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One year ago this week, my cookbook Dinnertime SOS: 100 Sanity-Saving Meals Parents and Kids of All Ages Will Actually Want to Eat was released into the world. It was a huge career moment for me—landing on the New York Times Bestsellers list was not something I even let myself dream was possible. Spoiler alert: It was! And it came during one of the most challenging personal moments in my life.
This is (some of) the story of what it was like to promote and sell a family cookbook—and feed my own kids—when my family as I knew it was forever changing. It’s not the story of getting a divorce, but how I suddenly could see where I needed to drop my internal checklist of mealtime “shoulds” in order to make everything easy enough for me to be able to do every day.
Food has always been comfort and security, ritual and routine. A familiar part of our day. But I realized I’d been using our dinner table, to some degree, as a sort of proof to myself and the world that I was a “good mom” even when I was unhappy and overwhelmed. Which created a loop of pressure that was distracting at best, and really undermining my ability to be fully present with my kids at worst.
I know that these intense phases of life—job or school transitions and adjusting to a brand new family schedule, grief, a new baby (and lack of sleep), divorce, or another challenging phase—often throw us for a loop. And there can be an urge to sort of throw everything out the window, reinvent the wheel, and start from scratch when what we’ve been doing isn’t working. But I wanted to keep the core of our food life—and all of the how-to-type logistics that I spelled out in the cookbook because I knew they worked.
I just needed the emotional distance to give myself true freedom from judgement and guilt. Frankly, I knew I didn’t have the brain space for it and I finally realized I deserved more.
So here are the small steps I took to really let go of the idea that I’m “winning”—or “failing”—at motherhood based on what’s on our dinner table…or what the kids eat or don’t eat. Which was, in retrospect, the shift I needed to make in order for it to be possible for me to cook dinner and enjoy that time with my kids…when all I really wanted to do was lie down.
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