The middle of the bed

Tag: food

  • Sad Soup

    When I am sad I make soup. We call it sad soup.

    It is not very good soup, not even particularly edible soup. It is not nourishment, not a gesture of love for anyone else or a moment of self care. It’s just a process, a compulsion. 

    I reach through shockwaves to gather whatever scraps in my home make up some kind of soup and I start mindlessly peeling, mindlessly dicing, mindlessly stirring. 

    The people who know me best know this about me, they whisper it like a code… ‘she’s making sad soup’….’oh shit’. 

    The soup is not made with love, it is made with sadness and it tastes like it. One of the kindest allowances I have made for myself over the last few years is to forgive myself the waste and simply throw the soup away at any time in the process. There is something deeply pathetic about forcing yourself to consume your own meaningless soup, never mind subjecting anyone else to it and even with good intentions and good ingredients the soup inevitably tastes fucking awful.

    This year I have made my fair share of sad soups. But, I have also realised as i sat down to write this, that I have been one myself. 

    Operating on some kind of unhinged auto-pilot I have gathered the scraps of my life, tried to figure out some kind of recipe and stumbled along to make something of it all. I have stirred the bejeezus out of everything , regularly added more liquid than necessary, made mindless mistakes, forgot what I was doing, turned perfectly good ingredients to mush or quit 1/2 way and tossed the lot.

    I’ve served myself up unbalanced and overdone only to see distaste in people’s eyes and I’ve refused to serve myself at all, simply turning off the lights to go to bed and deal with the mess in the morning.

    Today, for the first time in my very own home, sitting in the kind of sadness I always try to ‘sad soup’ my way through I reached for my big purple pot.

    I found the stock I made and froze last week when I had a burst of energy and a chicken.

    I grabbed the leftover vegetables from the first dinner party that filled my new table with friends and wine and laughter on Friday night.

    I chopped them slowly with the knife I bought in Japan with the woman who has guided me so wisely and patiently this year on what to cut and what to keep.

    I chatted on the phone to my mother, hope for future plans bubbling between us while the soup simmered gently on the stove I have finally figured out how to use.

    I let it do it’s thing, deciding I was in no rush to throw it out because the bin is all the way downstairs and my new home is warm and cozy and filled with children laughing and summersaulting around the living room.

    I added exuberant amounts of salt with the thought of one of my favourite chefs tipsy and barefoot giggling in the kitchen with me proclaiming that salt fixes almost anything,

    I added a leftover bunch of the fresh herbs I bought for a special dinner for the chef I love and remembered us all laughing until we could barely breathe as we surveyed the massive error in my herb volume.

    And just before I went to throw it away I tasted it once more….

    And to my shock, for the first time in a long time,  just like me….

    It’s ok. 

    It’s just taken some time, some patience, The perfect knife, a bit of hope, some fresh herbs and the love of two chefs.

    And I am ok.

  • Lasagna

    I once read something that said that the key to divorce was ‘learning to sleep in the middle of the bed’. It was a metaphor that tickled me even when the concept of divorce seemed like an impossibility from the comfort of my very long term relationship. In hindsight, maybe it captured me because subconsciously the thought of centering myself in my own life was incredibly exotic. I started sharing my pocket money and planning life for two at fifteen. I may have been raising my hands like an ‘ independent woman’ on underage nightclub dance floors but I somehow went and lived a life Destinys Child were definitely not singing about.

    Still, I’m a sucker for a shortcut, so in the 10 weeks since my marriage spectacularly and permanently imploded, I have been fixated on learning to sleep in the middle of the bed. I’ve tried just placing one pillow in the middle, I’ve tried trapping myself in with pillows on either side, I’ve meditated with determination on my place and moved myself back into the middle over and over through one sleepless night after another. But still, I wake up, every morning, as I always have, hair as askew as me, on the right hand side of the bed. 

    I’m learning at the moment that there are actually an alarming number of things I assumed I was capable of that it turns out I’m not. It’s quite de-stabilising to learn at 38 that you are in reality only ½ competent, but here I am, learning where the bins go and how to cook rice and where to put water in a car, even though I know how to do our taxes and bake the perfect birthday cake and run a board meeting. 

    The night I realised my relationship was beyond saving I sat alone in an airbnb and ordered lasagna, a desperately needed comfort on the last night of the holiday from hell. In the days after the end a beautiful friend bought a huge lasagna over and it sustained me for days and then weeks as I re-heated tiny frozen portions and felt her care. I haven’t been able to make it though because it turns out, that much like my life, it’s always been a group project. He did the chopping, I made the ragu, he made the bechamel and then I assembled the lasagna we’ve been making side by side for 23 years. It turns out ‘I’ didn’t actually make lasagna ‘We’ did. 

    But it’s rainy today, a dreary flat Saturday at the end of a hard week. My heart is fragile and I’m home on ‘my weekend with the kids’ and my daughter wants lasagna and quite frankly so do I. 

    So, I diced and sauteed and stirred and googled and much like the water and the bins – I figured it out. And now the smell of lasagna is wafting through my home and there’s truffle in the bechamel instead of nutmeg because I love truffle and soon my daughter will decide that actually she doesn’t love lasagna and wants toast, but I don’t care. I’m going to marvel at the lasagna I made by myself and I’m going to share it with my friend who is coming over to check on my heart….

    … and tonight I’m just going to go to sleep on the right hand side of the bed and see where I end up because I mightn’t have the hang of centering myself in my life just yet, but not being able to make a lasagna is not very ‘independent woman’ of me and I’m sure as hell not going to let Beyonce down again.