A Very Silly Thing I Am Angsting Over

Through a combination of targeted approaches over the past six months, I feel like I have effectively reduced my overall anxiety level. I notice some anxieties no longer really bother me at all – they only linger in expectation form, like a phantom anxiety that I expect to bubble up but never does. (Perhaps this is a brand NEW anxiety, although it doesn’t ACT like anxiety.) 

Other anxieties remain. I think it is impossible to live a life 100% free from anxiety; even the most laid-back people in my life, after all, have their Things. But sometimes the things I stress about are so SILLY, worrying about them seems completely inexplicable… and yet I cannot stop bumping up against them, like a ring I twist unconsciously on my finger or a mosquito bite I can’t help but scratch. 

I am going to share the current mosquito bite with you, in hopes that a) putting it into words acts as a sort of soothing salve and b) I am not the only person who angsts over things that are ridiculous yet nonetheless persistently irritating. Please. Please. Tell me all the ridiculous things that keep you awake at night.

A bunch of my loved ones are gathering to celebrate A Momentous Occasion and I cannot join them. Out of some sort of mishmash of FOMO and Wanting To Show I Care, I suggested to the host that maybe I could supply breakfast for one morning when everyone is together. 

The host responded with positivity and gratitude. Yes, my overture would be welcome and appreciated.

Almost immediately, I regretted giving in to this generous impulse. Because I am NOT GOOD AT THIS KIND OF THING. This is a task that requires phone calls and guessing what other people might want in terms of quantity and flavor. This is a task that requires, possibly, using DoorDash or UberEats or one of the many food delivery services I have never once used in my life. This is a task that requires evaluating, based on online information, whether a caterer/restaurant/café is going to provide good food and good value. 

The Occasion is taking place in a state I have never visited. Everyone is staying in an Air BnB together. It seemed, in my head, like it would be fairly easy to order donuts or bagels or breakfast sandwiches for everyone to be delivered to the house. But I was wrong! 

My first thought was to use Goldbelly to order something. I’ve used Goldbelly for various food gifts in the past, and it always seems to work out. (Unless my parents and sibling are shielding me from the awful truth…) But a) I couldn’t find what I wanted for under $250, which was more than I intended to spend, and b) my husband thought I was a huge weirdo for choosing that option when I could just order from someplace local. 

Oh. Okay. Right. 

So I researched some local places. Is it reasonable to put all my faith in online reviews and personal reaction to company websites???? Reasonable or not, that is where I put my faith. 

The first place I called took a message and never returned my call. When I called back, they said they were in the middle of a busy period and could I call back later. The second place I called rang and rang and rang. The third place I called was an on-site caterer, and they apparently only cater to their specific site. The first place, which I called a third time, once again took my information and never called me back. 

I decided I would order from Panera, which has a simple online order form and would deliver the food for me. And also, Panera isn’t, like, special or anything, but it’s decent. However, I mentioned this plan to someone whose opinion I trust. The response was an instantaneous and very firm, “Don’t do that,” and a quick google search to locate a fourth place (well, fifth, if you count Panera, which I am not counting so I’m not sure why I’m typing this parenthetical) for me to call. 

If I could have had this friend call the fourth place for me and place the order, I would have. I was Done, Dee Oh En Ee, with this task, except I wasn’t because the only thing worse than calling yet another breakfast place was telling the host I was reneging on my offer. Don’t think I didn’t strongly consider it. 

The fourth place answered the phone! They could put together a breakfast that sounded good! And they could deliver! They quoted me a price, although they “didn’t have the price sheet in front of them, so they were just estimating” and I said let’s do this. 

I emailed the host of The Occasion and let her know what I was planning, and confirmed the correct date and time and location. She responded with a thumbs up. (Not a literal or emojical thumbs-up, but with an affirmation that I was doing something that worked with her plans.)  

It seems to me that Other People have no problem with tasks like this. Either they would call Panera from the get-go, or they would quickly and easily find the exact perfect place to order breakfast from and order breakfast from that place, or they would tell the host “sorry, it’s not working out, can I contribute another way,” or they wouldn’t offer to provide breakfast in the first place, like a chump. So part of the anxiety stems from feeling like I am making a big messy ordeal out of something that should be SIMPLE and STRAIGHTFORWARD. And the other part of the anxiety stems from fear that I am going to fuck it up somehow. 

Today, the fourth place called me and took my credit card information. The price they charged me was quite a bit higher than the quote, but at that point, what could I do? I was already locked in. The date of The Occasion is too near to go back to the drawing board, and I am too worn out from calling all these places and thinking about this for WEEKS to contemplate doing anything else. 

And now I am waiting, very anxiously, hoping that the delivery goes as planned, and the food I ordered is good, and that I ordered ENOUGH FOOD, I am not even going to TELL YOU how much I ordered or for how many people because I am so stressed about it and so worried you will say OMG SUZANNE THAT IS WAY TOO MUCH/TOO LITTLE FOOD.

I even texted a family member who will be in attendance at this Occasion, and let her know that I’d placed the order and it was all set to be delivered at a specific time and directed to the host… even though this family member did not ask for this information, or volunteer to help in any way, and I do not want to make her feel like it’s now, somehow, HER responsibility. 

Also: let me be clear. I fully realize this is not about me. The Occasion is… A Momentous Occasion for my loved one, and there is a whole big to-do going on that has nothing to do with my measly breakfast contribution, and a crappy breakfast is not going to make or break an entire long weekend of celebrating. I GET THIS. My brain understands. But my body is not on board! It is all riled up. The My Breakfast Contribution aspect of The Occasion is all I can think about! What if the food is terrible? What if it feeds only half of the guests? What if everyone gets food poisoning?! (Food poisoning could break a weekend, I suppose.) Why am I worrying about such a small slice of the overall pie of The Occasion? WHY?????? Whatever it is, it will be a blip at most. (Unless food poisoning.) (Please, God, let there be no food poisoning.)

My husband says, “It’s the thought that counts.” And. Well. Sort of? But also… I don’t want to be The Person Who Sent Shitty Breakfast (or diarrhea, which is an entirely different kind of shitty breakfast).

I should have just kept my dumb mouth shut! I should never have offered to do anything! I should have simply offered to send cash to help fund An Event! 

This is the kind of thing that is itching and ITCHING and I cannot scratch it. I want to moan about it to my husband. I want to text about it to my friends. I want to call the host of The Occasion and triple check that I got all the details right and get her to tell me that it won’t even matter if it’s crap because everyone will be drunk on mimosas, or have her tell me that a third of the guests suddenly can’t make it, or have her assure me that there’s tons of other food in the house just in case I didn’t order the right amount (HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT AMOUNT TO ORDER OMG). I want to call my family member who will be on site and ask her to text me photos. I want to FLY TO THE STATE AND BE AT THE OCCASION AND HANDLE THE WHOLE THING IN PERSON OMG.

At least The Occasion will be over soon and I will no longer be troubled by the possibilities; I will know the outcome (because you know I am going to pester my family member until I get a report), and hopefully the reaction will fall somewhere in the range of “meh, that was okay” to “well, that was a pleasant little breakfast spread!” 

At the very least, I hope no one thinks, “Wow, we should have just gone to Panera.”

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I Know You Want a Playdate Play-by-Play

You are so lovely and kind and comforting and wise. I adore you, truly. Thank you. 

Also, just as an FYI: posting something highly vulnerable in the middle of the night – despite receiving kind, gentle, and understanding responses – may result in searing embarrassment. 

Moving on, let’s talk about playdates!!! It’s all playdates all the time over here, folks! 

We had two, on consecutive days, and they are now over, and they went okay. I feel more confident about future playdates, and have also reinforced my belief that back-to-back playdates are Too Much For Me.

Like many suggested, I allowed Carla to fill the kids in on our house rules (i.e., no shoes in the house, wash your hands when you come into the house, no food outside of the kitchen). As you predicted, no one complained. 

I mainly left the kids alone to do their own thing, but there were two hiccups with this plan during the first playdate. 

First, I had to unexpectedly re-do a writing project, so I needed focused time to work while the kids were playing. But of all Carla’s many toys, they seized on her small collection of remote-controlled animals/robots and brought them all downstairs – presumably because they move more easily on the hard flooring instead of the carpet. 

After I asked them not to spy on me with the walkie talkie robot, they abandoned this avenue of play. One of my rules is “no screens” – although there is a special dispensation for a movie once all other play options, including going outside, have been exhausted. But during the first playdate, the kids went into the basement and started playing music on the TV in the workout room. Carla does this when she “works out,” by which I mean she sets the treadmill to something like point-five miles per hour and then sings along to Dua Lipa and Ava Max while she walks. Fine, I can be flexible with this re-interpretation of the no-screens thing. 

After awhile, I noticed that I couldn’t hear the music anymore so I went to check on the kids… and they were sitting in the dark on the exercise bench playing some sort of “would you rather” game on the TV. They’d found it on… YouTube? Netflix? I honestly have no idea. The questions I saw were pretty tame, but I have NO IDEA what the content of the other questions was so I put the kibosh on this activity pretty quickly. 

Well. Lesson learned, and before the second playdate, I re-discussed with Carla my reasoning for not allowing screens, and talked with her YET AGAIN about why unsupervised internet surfing freaks me out, and I specified that even the downstairs TV is off limits. 

So. We were all set for playdate number two, and that went very smoothly. The kids played Truth or Dare most of the time, which consisted mainly of them daring one another to run into my office and shout something nonsensical or do a little dance. 

All of the other things I worried about – you are going to be SHOCKED by this, so brace yourself – turned out to be non-issues. I had Reasons for being near both of the friends’ houses, so we were able to pick up one friend and drop off the other, and one of their parents did the other half of the interaction. I loaded up on plenty of snacks, and the kids ate the snacks – except for the bananas, which I will now have to add to my already robust supply of frozen overripe bananas. I fed both kids dinner, and that worked out fine, although one of the kids didn’t want chicken nuggets so I had to pivot at the last minute. Thankfully, I had some meatballs in the freezer and she was amenable to eating those with some spaghetti noodles; my kid ate plain pasta. 

Because the kids had other activities, the duration of the playdates sort of fell into place organically. They ended up being about four hours each, which worked just fine. Time will tell whether Carla gets invited to the kids’ houses for playdates – although one parent said she was welcome anytime – but after everyone’s accounts of how infrequently their own kids got invited to playdates, I am no longer focusing on that particular worry; I’m sure others will move right in to take its place. 

You are so lovely and kind and comforting and wise. I adore you, truly. Thank you. 

Also, just as an FYI: posting something highly vulnerable in the middle of the night – despite receiving kind, gentle, and understanding responses – may result in searing embarrassment. 

Moving on, let’s talk about playdates!!! It’s all playdates all the time over here, folks! 

We had two, on consecutive days, and they are now over, and they went okay. I feel more confident about future playdates, and have also reinforced my belief that back-to-back playdates are Too Much For Me.

Like many suggested, I allowed Carla to fill the kids in on our house rules (i.e., no shoes in the house, wash your hands when you come into the house, no food outside of the kitchen). As you predicted, no one complained. 

I mainly left the kids alone to do their own thing, but there were two hiccups with this plan during the first playdate. 

First, I had to unexpectedly re-do a writing project, so I needed focused time to work while the kids were playing. But of all Carla’s many toys, they seized on her small collection of remote-controlled animals/robots and brought them all downstairs – presumably because they move more easily on the hard flooring instead of the carpet. 

After I asked them not to spy on me with the walkie talkie robot, they abandoned this avenue of play. One of my rules is “no screens” – although there is a special dispensation for a movie once all other play options, including going outside, have been exhausted. But during the first playdate, the kids went into the basement and started playing music on the TV in the workout room. Carla does this when she “works out,” by which I mean she sets the treadmill to something like point-five miles per hour and then sings along to Dua Lipa and Ava Max while she walks. Fine, I can be flexible with this re-interpretation of the no-screens thing. 

After awhile, I noticed that I couldn’t hear the music anymore so I went to check on the kids… and they were sitting in the dark on the exercise bench playing some sort of “would you rather” game on the TV. They’d found it on… YouTube? Netflix? I honestly have no idea. The questions I saw were pretty tame, but I have NO IDEA what the content of the other questions was so I put the kibosh on this activity pretty quickly. 

Well. Lesson learned, and before the second playdate, I re-discussed with Carla my reasoning for not allowing screens, and talked with her YET AGAIN about why unsupervised internet surfing freaks me out, and I specified that even the downstairs TV is off limits. 

So. We were all set for playdate number two, and that went very smoothly. The kids played Truth or Dare most of the time, which consisted mainly of them daring one another to run into my office and shout something nonsensical or do a little dance. 

Another unexpected – hmmm… “dilemma” seems too strong a word, but that’s in the neighborhood of how I’m feeling about this so we’ll stick with it – dilemma arose during the not-insignificant car rides to and from the playdates. It’s partially my fault, and I have now Set A Precedent, so it’s something to mull. I suggested that the kids take turns making song requests to liven up the car ride. They really enjoyed this, and I enjoyed hearing their adorable conversations about the artists they like. However, Carla is allowed to listen to a lot of music, even if it has questionable lyrics. I draw the line currently at hard rap and other words with frequent cursing or use of the N-word, but even Taylor Swift will throw out an F-bomb now and again. We’ve talked about cursing and how there is a time and a place, and Carla is pretty averse to it overall, so we feel that it’s okay in music. I prefer the radio edits, honestly, but I’m not precious about it. But… I don’t really know how OTHER PARENTS feel about this. For one of our playdates, I know the parents really well and I think they would be okay with it… but the other kid’s parents are not as familiar to me. She didn’t seem to request, like, exclusively Disney songs or KidzBop songs, so I am guessing her parents let her listen to a range of music, but may be a little more restrictive than my husband and I are on this topic. Anyway, there was a lot of whispering in the car over song selection, and I heard Carla say, “Oh, she won’t mind” about me, and I overheard some discussion about and then a decision not to request a song that had a curse word in the title. And there was a song Carla requested that has the F-word in it, so I very loudly and obnoxiously bleeped that out every time it came up, which the kids found both annoying and hilarious. I don’t know. Curse words exist in the world. These kids are ten and eleven and are aware of that. So I guess I don’t feel too bad about allowing a little bit of cursing in songs we listen to??? But also I feel a little unsure about the “right” stance to take, when I am charged with caring for another person’s kid. Your thoughts are welcome.

All of the other things I worried about – you are going to be SHOCKED by this, so brace yourself – turned out to be non-issues. I had Reasons for being near both of the friends’ houses, so we were able to pick up one friend and drop off the other, and one of their parents did the other half of the interaction. I loaded up on plenty of snacks, and the kids ate the snacks – except for the bananas, which I will now have to add to my already robust supply of frozen overripe bananas. I fed both kids dinner, and that worked out fine, although one of the kids didn’t want chicken nuggets so I had to pivot at the last minute. Thankfully, I had some meatballs in the freezer and she was amenable to eating those with some spaghetti noodles; my kid ate plain pasta. 

Because the kids had other activities, the duration of the playdates sort of fell into place organically. They ended up being about four hours each, which worked just fine. Time will tell whether Carla gets invited to the kids’ houses for playdates – although one parent said she was welcome anytime – but after everyone’s accounts of how infrequently their own kids got invited to playdates, I am no longer focusing on that particular worry; I’m sure others will move right in to take its place. 

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Dinners This Week

The thing is, for all my Big Dinner Plans from last week, I think I ended up making dinner twice. And once it was tacos and the other time it was pizza. The rest of it was convenience food from the freezer or from a variety of restaurants. 

We’ve had a pair of painters in the house for going on three weeks (this should be the last week, thank goodness). They are lovely people – quiet and friendly and good at their work. But I am deeply uncomfortable with strangers in my space. Additionally, the painters have been entering and exiting via the garage, which means they go through the kitchen semi-frequently. I find myself feeling Very Awkward about making food, including lunch, and have been unable to bring myself to prep anything for dinner while they are around, because they are either traveling right through the cooking space or working in/near it. (To allay at least some of the awkwardness, on my end at least, I have been bringing in occasional treats – donuts or some other pastry-type thing for breakfast maybe twice a week, cookies a couple of times, and last week I brought them lunch from a local shop.)  (Should I be buying them lunch and/or breakfast every day???? Sometimes I’m not here during those parts of the day, and what if they are just eating what I provide out of politeness???? Also, feeding two additional people one or two meals a day for 15 days seems… excessive???? Or am I being selfish and cheap???????) 

ANYWAY. I have not been making dinner with any sort of regularity, so the list below is highly aspirational. Especially because this is a Call Week, and my husband is unlikely to be home before 8:00 or 9:00 pm on any given day.

Dinners for the Week of October 16-22

• French Onion Soup: I already possess all the ingredients for this soup, so making it should be easy. But I was planning to make it yesterday and then got too tired from errands/football watching, so it didn’t happen. Hopefully I can drum up the enthusiasm to make it soon, though, because the leftovers are good and easy to heat up. (I do have some minor anxiety about whether my house will smell oniony once I make the soup, and whether that will bother the painters, even though logically I know they probably don’t care at all and just want me to make the occasional muffin available to them and then render myself invisible for the rest of the time they are in my house.)

• Sheet Pan Chicken with Zucchini: I grabbed some zucchini the other day, thinking it was such an easy vegetable to cook, and I already have chicken breasts in the freezer, awaiting their time in the sun, and having the ingredients to SUCH an easy meal on hand would give me NO excuse to resort to takeout. And yet the zucchini and the chicken remain unprepared and uneaten. Just move the chicken from the freezer to the fridge! Just wash the zucchini! That is 40% of the work right there!

• Oven Baked Pork Chops with Steamed Broccoli: Pork chops were on sale so I bought some because apparently Me In The Grocery Store is a totally different and much more with-it person than Me In My Well-Stocked Kitchen. I also have broccoli in the fridge I was supposed to eat last week. This is another extremely easy meal that I may still be unable to persuade myself to make.

• Some Sort of Curry: My husband and I had a date night recently during which we went to a massive Asian market a few towns over. We had so much fun wandering the aisles and picking out fun things to try (my favorite were the wasabi flavored Lays potato chips – yum!). Among the many things we bought were a few tubs of curry. I have some assorted veg in the fridge and plenty of meat options. Maybe I’ll try out one of the curry mixes. 

Time will tell whether I make any of these things, seeing as my intentions are even more halfhearted than usual.

If you meal plan, about what percentage of the meals on your list end up Made And Eaten by the end of the week? 

If you were to go on a food shopping and preparation date, what type of food would you shop for and what would you want to make?

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Things I Am Worrying About

Some of my biggest failings as a human include a predisposition toward extreme ambivalence, a tendency to catastrophize, a habit of worrying that a good thing happening means an equally bad thing will follow to balance out the universe, and a pattern of endlessly overthinking a decision once it’s already been made. All of these tendencies are rallying together right now, as we prepare to sell our current house and move into the new home we just purchased. I am a wreck of nerves and anxieties. I have not had a solid night of sleep in… three weeks??? (Hello, 3:00 am my old friend.) (WHY IS IT ALWAYS 3:00 AM?!?)

Let’s see if the old “get it out of your brain and onto the page” trick works today. 

I am worried that:

• we will move in and end up hating the new house for unforeseen reasons.
• my eye will never stop twitching and I will never have a full night’s sleep again.
• we will never sell our current house, will be stuck paying two mortgages until all our savings drains away, and then be forced to sell our new house at a loss.
• our realtor will tell us the ONLY WAY to sell our house is if we move the majority of our belongings into storage and we have to do that and then move those things into the new house. (My husband and I did a double move when we moved into our first apartment together prior to me starting grad school. IT WAS AWFUL.)
• I will not be able to find a handyman to do the work I want to do on our house and will have to do it myself (which I am WILLING to do, it will just be subpar work).
• none of our furniture will look good in the new house and we will have to spend gajillions of dollars on new furniture.
• encouraging my daughter to donate/give up [beloved baby toy] will ruin her life and she will hate me forever because of it.
• we will all hate the commute and feel like we are in the car all the time and it will ruin our lives. (The new house is QUADRUPLE our current commute to both school and work [although this is because our current commute is six minutes].) 
• Carla will be consumed with grief over leaving our neighbors and their dogs and will never forgive us for doing this to her.
• I will (continue to) be so consumed by The New House that I will (continue to) ignore the work of my heart, which is my writing, and ruin my life and future prospects as a mediocre writer.
• we will end up hating the flooring we have chosen (and ordered) and cannot reverse without significant financial burden. 
• dander from the sellers’ pets will have seeped into the walls of the new house and I will be Extremely Allergic for all of my days.
• my mother-in-law’s prediction of “there will be mice!” will come to fruition.
• some horrific calamity will befall us because we have been too fortunate in all other areas of our lives.
• there won’t be enough wall space for all the bookcases we want/need.
• we will end up hating our new neighbors.
• the new house will have some hidden deficit that the inspection didn’t find, and it will be costly and burdensome to ameliorate.
• (relatedly) our air conditioner will decide that now is the ideal time to die. 
• the primary bedroom, which is most definitely MUCH smaller than our current capacious bedroom, will feel TOO SMALL and I will hate it.
• I will fail to transform into the casual entertainer that the new house kind of demands I become and waste our fabulous outdoor space.
• prospective buyers who come to look at our house will TOUCH my STUFF with their HANDS and other BODY PARTS. 
• my failure to be purely excited about a circumstance that is objectively exciting indicates something awful and irredeemable about my personality.

Part of me believes (hopes) that this is a normal response to making a big, life-changing decision. Moving is a big deal, and so I am expending a lot of mental energy thinking about it. I hope, with time, I feel better about all these things. 

The last time you made a major decision, did you have similar anxieties? What was the biggest thing you worried about that turned out to be a non-issue? Were any of your concerns realized?

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Friday Randomosity: Of Frazz and Birthdays

What are you doing this weekend? I don’t even KNOW what I’m doing. Or maybe I do? I think my mom and I have plans to maybe go shopping? And while we do that, my dad is going to examine this segment of siding that has decided it is a ruffle. And then maybe I will make dinner? My husband also said something about going to look at outdoor furniture??? Was that this weekend???

I feel so overwhelmed by life – all good things!! everything is good and happy and extremely stressful! – that I can literally only think about the step immediately ahead of me. Right now, that looks drinking some water (per Sarah) and making lunch and doing a tiny brain dump. 

• This Is Just Mean: As you may have gleaned, I have been in such a state of frazz. SUCH A STATE. I keep doing this thing where my brain will smugly prank me and – this requires an example. I was sitting at Carla’s sports practice, scrolling through Twitter trying to work on my sorely neglected novel, when all of a sudden I saw a tweet that said, simply, “One word to describe Cancers” and my brain helpfully said “Your friend H is a Cancer.” And then my body went cold and my heart skipped because a) H is not a Cancer but b) her birthday was ten days ago did I even acknowledge it???? 

I did acknowledge it, both via text and in person, but it still took me several nearly-avoided-a-car-accident moments to recover from the horror of potentially forgetting a friend’s birthday. WHAT THE HELL, BRAIN? 

Especially what the hell because this has been happening all week. Little pinches in the back of the thigh that have been wildly (if momentarily) terrifying and – so far – completely unhelpful. I am doing the things, I guess, even if I am apparently not making a mental record of them having been done.

• I’m A Lot Like You: My brain has also been doing that thing (HI NICOLE) where it hyperfocuses on one or two lines of a single song, and then blares those two lines ad infinitum into my skull in the middle of the night. (The song in question is El Scorcho, which I quite like as long as I don’t think too hard about the lyrics.) (The narrator is an entitled dick, is my view when I do think about the lyrics, which I have been a lot because they are always elbowing into my thoughts. A girl does not owe you her interest simply because you have a thing for her. Also, maybe don’t read girls’ diaries?)

• Tiny Weezer Fan: Speaking of Weezer, if you also have a tiny Weezer fan in your household, I just ordered this T-shirt for Carla. It will be one of her birthday presents and I am so excited for her to open it. 

• Rev-Up of the Birthday Sads: We are getting SO CLOSE to Carla’s tenth birthday. I am excited and happy because it is a joy to see her grow up, but I am also a little sad. On the way to camp this morning, I literally started crying in the car simply because I thought about one specific moment from her birth. She was born with the umbilical cord around her neck, and was whisked away to the NICU pretty immediately after she was born. I couldn’t move my legs because of the epidural, plus I was shaky and vomity after giving birth, so I remember shrieking at my husband that he needed to go with her. She was brand new! And now she was all alone! Don’t let her be alone!!!! Obviously everything turned out just fine, but the thought of that little new-to-the-world infant, wrenched from her warm cozy womb into a cacophony of unfamiliar blaring light and sound, and then instantly separated from the voices she was accustomed to… Oh my god, it just breaks my heart. Still. 

• Shellacking the Sad with Other Anxiety! Yay!: So instead of thinking about and possibly dealing with my Feelings, I am masking the sadness with ridiculous worries that are not worries. My latest: Ten is a special age! Should I be doing Something Special? Like, especially special? We are having dinner at Carla’s favorite restaurant with all her grandparents, and then we’ll come home to eat cake (she now wants a vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream topped with raspberries, raspberry jam in between the layers, and a raspberry coulis on the side. “Simple,” she said.) (Maybe something like this? With vanilla instead of raspberry buttercream? Or this one, although it’s got cream cheese frosting instead of buttercream? Or this one, which sounds just right but has a few unusual ingredients that are making me squinty?) and open presents. Is there some sort of special You Are Ten type of gift I should be getting her? What is memorable about your tenth birthday? Or the tenth birthdays of people in your life? Can it just be a normal birthday or do I need to do something extra? And if “yes to extra,” what should that be??? Look at that. I am feeling less sad and more stressed as I type! 

• Pool Hair Do Care: Let’s ABRUPTLY change subjects! Carla is doing a lot of swimming this summer and her hair is not loving it. She has fine hair. It’s light in color. It’s long (below her shoulders). And it’s wavy. This plus repeated chlorine exposure all adds up to hair that feels brittle and does not brush well. I bought some special shampoo and conditioner designed to help with chlorine removal, but either Carla isn’t using enough of it or it needs more time to work. I’ve tried forcing her to wear a swim cap, but a) I can’t police her at camp and b) she’s already lost one swim cap and the other is so tight it gives her headaches and c) it doesn’t seem like the swim caps are actually water tight anyway. I am NOT a swimmer so if you have any swim-related advice, hair specific or other, I would welcome it. 

• Bloggy Book Club: I used the shampoo/conditioner purchase as an excuse to buy a copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I am eager to read as part of Engie’s bloggy book club in July. Are you joining us? I started reading it to Carla this week and her initial impression is that it is boring. I am not sure if she will have a secondary impression because she keeps rejecting my attempts to keep reading. We haven’t even made it through the first chapter! (I do not think it is boring. I think it’s fascinating.) It’s been more than a decade since I first read (listened to) this book, and I’m really excited to see if I love it as much on a second read as I did the first time.

• Summer Skirt Success: I think I already mentioned this, but I went on a bit of a buying binge in May and got a bunch of cute dresses. This skirt was among them and I wore it for the first time this week and LOVED IT. It is super light, and so long it skims the tops of my feet. I wore it with this bodysuit, which I also surprisingly really like. It’s a nice thick material so that you can’t see a bra underneath it. Well, I didn’t wear, like, a bright purple bra under it or anything so YMMV, I guess. But it’s very soft and I like how smmoth-to-the-body it is compared to a T-shirt; I always feel frumpy when I try to pair a T-shirt with a skirt, but perhaps that’s user error.

All right, I think that’s all I have today. Thanks, as usual, for listening. While things are no less busy around here – and are about to get even busier and more full of change – at least my houseguests are gone and I have the house to myself once more. Laundry is laundrying, the dishwasher is running (somehow we used every single non-specialty drinking glass that I own), and I am starting to feel a teensy bit more normal. My head is still full of Weezer, though. How stupid is it? I can’t talk about it. I gotta sing about it and make a record of my heart.

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Worry Hamsters, Flayed Face Syndrome, and Melodramatic Petunias

My usual methods for lulling the worry hamsters to sleep are not working. 

• I have tried making lists: seems to awaken additional worry hamsters, plus I keep forgetting about the lists I’ve already made and making new ones.
• I have tried long solitary walks: more time for thinking and worrying!
• I have tried distraction via TV, book, and endless scrolling of the internet: these work with varying degrees of success, but leave me feeling yucky.
• I have tried comfort eating: see above re yucky. 
• I have tried retail therapy, which is certainly fun. (By the way, Stitch Fix is KILLING it right now. I have liked nearly every single item they have sent me recently and I keep clicking, “yes, send me a new fix!” as soon as I pay for whatever I just bought.) I have a bunch of new clothes, including several new dresses and a very long skirt I love but have yet to wear. I dislike how people say “you’re so dressed up!” when I wear a sundress. Also, is age 42 too old to wear a shirt that might once in a while show a small sliver of your stomach? Kae influencered me to buy this shirt, but I have a very long torso and so the shirt doesn’t go quite to the top of my high-waisted jeans. My daughter and, I’m sure, my mother would say an emphatic YES, 42 is too old, or more particularly, I am too old (my husband’s take: “just don’t raise your arms”), but I have a friend who is in her later 40s who says WEAR IT and I’ve already taken off the tags and purchased a second shirt in a different color so I guess I’m a belly-shirt wearing person now. My mom and my daughter can go shake their heads sadly about me in another room. I did, however, return the dress to which my husband’s response was *a very tender and carefully worded version of* “I think you might be in an age range where a dress this short no longer looks appropriate.” But I didn’t return it because of that; I returned it because I hate my knees. And this dress – well, you know how some dresses are designed to showcase your décolletage or your back or whatever? This dress was designed to showcase your knees. And my knees get me around and do a great job of getting me up stairs but they are not show-worthy knees, you know? So I returned the dress, which was otherwise adorable and extremely comfortable.
• Oh right, I was listing things that I have tried to help prevent all the endless anxieties that keep scurrying around my brain.
• I have tried complaining to my husband, who has limited patience with reassuring people; why did he marry me when I need near-constant reassurance about everything????
• I have tried sending ridiculous hyperventilatey emails to blog friends, whom I hope have enough of an existing familiarity with my all-caps style of hyperbole to not think that I have completely unhinged. I am still semi-hinged. For now.
• I have not yet tried therapy, although I have broached the topic with my husband and have asked some offline friends for recommendations. Who has time for therapy, though?!?!?

The only thing that works even slightly is exercise – strenuous HIIT or strength training – but the downside is that the worry hamsters wake up immediately upon my heart rate returning to normal. And I just cannot exercise every second of the day. 

Speaking of exercise: do you have, as I do, Flayed Face Syndrome? (Which is a totally made-up non-disease that is not to be confused with Scalded Skin Syndrome, which is a real and horrifying thing.)

Every time I do something that raises my heart rate for a prolonged amount of time, I end up looking like a character in Game of Thrones whose facial skin has been peeled away to reveal the tomato-pulp flesh beneath it. Is Game of Thrones still a relevant reference point? Feels like a million years ago that it was the hot thing, but then again I don’t consume a lot of other media where “peeling off someone’s face” would be a reasonable plot point. 

The effect is quite alarming, let me assure you. Every time I have exercised in public to the point of my skin scarleting itself, people approach me to ask if I am okay. It is highly embarrassing. The redness lasts for a long time; I am writing this an hour after I finished a very heart-pumping exercise routine with Tracy Steen (this 45-minute HIIT workout) and my face is only just now cooling off to the “moderate to severe sunburn” level of redness. 

One of my friends keeps asking me to go to barre class with her. I would love to – I used to love barre, and haven’t been back since March of 2020, hmm wonder why, but I am pre-embarrassed about my tomato-y complexion. 

(Also keeping me from barre class: I am an extremely sweaty exerciser. And while that is tolerable at home in my own house, at least to me; I have not asked the other members of my household, I feel super self-conscious about it in public.)

I have been like this – a deskinned tomato person – for as long as I can remember. I don’t think there’s anything to be done about it, but maybe YOU have a solution? Perhaps that solution is simply, “avoid exertion,” which makes sense to me.

Recently, Lauren shared some rules to live by. One of them is that everyone deserves flowers. And even though buying flowers doesn’t soothe the worry hamsters, it does bring me a little ping of joy every time I see said flowers. So I am buying the flowers and I hope you are too. 

Currently, my dinner table has some lilies and some delphinium (at least, I think it’s delphinium) in a vase. But I also bought a bunch of flowers for outside my house. Including two hanging baskets of bright magenta petunias. There’s nothing like a basket of magenta petunias to lift a mood, if temporarily. 

Of course, one of them fell from the little hook that dangles the basket above my porch, and the basket broke. I transferred it into a pot and it seemed to be doing okay. Then I forgot to water both pot and basket for two days – two days during which we got significant rain, by the way – and when I went to check on them, the flowers had all wilted in an extremely distressing manner. I couldn’t bear to throw them out, so I watered them. And it turns out they were just being melodramatic. They look glorious once again. (Phew.)

In a fun twist, these petunias are the same hue my face turns after intense exercise.

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Feeding-the-Babysitter Fret, SNACKS, Old-Fashioned Blogroll

After posting yesterday, I was fretting (mildly, very mildly) about what we would eat for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. I like to have a plan, especially when it comes to food. Plus, the grocery store situation will get iffier as we get closer to the holiday – busier and then closed; that’s what I mean by “iffier.” I had to dash over to the grocery store yesterday afternoon, to find something to feed the babysitter.

(Did I already fret about this to you? I feel like I did, but I can’t find it in yesterday’s post. Oh well, if you have already endured this fret, perhaps skim down a bit or come back another day. Here, I will put in sub-headings to make it easier to skim.)

Feeding-the-Babysitter Fret

What do YOU feed the babysitter? Why is this something that I fret about so much? We rarely have a sitter, but when we do I almost always get a frozen pizza. My thought process around frozen pizza is a) easy and b) most people like pizza and c) Carla eats it. (She does not eat macaroni and cheese for instance. Or most other things.) But when I fretted out loud to my husband and daughter, a) my husband said “You ALWAYS get a pizza” and b) Carla said “I’m tired of pizza. I’d rather have chicken nuggets.” Oooh, two multiple choice lists in one paragraph. Wild.

These were highly interesting comments. First, yes, as I already told you, I do tend to ALWAYS get pizza. But we have had a babysitter, what, twice in the past three weeks? Is pizza two times in three weeks really that egregious? But more importantly, the babysitter last night was a different babysitter than the one we had last time. So she hadn’t eaten pizza three weeks ago.

Secondly, yes, Carla ate pizza three weeks ago with the other babysitter… and I think we made pizza last week or the week before as well, so that’s twice. In the meantime, aside from two nights of steak and maybe a night or two of salmon and maybe one night of tacos, I think she’s had chicken nuggets for every other dinner. (I am refraining hard from making a self-deprecating “I am such a shitty mother for feeding my child nuggets daily lol” comment because she EATS them which is better than not-eating other things and they are easy and they have protein and sometimes I get the ones that also have veggies in them and this is a very long-lived phase but it is just a phase that won’t last forever and I make up for my lack of meal creativity in other good and valuable ways.) 

Being a mom slash babysitter-food-decision-maker is so fun. So, so fun. 

Now, I don’t personally care to eat chicken nuggets. (I have never typed “chicken nuggets” so many times in my life.) But I think many people are fine with them, so I decided that I would just let the sitter make some nuggets for herself and Carla. But I still managed to fret about it. The dear wise friend to whom I fretted via text suggested I get pizza and chicken nuggets so that there were options. This was genius, so that’s why I went to the store. Plus, I figured I would come up with some wonderful idea for NYE / NYD food in the moment. The store was very busy. 

(By the way, I have been masking again in the grocery store, these past few weeks. Around Christmas, I noticed that quite a few more people than usual had joined me… but I went yesterday afternoon and I think there was only one other person in a mask.)

Snacks

While I was there, I did indeed experience a lightning strike of inspiration. For our extra special New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day meals, we are going to have SNACKS!

(By the way, when Carla was very small she pronounced the word “snacks” with kind of a swallowed H/N combo instead of the initial S. Like “HNacks.” So that’s still how my husband and I refer to them.)

We have not yet made the cranberry salsa for which I bought ingredients last week, so we will have that with pita chips. I picked up a small bag of Lay’s Potato Chips and some Southwest Ranch Dip, and I have plenty of vegetables to cut up for extra dipping. 

(Since this post is rife – RIFE – with parentheticals and asides, what’s one more? I first became acquainted with Southwest Ranch Dip when I was pregnant. My mother-in-law served it at her apartment one day – this was when my in-laws had an apartment in our city – and I loved it. Pretty much everything made me nauseated in those days, but crunchy greasy Lay’s chips dipped in that dip were HEAVEN.) 

(I am getting such a silly kick out of posting these photos, as though you don’t know what a bag of Lay’s looks like. I mean, maybe you don’t, but it seems unlikely.) (Images above and below from lays.com, marzetti.com, Instacart.com for some reason, and traderjoes.com)

In addition to chips and dip, I grabbed some mini pretzel dogs that I’m hoping my husband and child will eat (I eat one hot dog a year and it is normal sized and in a BUN not a pretzel; I do not care for pretzels) (are you beginning to get a clearer picture of why my child is so picky), and some feta and caramelized onion pastry bites. I also got a garlic and cheese flatbread, which sounds good but not terribly different from garlic bread; we’ll see. We have some cheese and crackers and some olives already. This is all way too much food already, but I have arranged a family outing to Trader Joe’s later today to see if we can find any other treats to add to the selection. Trader Joe’s is usually pretty great about having fun frozen treats.

Do you have favorite snacks to recommend? I would be willing to go to another location in addition to Trader Joe’s if there is something I NEED to try. I am serious about snacking.

As far as sweets are concerned, we have PLENTY. So many sweets. I ended up throwing out a bunch of leftover (and now stale) Christmas cookies, which was both sad and cathartic (the ratio of cookie plates for neighbors to cookies made was waaaayyyy off; lesson learned), but we have many other cookies and candies that kind family and friends sent. Most of it is chocolate, which I don’t like except in very specific situations. But as I prefer savory to sweet anyway, I will be perfectly happy with my Lay’s and dip. 

Old-Fashioned Blogroll

(I am feeling very smug about my choice to put subheads into this post, because there is no good segue between Lay’s and blog reading.)

Lately, my Feedly has been acting up. Either that or user error but PROBABLY it’s Feedly yes that makes the most sense. The problem is that I keep missing posts. I’ll think, “Oh, so-and-so hasn’t posted in a while!” and then I’ll go to her blog and she posted sixteen days ago and I missed it. I’m not opposed to leaving comments on old posts, not at all, but I like to know what’s being posted AS it is happening, not after the fact.

I was remembering how, in Days of Yore, I had a list of blogs I read on the side of my homepage. And every morning when I had a tea break from work, I would click through the list to read everyone’s posts. When I got back to regular blogging in 2016, my blogroll was so depressing; so few of the people on the list were blogging anymore! Some of the links went to defunct pages or spam sites!  So I deleted the whole thing.

But now… maybe it’s time to create a new blogroll. This wonderful blogging community I am so fortunate to be part of is robust, and I don’t want to miss anyone’s posts because of user a Feedly error.

Of course, the very idea of creating a blogroll raises frets like “what if I accidentally leave someone out?” So I need you to promise that if you have a blog, and for some reason it does NOT appear on this hazy future blogroll should I ever get it together enough to make one, that you would TELL ME because it was clearly I don’t think we can blame this on Feedly user error and not a deliberate decision to exclude.

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Fire Dreams, New Schedules, Dinners This Week

I woke up at 3:00 this morning from a bad dream. In the dream, I was in my childhood home with my husband. Somehow, my horse had gotten into the house, and we were trying to get him out but he was stomping around and bumping into the furniture and getting very riled up and upset. In the confusion, a fire started in the dining room. My husband was yelling, in a very loud monotone, “Fire! Fire! Fire!” That’s when I woke up.

My father is a volunteer fire fighter, and he’d told me yesterday about a recent fire that had devasted a dwelling. Plus, my husband and I started watching a new show this weekend and last night’s episode featured an explosion that resulted in a house going up in flames. So I think it’s safe to say that I had fire on the brain.

Nonetheless, it’s easy for a dream like mine to have the weight of prescience, foreshadowing, and I lay there in the dark house taking long deep breaths through my nose, trying to smell smoke, listening intently for the crackle of flames. I finally got up and did a walk-through of my home, which allowed me to fall back to sleep after an hour or so of troubled thoughts about my loved ones and whether the dream fire had escaped into any of their homes. 

We’re also about to begin the new school year, and, along with it, a new schedule of extracurricular activities. So perhaps my brain was merely venting its feelings of facing the unknown in an uncontrolled way. 

Carla will be doing extracurricular activities FOUR DAYS A WEEK, sometimes five, and that sounds completely bonkers I am aware. But these activities are ones she has been wanting to do for a long time, and we discussed the time commitment at length as a family, and my husband and I think they will be good for her. 

But I am fretting, as usual, about dinner. Dinner is a thing I can – usually – control, in a world that increasingly feels uncontrollable, but I haven’t quite figured out how I will make it work with our new schedule, so I am out of sorts. Horse-in-the-dining-room, fire-breaking-out out of sorts, it seems. 

Some weekdays will be normal – by which I mean Carla has no commitments after school is out. One day each week, she will have an extracurricular commitment that takes place after school but ends before dinner. I suppose on those days, I will need to have everything prepped and ready to go so that we can come home from the activity and I can immediately get food in the oven. Some weekdays, we will have a couple of hours of free time after school, and then the extracurricular activity takes place in the evening. My plan is to feed Carla dinner before we leave for her activity. But then, it will be quite late when we return, and she’ll need to shower and go to bed immediately upon arriving home. (To accommodate the new activities, we’re pushing her bedtime back a teeny bit to 8:30, as long as she still gets adequate rest.) So… when will my husband and I eat? 

(Recall, if you will, that our normal school-year dinner schedule is: Carla eats at 5:30 and is in bed by 7:30-8:00, my husband arrives home between 6:00 and 8:00, my husband and I eat between 8:30-9:00. Thanks, I hate it.) 

I wailed to my husband that we might be eating a lot of Lean Cuisine this year, and he very kindly said that that was FINE, we would make it work. But I don’t really LIKE Lean Cuisine (or its brethren), so I would prefer to find an alternative that isn’t a) fast food or b) nothing or c) me making dinner at nine o’clock at night or d) some variation on Lean Cuisine. (Although all of those are options occasionally, I don’t want to do any of them ALL the time.)

Making meals with built-in leftovers sounds like our best option. That’s why I have chicken fajitas on the menu this week. That way, I can eat before the activity and my husband can eat whenever he gets home. But I’m not great about knowing which meals will produce leftovers, and it seems to me that most of them (not all, but a lot of the ones I love: chicken paprikas! pizza! chili! spaghetti and meat sauce! tacos!) are the more decadent, less I’m Trying to Lose Weight ones that I would prefer to be eating lately. Sigh. Maybe Lean Cuisine is the way to go. 

Dinners for the Week of August 22-28

• Slow Cooker Chicken with French Wine and Mustard and Green Salad: Maybe this will produce leftovers? Also, the slow cooker is going to be my bestie this year, I can already tell.

• Sheet Pan Chicken Fajitas: I can definitely amp up the chicken and veggie quotient to get at least one, maybe more, days of leftovers out of this. 

• Thai-Style Pork Tenderloin with this Quinoa: The quinoa is leftovers-friendly, but I’m not wild about reheated pork. Hmmm. 

• Honey Garlic Sheet Pan Salmon & Brussels Sprouts: I’m fine eating leftover salmon, but my husband doesn’t particularly like it even on Day One. Hmmmmmm.

• 20 Minute Korean Beef Sesame Noodles: This doesn’t seem particularly leftovers-friendly, although that could be my own bias against reheating beef, but it sounds really tasty. 

What are some of your favorite Plentiful Leftovers meals? Also, your favorite make-ahead meals, quick meals, one-person-eats-now,-the-other-person-eats-later meals?  

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Out of the Food Fret Frying Pan and Into the Fire

I DID IT. Based on your supportive comments and gentle nudges toward action, I talked to my neighbor about her lovely lunch invitation.  First, I resolved to talk to her about it. Next, I cobbled together a script from several commenters’ suggestions, and I practiced it in the car and in the shower. Then, I waited for the Right Opportunity.

Carla provided me with a very nice segue – she was playing with the neighbor’s dog, and I needed her to come home to eat lunch. So I walked next door to fetch her. The neighbor came out and said hello, and I told her the reason for my appearance. Then I made my little speech: “Speaking of lunch, I was thinking about your kind invitation that we have lunch together, and I was so delighted by the offer that I said yes without thinking, but the truth is, Carla and I have so many silly food restrictions between us it’s not really worth getting into, and I was wondering if we could do something a little simpler, like afternoon tea or lemonade?” When I practiced it, I was Breezy and Casual and I had a little self-deprecating laugh in there, plus I also had a line about how of COURSE we wanted to spend time with her… and I also wanted to offer to bring homemade cookies or something… but it all came out in a rush and I forgot some of it. Oh well. At least I got out the important part which was LUNCH WILL NOT GO WELL.

Her immediate reaction was, “Oh no, sometimes I give Carla food when she comes over!” and so I had to reassure her that I didn’t mean allergies, but rather that Carla is the pickiest person on the planet. (Deftly trying to put the bulk of the blame on Carla’s food restrictions rather than my own.) Here is where Carla chimed in and informed our neighbor that I HATE tomatoes. So I am clearly not blameless. 

Once I had assured her she wasn’t doing something egregious by feeding my child cherries and red peppers, she seemed to relax a bit. She asked if something like tea and biscuits would be fine and I said that would be lovely and we discussed possible dates (though didn’t settle on anything specific). I am… so relieved. THANK YOU for helping me figure out the right way to handle this sticky situation. 

Now I can turn my Food Frets toward camp. 

Carla is attending a new camp this summer, and they don’t offer meals. So we will be packing a lunch. This is fine. 

Now that she is nearly NINE (which is nearly TEN, omg), I am looking forward to forcing encouraging Carla to make her own lunch (with supervision). We discussed some potential ideas for lunches, and her Ideal Lunch is a Lunchable. She only eats the ham Lunchable, and she only eats the ham, the cookies, and the crackers. She refuses to eat the cheese. If I pack her slices of other cheese – specifically cheddar that I have cut for her – she will eat that. 

So I was banking on sending her with Lunchables each day, and that if Lunchables become unavailable (again), or if she gets sick of them, we can pack a bagel and cream cheese with some pepperoni.

To round out her lunch, I would add other things she eats, like pickles and grapes and berries and grape tomatoes and red peppers and sugar snap peas. 

So I felt pretty good about our options. 

Then we got a note from camp that said NO PORK PRODUCTS. 

AHHHHHHHHH 

What now???

I suppose what we have to do is revert to PBJ. The camp is not a nut-free campus, so peanut butter is an option. Carla also enjoys eats sun butter, so she (and I) can make sandwiches every day. Carla eats sun butter sandwiches at school all year long, so I know she WILL eat them. But the last time I tried to make her one, she complained because my sandwiches weren’t the SAME as the ones at school. 

Weary sigh. 

I suppose I can just send her with the equivalent of Snack Dinner, but for lunch. But I am just not sure what the protein situation will be in that case. Snack Dinner usually has pepperoni or a couple of chicken nuggets or two.

I wonder if she would eat cold chicken nuggets (hork)? 

The reason that I am fretting about this is two-fold.

The first fold is that the camp really made a Big Deal about ensuring that we sent a LOT of food with our kids to camp. They emphasized that we should send MORE than we think – like, enough food for a week rather than a day. The kids work so hard and are so active, they are ravenous when they get to lunchtime. So I want to a) comply with the rules and b) make sure my particular kid is getting enough sustenance. 

The second fold is that Carla already eats next to nothing for lunch. I assume she eats something at school each day, although her reports are sporadic and often sound like, “Oh yeah, I ate a hamburger bun and a slice of American cheese.” So I am already facing an uphill climb when it comes to getting her to eat. I want to stack all the odds in my favor by ensuring her lunches are full of things she LIKES, not just things she tolerates. 

Well. I am not really asking for ideas, because I feel like it will be an exercise in frustration. (You, reasonably: “Send her with some chickpeas! Or beans! Or hummus! Or tuna salad! Or turkey! Or a protein drink!” and I will cringe at you while shaking my head because she will not touch ANY of that, and the list is endless.) (I am going to buy some turkey pepperoni and see if Carla will deign to try it.) I am just whining. New camp, new frets. 

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Bad Dreams, Fussy Eating, and Lovely Invitations

I have always dreamed extremely vivid – and usually super violent – dreams. But it’s been a long while since I’ve remembered any. 

This past week, I’ve had two that stuck with me after the fact. 

In one, I dreamed I was in an enclosure hiding from bears. The bears WERE going to attack, and if anyone wasn’t in the enclosure, they WOULD be mauled. There were other people who kept coming into my enclosure, but no one seemed to grasp the fact that BEARS CAN OPEN DOORS, and so they were leaving all the doors unlocked, so I had to keep going around and around to all the doors, locking them and shooting meaningful, grim looks to my fellow enclosees, none of whom seemed capable of grasping the fact that MAULING WAS IMMINENT. There were a LOT of doors, and the enclosure kept expanding. At one point, I went outside into a fenced-in area. The fences had barbed wire on top of them, but they were all only about two feet tall so that a really determined bear could simply step over them. 

I think we can all deduce what particular anxiety THAT dream is about.

The other dream is less memorable, and less perilous. But no less upsetting, for me. In the dream, I dropped Carla off at someone’s house for a playdate, and the mother invited me in to join everyone for a snack. The snack was bananas (which I do not eat), but Carla hissed at me, “You have to be polite.” So I ate a piece of a banana. And the host cut off another slice of banana, so I ate that too. And another. And another. Even though I haven’t eaten a banana since… preschool? I can still feel that mushy, sickly sweetness in my mouth. 

This dream, too, has a direct source. Our lovely neighbor has invited me and Carla over for lunch. The date is still pending, but oh my goodness I wish I could get out of it! 

Eating at other people’s homes has always been a HUGE source of anxiety for me. While I do eat a large variety of foods, I have a lot of super picky aversions. It’s not as easy as saying, “Oh, I have an allergy to X” and then the host just doesn’t cook with X. The list is so long I could not even hope to cover it all.

I remember, as a kid, DREADING going over to other people’s houses to eat. Just absolutely finding it awful. I have a vivid memory of sitting at a friend’s dining table with her whole family as they ate what was, I’m sure, a perfectly lovely meal, and I was just choked with anxiety because I did not want to eat any of it. And I tried to eat things here and there – the bread, maybe – and my friend’s mother was scolding me to clean my plate. It was awful. I don’t think I ever ate at that friend’s house again. In fact, unless someone was clearly and definitely serving pizza or tacos, I don’t think I ever ate at ANYONE’s house again.

I will never do the ”clean your plate” thing to Carla and I will never force one of her friends in my care to eat something she doesn’t want to. But that’s children. I am a grown adult. I should be able to go to someone’s house and eat the food. And yet. It is very anxiety producing, because I am equally afraid that a) I will have to eat something I dislike or b) I will offend the host by rejecting something I do not want to eat. 

I would say that my husband and I only rarely eat at other people’s houses. We have two sets of friends with whom we dine occasionally, and I feel like they are close enough friends that I can say, “No, I don’t eat lamb” when they ask, in advance of the dinner, if we eat lamb chops. (I say it regretfully, and embarrassedly, but with great relief.) But with the vast majority of people, you just show up! And eat the food they serve! I remember going to a new friend’s house and they served an absolutely beautiful meal of which the main course was chicken parmesan. Each breast was just smothered in tomatoes, which is probably my Number One Most Reviled Food. I cannot eat tomatoes; I have tried. I think I tried to be surreptitious in how I scraped them off the chicken, and then I helped wash the dishes, and I am SO hopeful that the host didn’t notice. (I am guessing the host noticed; I would notice. I would then, as host, fret that the food was bad or that I’d made something unpalatable to one of the guests.) Another time, we went to a friend’s house and she served chili with chunks of tomatoes in it. I ate around the tomatoes, but it’s so hard to do that in an unnoticeable way, and yet I cannot eat the tomatoes. I WISH I COULD. If I had access to a genie, and could only make selfish and self-serving wishes, I am pretty sure “make it so I love tomatoes” would be one of them.  

All this talk about tomatoes is making me queasy.

Along the same lines: Carla eats nothing. She is FAR more picky than I am and has not developed the techniques I have honed over the years for eating things she doesn’t like but can stand, or taking (as my mother-in-law calls it) a no-thank-you portion of something she doesn’t want, or trying something that doesn’t look appealing, or swiftly moving an item to her husband’s plate for him to eat instead.  

So now, this lovely, wonderful woman has extended this lovely invitation… to two people who eat NOTHING… and I not only have to somehow overcome my own anxieties about eating but also model good guest behavior to my child. Ugh ugh ugh. (What if she serves egg salad, a food I do not think I could force myself to eat??? Or some kind of lunch meat??? Or almost any normal lunch food????????)

Is there any way, after I have already said, “Oh that sounds lovely” to the neighbor, to now go back and say something like, “Carla and I have a bunch of really fussy food aversions – would it be possible to come have a glass of lemonade instead?” Is there any way?????? There isn’t, is there. I can almost picture her face falling as we reject her LOVELY invitation. Which is almost – but not quite – as bad as facing the Unknown Food. 

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