The middle of the bed

Tag: friends

  • 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.

  • Yoga

    I have always had an odd obsession with perfection, with what it would take for me to be the perfect version of myself. As someone chronically desperate to be loved, perfection seems like a great shortcut. Perfect me wouldn’t waste money or upset anyone ever, she would exercise regularly and never let anyone down at work. She would drink less, sleep more, eat right. 

    And I swear I’ve tried, I’ve committed to Saturday morning yoga classes or booze free months and I at least look at how long public transport will take before I call an Uber.  But inevitably (and embarrassingly quickly) there’s a Saturday morning brunch invite from a cousin I haven’t seen in months, a woman in my favourite Whatsapp chat that needs a hand or a new mum desperate for her first post-breastfeeding wine on a Friday night and my rubber arm is ½ way out the door in a leopard print coat with yoga long forgotten. It surprises no one who knows me that I can’t get this balance right and I’ve long suspected if any of my friends eyes get stuck in a rolled position I will be to blame. 

    In the weeks after my lil life implosion I wanted so badly to do the ‘right things’. I wanted to get off the floor (sometimes quite literally) and be the perfect single mum moving forward. ‘you have to look after yourself’ said the person who knows me best. And god have I tried. I set myself morning routines and evening routines, I dragged myself out of bed to ‘take deep breaths of fresh air’ I joined yoga classes where tears would stream down my face during still moments and boxing classes where my anger would bubble to the surface and the poor 55 year old woman I was paired with looked on in horror as I kicked a boxing bag with such force the instructor kindly recommended a private trainer.

    I pivoted between purposeful teary isolation, ‘doing the right things’ and then true to character blow-outs where I’d masquerade as a woman fit for public until two drinks in and one too many head tilted ‘so how are you going’s’ and I’d be spilling my sob story so darkly that more than one bartender overhearing me, refused to let me pay for my drink (cheers to the bartenders of Melbourne you have made me feel both seen and deeply pathetic). I’ve been a chaotic buzz-kill wild-card capable of ruining pretty much any social event for at least one person before disappearing into the night leaving the people who love me both concerned and fairly annoyed. A special level of self absorbed I’m cripplingly ashamed of the next day.

    And yet there they were, week after week, relentlessly there for me… these people I love. They have fed me and listened to me, sat with me and wiped my tears and checked in on dreaded ‘handover days’, they have driven interstate, they have told me to go easier on myself, given tough advice and said the sassy things you’re not supposed to say about someone’s ex that you they really need to hear. 

    And I’d love to say that the moral of this post can be neatly tied up in a bow, something about how choosing people over yoga comes back in some kind of cosmic karma. Realistically though, I should probably get back to Yoga.

    But I have learnt something in the depths of what I keep obnoxiously calling a ‘hard season’. I have been given grace through some truly undignified moments and I have never been further from perfect. But I sure as hell wasn’t perfect before either, and it’s almost like…. maybe, curiously… they might love me anyway.