Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 154728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
He’d thrown himself into the role of ‘stay at home dad,’ though I had urged him to do something other than that, like write a memoir. His new agent let it slip that he’d been offered many book deals. Kane was a literary lover and had an extraordinary story.
He was in Portland then, meeting with publishers, on my urging.
Tides was opening in two weeks. I had been toiling over the menu all throughout the day, writing and rewriting it. My decision making struggles were not just reserved for baby related things; it seemed they had seeped into an area of my life I had previously thought was untouchable. Unbreakable.
Doubt gnawed at me that this restaurant was a mistake.
“I didn’t hear your bike,” I called to Kane as the door opened then closed behind him. “She’s not sleeping. You didn’t have to push it up the drive again,” I laughed.
Mabel laughed along with me from her highchair, squeezing a piece of banana in her little fist, elated at the resulting mush.
It was a process, my accepting the mess that Mabel had to make in order to discover food, to learn. To understand that most everything I made ended up on the floor and that the bigger mess she made, the more delighted she was. Until it came time to clean her up. Then she made it clear that she thought we were trying to torture her.
Yes, it was a process. But one I was starting to enjoy. Motherhood started to feel comfortable, like it fit, like it might’ve been made for me instead of something that I was trying to cut myself into shape for.
Some days were harder than others. But I had Kane. He was unflinching in his support of me, of us. There were times, moments, when he did things that communicated the ways in which his life hadn’t changed and I had. Small things. It was hard not to turn them into larger things, to not catastrophize our entire relationship and its trajectory. To believe that he wanted me to be nothing more than a wife and mother.
Except he’d proven the exact opposite was true. Yes, he’d bought me the restaurant—which I still battled with my feelings about. But it wasn’t because he wanted to own me or be my ‘boss,’ to hold it over me. It was given freely, a part of myself he was giving me back.
And he was happy to be a stay-at-home dad, to ‘retire’ from his title as ‘The Devil.’ Granted, he was still planning on taking sponsorships here and there to ‘bulk up Mabel’s college fund,’ even though it was already bursting.
I knew he didn’t want to entirely let go of the opportunities because part of him was still the poor boy struggling and going hungry.
He’d communicated that one night. “Except now I know you’ll feed me, Chef,” he murmured against my neck.
And I was working on that. Feeding him. Feeding us. Feeding myself. The restaurant was truly coming together. I had finalized a menu after testing it, retesting it then changing it completely. It had taken me four times as long as it used to, but that was okay.
I’d interviewed for staff, gotten licenses, approved the interior layout, had the time of my life designing my kitchen. It was a little extravagant considering it was going to be a mid-scale restaurant in a small town, but Kane had insisted on it, and I’d found it hard to argue.
I was dying to be in a kitchen that was mine, to reclaim a little bit of my old identity and mesh it with this new one.
I had spoken to a therapist who diagnosed me with postpartum anxiety—not an uncommon thing with high achieving women, apparently. The transition from the control we had to perfect our everyday lives to the utter chaos that was parenthood and the chasing of a perfectionism that didn’t exist was a bit of a recipe for disaster.
It was nice to have a label, a diagnosis. There were many things I could do to combat it, though the ‘make sure you’re getting enough sleep’ was a laughable concept.
I thought about her death often. About the myriad of ways she could be taken from us. Suffocating in her sleep, choking, some obscure sickness, a food allergy. The list of things took my breath away and panic crawled over my skin knowing how fragile she was. How helpless I was.
But I was learning to let go of things, to not try so hard to control everything since an eight month old was uncontrollable. I tried to trust that nothing would happen to her.
“Babe?” I asked Kane, still looking at Mabel’s smile. At the time, she was craning her head to the hall to look for her father. She was obsessed with him and usually let out squeals of delight whenever he arrived home, even if he had been gone for less than an hour. He’d been gone since early morning, so surely, she’d be screeching.