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I know this is kind of an odd topic but I think I have an explanation for the meanderings of my mind. I hope you will bear with me for a while.
This morning I decided to start the new day and the new work week with a fresh breakfast pick-me-up. I like change. It excites and invigorates me. It makes me think of more possibilities and keeps me from being bored and stuck. Some people are frightened by it, and I have also been that way on occasion, when there were an overwhelming number of unknown consequences entailed in the pending changes.
My dear husband loves his Cheerios for breakfast. He might shake things up once in a while by switching to Apple Cinnamon or Multi-Grain, but he rarely deviates from his daily Cheerio kick off, unless it is a special occasion or we are venturing out to breakfast. I think he may just like not having to think about his breakfast much and prefers to get it done and get on with his day. My late first husband ate peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast, day in, day out, year after year. He sat down and attacked his sandwich with the same joy and anticipation and with a huge grin on his face all the time. This joy never seemed to diminish for him.
I just don’t get it. Too much routine (Just how much is too much?) makes me feel dull and listless and even trapped. It makes me feel less able to plunge into my days with the kind of energy I want to have. It makes me heavy and lethargic. Something new for breakfast stirs up my ability to be resourceful and imaginative and tells me that my day ahead and my life are full of possibilities, new things that I can create or make happen if I set my intentions to do so. So today I began the day with a yummy low fat tomato-basil wrap, filled with a small piece of mashed baked sweet potato, a small piece of mashed avacado, a tiny dab of apple butter and a nice piece of low fat cheese. This was warmed just enough to have the flavors blend and beckon to me while I fixed my cup of tiramisu tea, a holiday gift from my teenaged granddaughter.
Our food preferences often hark back to our childhoods, as do many of our other preferences, quirks and also our limiting beliefs. I don’t recall liking many foods or having a very varied diet as a young kid. I was pretty limited and didn’t enjoy trying unfamiliar foods at all. My mother was an excellent baker but she revealed to me after I was grown, that she disliked cooking. Growing up in the 50’s and early 60’s, that was incomprehensible to me and I surely hadn’t spent much time contemplating the topic, but just assumed that my mother, and all mothers, liked to cook. My bubble was burst when I, a blossoming young feminist, began to ask her questions about her likes and beliefs and really listened to her, maybe for the first time in my life. I suppose, in retrospect, due to her lack of great love for or interest in cooking, my mother’s meals were, for the most part, pretty uninspired. Her mother had been a fabulous cook, making heavenly Romanian and Jewish dishes and pastries. I suppose my mother either found cooking just wasn’t her thing, or she wanted to assert her own identity in a way that was not a carbon copy of her mother’s, which I can certainly understand.
My sister took great delight in creating concoctions to eat and in making her little sister, Iris, gag at times. She liked sandwiches of vegetarian baked beans, scrambled eggs and ketchup, or baked beans and sliced bananas, and she later went on to become a cook who liked to experiment with food, as do I nowadays. My mother would watch my sister’s preparations and would wring her hands in disgust. My mother’s only defense which she used regularly to restore the order she needed in her universe, was to busily follow my sister around the kitchen cleaning up the aftermath of the culinary experimentation. She didn’t require that people take responsibility for their own messes because she was anal about cleanliness and she knew her standards would never be met. She wanted things done a certain way, in a certain order.
Her standards for cleanliness and her need for predictable routines surpassed those of anybody else I had met. She donned what was termed a “housedress” during the day when at home, with a rag conviently tucked in her bosom and multiple times during the day, swiped at and dusted off the furniture and woodwork, attacking the dog hair that dared to rest on household surfaces. Every late afternoon she changed her clothes, donned something pretty and “put her face on” in preparation for my father’s homecoming. Meals were served on time, always. Household chores were relegated to certain days of the week and it was unthinkable to deviate unless severe illness or family emergencies caused disruption. Monday was washday, Tuesday ironing day, Wednesday was for vacuuming, Thursday was shopping day, etc. Saturdays were reserved for visiting the maternal grandparents and relatives and Sundays were for the paternal relatives. Homework was to be done during certain hours only. Poetic inspiration was not understood when the Muse appeared at 2AM and I was up writing. The lights were supposed to be turned off when the TV went off and that was always off by 11 PM. Bedtime for small children was not ever negotiable, the kitchen was “closed” after 9 PM, you always kissed the relatives hello and goodbye and no excuses were tolerated. You had certain foods on certain days of the week usually, and holiday foods were unbendable traditions. The menus did not change. Breakfast foods were to be eaten at breakfast, period and any breaking of the rules was tantamount to committing a sin against God. You absolutely did not eat cold pizza for breakfast, for example. You always invited the Fuller Brush salesman in for coffee and cake, as well as the Insurance Man and the family doctor when he made house calls. It didn’t matter if you weren’t in the mood, were reading a book you didn’t want to put down, or were having an argument with your husband or your kids. It was part of the list of sacred routines.
My mother stretched and changed as she aged, which is not what typically happens. Many get more rigid and more locked into their routines. This was actually a pleasure for me to witness. Luckily my father was not so locked in to routines when I was growing up and managed to introduce notes of humor and wonder, as well as variation into our daily lives (which my mother loved in him).
However, I had pretty much had it with being stuck in routines and schedules. This was anathema to me. When my kids were small, even though I understood the value and security of consistency for young children, I fought being tied to a schedule as much as possible. I liked introducing elements of surprise into our lives and definitely into our meals. I loved putting unexpected notes and tasty treats into their lunchboxes. I hid gifts in unexpected spots in the house, such as on the shelf near the furnace, where they found their treats after following a series of notes on paper scraps that led them down the cellar stairs. I liked to have picnics on the living room floor in the winter, and supper when we felt like it. I liked having supper for breakfast sometimes and breakfast for supper. I was a huge fan of a book called “The Stupid Family” which depicted people sliding up the banister instead of down, wearing cats on their heads, instead of hats, sleeping with their heads under the covers and their feet exposed and other zany things.
When life begins to get too predictable, certain and even just a little stale for me and I begin to feel confined, I need to shake things up in different ways. Sometimes I have to do some heavy-duty introspection. I have to make sure that what I want to do is not too impulsive and won’t ultimately have greater consequences for me and others close to me than is worth it. I need to find ways to charge my batteries and change my mood and path. There are so many ways to do that, but one that works for me and is fun and pretty harmless is to start my day with a breakfast concoction. It’s a simple way to keep from sinking into tedium and insipidness that I really don’t tolerate too well.
So, here I go with the questions, if you are ready for them. Are there many things you do nowadays that you can associate or attribute to patterns established in your own childhood? Are these positive or negative habits or routines? Do they serve you well, or do they limit you in some way? What do you do to break out of them if you decide you want to do that and/or you are not served by sticking with the same old patterns and beliefs? What is the biggest and most fun or satisfying change or shake up you have initiated in the last year? Are you ready for another? What will it be? When will you begin and how? Maybe it will just be with a different sort of breakfast but that’s a beginning.
