Hey you.
First off: There’s a whole bunch of brand new (and gorgeous) pens in the shop. Somewhere around 20. Mostly Fidget Pens, but there is an Apollo in there I’m pretty proud of. (That one took some finesse.)
And off we go.
Sometime in the last year or so my middle kiddo (who is a college student as of this writing) took a decade’s worth of seasoning off of my wok. He didn’t realize that carbon steel woks are like cast iron, in that they are supposed to have and leave that hard, shiny, dark coating on them. He didn’t know better, so I wasn’t mad or upset with him for scrubbing the wok right back to its raw metal state. However, I didn’t have the heart in me to re-season my wok. It’s a bit of a process, and since I was barely eating anyway (and definitely not cooking much) it just didn’t seem important enough. I just put it back on top of the fridge, knowing full well that even if I oiled it, it’d still get rust spots that would cause damage until I did.
Loss is a whole lot like an 18 year old man with a stainless steel chainmail scrubby pad and stern directions to get the kitchen really clean or else: it’s going to leave your heart (and your wok) raw.
The wok was one of the first things I bought after Steve and I moved in together, and my first real kitchen purchase after my divorce was final. I still remember buying it, how excited I was that things were finally stable enough that I could think about buying a $13 wok for that tiny apartment kitchen. Plus, Steve and I cooked together, too. It was one of the things that We Did. Cooking, building things, and yard work, but especially cooking. So that wok got some use, it was an easily justified purchase, even on our shoestring budget. Cooking for each other was something we did to say we cared, that we loved each other – we both came from Food Is Love families, and neither of us would cook for ourselves. But give us someone to love, and we would. Then we found each other, and we cooked together.
You would think that I’d have noticed the connection between my struggling to eat and reluctance to cook the last few years with grief sooner, right? Especially considering that I stopped eating entirely the first week after he died, and that it was a year before I was able to really eat meals. It wasn’t until around Thanksgiving this year that I connected all the dots: I stopped eating and cooking because that’s what we did together… and I just didn’t want to do those things without him. It took me 22 months to figure that out.
It’s two years as of this month, and I re-seasoned my wok this weekend.
Not because I felt some kind of renewal of hope, or wanted a connection to the past joys and memories, or that I was remembering who I was with him. I wish I could say something Hallmark-worthy like that and then talk about how his memory is now a blessing by way of the wok.
No, I re-seasoned my wok because I like eating beef & broccoli stir fry and I had gotten tired of it sticking to the wok when I used it.
That’s the important part, that simple bit right there. I caught it while I was heating up and wiping each section with cooking oil, as the kitchen filled with smoke from the occasional flare up: I cared that it was getting stuck and I knew how to fix it… and I was fixing it. I was fixing my wok so I could cook and eat something I liked with less frustration. I cared about something food-related. It wasn’t much, but it was more than had been there before. That’s healing! That’s progress! YEAH!
Don’t laugh – when healing isn’t linear, you celebrate every bit.
See, here’s the thing: They totally tell you that it’s normal to not want to do things when you’re grieving, or after loss, or major changes. That it’s part of grief, and change causes grief for lots of us. They say just be gentle to yourself, and you’ll know when you’re ready to try things again, when you’re feeling up for things again, when it’s the right time. What they don’t tell you is how you know for each one. Yes, each one, because you don’t get them all back at the same time. It’s a process of picking them back up, sometimes slowly, trying to figure out if this is something you have any hope of carrying again, maybe juggling would work?
In this case, I found myself standing in a smoke-filled kitchen re-seasoning my wok, remembering that I was a really damn good cook, and, hey, remember how happy food made everyone when I made it? Remember what it was like to feel happy in a kitchen, to eat for more than survival, remember what it was like to be alive and experience food when you ate? Maybe it’s time to remember that we have a body and it’s okay to still be alive in it, even if he’s not here. My experience matters too, you know?
And, if you’re anything like me, there you’ll stand, remembering. Only, this time, it’s not just them or the past, but also yourself. You’ll start to believe, all over one more time, that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to feel alive like that again – maybe it’s time.
You’ll have to drag yourself through those things more often than not at first. It will still mostly suck for a while yet. But you’ll do it, because now you understand that sometimes you only know it’s time because enough is enough. Because you’re tired of waiting around and being sad, and you want something of that old happy back.
Sometimes, you realize, sometimes, you have to decide it’s time.
A. Markov
PS: It’s okay if it’s just a small step – like re-seasoning your wok – too.
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