Her Stew
I recently reintroduced meat into my life—turkey and chicken, that is. I still cannot bring myself to consume ruminants, or anything that walks on four legs. Never truly developed an appetite for land meat. My reverence for land animals is deep, a sentiment that extends to all creatures, actually. Growing up in a coastal city the offerings of the sea, however, painted a vastly different picture.
Other allowances have returned too—and when I say “allowances” I look at those self-imposed indulgences I had tucked away during my earnest adolescence; a pre-digital youth, when the omnipresence of the internet still felt like a fantasy and handwritten letters occupied part of my days.
Soon after, the fairytale of my twenties arrived, when the world felt as though it belonged to me. I was fiercely curious, convinced of the vastness of my own being.
Life then seemed like a perfectly cut watermelon. One half burst with juice, flavor and color, plunging headfirst into the richness of living. The other remained a quiet ache, thirsty for love, craving tenderness, warmth and deeper meaning. That divided feeling remained mostly concealed by the crushing grief of my mother’s untimely death.
In those years, I disregarded many things. I had also given up chicken (red meat had left my life nearly a decade earlier). I yielded to a new way of being. A husband came soon after, followed by the purchase of a house.
I dissolved into the golden hair of my newborn son, into the folds of his well-fed legs, into the gallons of milk that streamed from my tender breasts, into the inevitable changes of my body, and into the new essence that seemed to fill the abyss my mother’s departure had opened—a total surrender.
Not long after, a second property followed, and I found myself riding the wave of a present that was mine yet had devoured my innocence. I kept looking back to an earlier life—when I ate meat and cotton candy and played freely in parks.
Reminisced on the afternoons spent lying on my stomach, counting and studying my colored marbles as the sunlight spread across the polished floors of my grandmother’s house. Remembered when I stared at my colored pencils, lined up in perfect order, with a sense of accomplishment.
I looked back to when eating meat carried no weight of guilt, when it felt like nothing but pure strength for my bones. During a time when life cooperated and plans seemed easy.
Slipping out of that past, I wonder when the door to my self-imposed guilts first creaked opened. I wonder how it brought me to the huge desire to breath in and taste, one last time, the warm and savory aroma of my mother’s stew—the only meat that ever truly felt like home.
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