventures.
As the children grew and began to leave home, there were less mouths to feed and less people to pitch in. When the girls married and moved away, I was the lone female left in a household of boys, and lots of changes were happening in our life that put cooking everything from scratch on the back burner (pun again intended). There were less family meals and more convenience meals, though I did have an occasional renaissance of cooking inspiration, mostly in spurts when there were special occasions or we had visitors. One son became quite a baker, creating a new bundt cake every week to take to the church fellowship meal.
But life was changing and so was our family, with grown kids moving out and my divorce creating understandable confusion and friction among the kids, so that even holidays, with all their traditions, were suddenly different. Food and mealtimes became laden with painful memories, and even lovely memories were hard to revisit with tastes and smells and sights evoking loss.
My children are their own people, with their own stories of what they experienced in our big, messy family. Some have trouble remembering some of the goodness of the past because they have unhealed hurts from parts of it that were painful, that they are processing in their own way. Some have reconciled the things that were hard through long conversations and tears and work that is personal to them in their healing journey. They recall some things from the past with fondness even though they have accepted that other dynamics were not healthy.
I get it. I’m still processing, too. I have things I’ve needed to repent over and things I’ve needed to forgive. Sometimes the hardest part is having grace for the young mom who didn’t know what she was doing and survived the best she could, doing some things well and sometimes screwing it up spectacularly. We all have different bodies, nervous systems, histories, personalities, and survival strategies. This makes healing and growth look different for everyone. For me, too.
One of the triggers for me from the past has been cooking. For many years I have not been interested in spending much time in the kitchen, though I eat pretty healthy to stay alive. Food is necessary fuel. With just me and my husband to feed, this is usually not a problem. He’s easy-going and is perfectly capable of fixing himself things to eat. I sometimes pull together a real meal with a protein, a vegetable or salad, and a healthy grain. There, I cooked! And my husband almost always does the dishes afterward.
Lately, though, I’ve noticed a spark of interest in my body and my appetite to put more effort into food and cooking. Nothing major. Nothing gourmet. But the feeling of malaise regarding creating a menu plan and shopping for food is dissipating. Perhaps it’s because I have more time to think about it, with fewer daily stressors. Maybe over time my body has become able to switch more easily out of survival mode, making room for slowing down and enjoying food. Or maybe it’s out of concern for my husband’s health, and mine. He has had some heart issues and after a small stroke last year, I became motivated to find healthy ways for him to eat, with a focus on a Mediterranean diet which is supposed to be the best for heart and brain health.
I also care about mental health, of course, and mine is needing attention as much as anyone’s. I have had some gut issues show up the past couple of years, not a surprise after those years of stress; it is well-known that there is a “gut-brain connection”1 which affects mental health as well as physical health. These concerns have given me a different perspective, and I am pleasantly surprised that my body is not reacting with reticence to looking at recipes and planning meals. I have occasionally had fun with subscription meal services like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh, or Green Chef. But I am getting more adventurous on my own.
In the day, when I was living the rural dream, there were lots of homeschooling moms (and some dads, particularly the antidisestablishmentarian ones) like me who became enamored of the ideal agrarian lifestyle. Heck, I even edited a book on agrarianism. Along with my friends, I was an avid reader of Gentle Spirit magazine which had alluring descriptions of back-to-the-land motherhood and do-it-yourself everything from growing food to birthing babies. That bubble didn’t exactly burst (would that it had) but began to slowly deflate like a tire with a nail in the sidewall, when it came out that the proprietress of this “godly” way of living was lying to her readers and hooking up with a honey on the side at the homeschool conventions where she was a popular speaker.
The crowd I ran with then was good at rationalizing indiscretions this way: One bad apple doesn’t have to spoil the whole bunch. See what I did there? (Look up the actual saying.) The Bible has lots to say about fruit and trees (Gen. 2:17; Ps. 1; Mt. 7:16-18; Mt. 21:18-22), but Christians are notoriously good at twisting the metaphors to mean what they do not mean. I should have known better since I had read The Princess Bride in junior high, long before it became a cinematic hit.2
I, apparently, have a high tolerance for pain, because it wasn’t until the Doug Phillips and Vision Forum scandal years later that I finally threw in the towel. Enough! Yes, one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch. That was the beginning of my late-to-the-party wakeup call to the abuses within evangelical circles. I have been untangling ever since. One of the chains I have been trying to unhook is the one that bound me to the stove and the limitations of domesticity as my “realm.”
I now have a career as a therapist, living in suburbia, with stores and libraries nearby, and neighbors I can say hello to when I step out my front door. I love it. There were lovely things about living in the country with gorgeous views and the privacy that 34 acres of wooded land offered. But that life was not more “godly” than how I live now, even though my prideful little self convinced myself that it was. I shudder with revulsion concern when I see the same philosophy repackaged as living a magazine-worthy “trad wife” life. Been there, done that.
BUT, there is absolutely nothing wrong with living in the country. Or growing a garden. Or sewing or knitting or cooking a meal from scratch. Or even homeschooling. Or wearing a dress and looking pretty. The problem is the idealization of these things as the means to happiness and fulfillment, or worse, the means to godliness and fulfilling God’s plan for the “Christian family.” You have to torture the Bible to get it to say that. Folks, the world is a much bigger, more wonderfully diverse place, and living in a silo nurtures fear3, not love of your neighbor.
Let’s bring this meandering back to the point. It has taken me over a decade to untangle enough in my nervous system to again want to enjoy being in my kitchen sometimes, feeling like I can be creative there without my chest getting tight and my stomach knotting up. There were times when I was in the grocery store that my brain would fog over as I would try to think about what I needed to buy to make some simple meals. Do you see what I’m getting at? The burdens of the lifestyle I thought I had to live caused my body and brain to revolt at the idea of returning to those past practices, even though I was no longer in that milieu. This is a small example of what C-PTSD can do.
Mental health and physical health are inextricably linked. As James K.A. Smith says, you are not a brain on a stick. Your brain and your gut are connected through your nervous system, particularly through the vagus nerve, which is why many of my clients with C-PTSD have stomach problems, as their cortisol-flooded, inflamed vagus nerves hinder the digestive system from functioning well because the body believes it needs to stay in survival mode. Eating in a way that is supportive of your gut health, as well as using tools that calm down that hyper-vigilant vagus nerve, is important to overall well-being.
So I’m starting to get back in the kitchen. And take some deep breaths as I do.
Something I’ve been excited to try recently was making yogurt again. We eat a lot of it already, but I saw a suggestion for how to make a gallon of it and wanted to try. It works! It’s like magic to see milk turn into yogurt. I used my Instant Pot to do it–I was so glad I didn’t give it away after not using it for such a long time. It was patiently waiting for me in the back of the cupboard. My daughter-in-law told me that her family in India used to just stir yogurt into milk and leave it overnight on the counter, but she lived in a warm climate where that was perhaps a little more reliable. Here’s how I made my own big batch of yogurt, a fermented food that is good for your gut.
Easy Yogurt in the Instant Pot
Pour a gallon of milk (I used non-fat) into the metal insert of the Instant Pot.
Secure the lid and push the yogurt button, then push “Adjust” to “More” until it says “Boil” on the display.
Let the milk boil until the the message says “Yogt,” then carefully open the lid and check the temperature (it will initially be around 180 degrees), waiting until it goes down to 115 degrees (this will take awhile).
Whisk in a small container of plain yogurt (with live active cultures; any brand will do). Put the lid back on and secure it.
Press the “Yogt” button, which will set the timer for 8 hours. You can be done at that point, but I wanted to ferment mine for much longer because that is supposed to be better for gut health, but it does make the yogurt more tart–so I adjusted the timer using the + button, for 20 hours. I started the process late in the morning, so it was ready the next morning.
When the yogurt is done, open the lid and take out your finished yogurt! There will be a lot of whey. You can just drain it off or save it for cooking with beans or adding to other recipes (like bread or muffins). I wanted my yogurt to be thick like Greek yogurt, so I put it in a large colander with very small holes until a lot of whey had drained off. You can set aside some of it to drain longer in the fridge to make it into thicker “yogurt cheese” that you can spread on toast or use in recipes that call for cream cheese.
There is so much research about the impact of food on emotional well-being. There are psychiatrists now suggesting dietary changes, not just prescribing medication for mental illness. The Integrative Psychiatry Institute has a lot of helpful information about this. In the article linked above it says: “The most evidence-based intervention you can make is to consume as wide a variety of plant-based foods rich in fiber (a type of prebiotic) as possible. Fermented foods like yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, and kimchi can introduce beneficial bacteria (probiotics) directly to the gut. Remember, everything in moderation is often more sustainable than always eating one type of food. Limiting processed foods is recommended.”
In the movie, frustrated by Vizzini constantly repeating, “Inconceivable,” Inigo Montoya replies: “You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.“ (I John 4:18, NIV)