Creative food, Utilitarian moms & February's full moon
Non-recipe recipes, micro-managing moms and some fun facts about the full moon
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Today’s newsletter is divided into 3 parts:
News you can use (an announcement)
An essay titled Utilitarian Mom
February’s Full Moon
Please note: if your email truncates this newsletter, you can view the entire article on my substack page where you also have access to previously published (archived) content. Click here to read in the browser. (writerofwordsetc.substack.com)
News you can use (an announcement!)
There are two new sections in this substack publication Room with a Door; one is called Stirred and the other Travel.
Neither has any content in it yet.
Stirred
I wrote a PDF called What is Stirred by Writer of Words etc, which explains what Stirred is all about. Download it for free (enter 0 into the designated price spot when prompted.)
Here’s the gist:
I take photos of food. Yes, I’m that mom, that person in the restaurant. #sorrynotsorry
Food is such a prolific form of creativity for me - the cooking, the presentation, the eating itself, I can't help myself!
Of course, I don’t just take photos of my creations, I load them into an app, create pretty little designs, spend hours setting up templates, and then write endless words about said food.
Welcome to the inside of my head. I never stop creating.
Occasionally, I post my food on social media. The food posts are among my most popular and most heavily engaged.
Every so often, someone sends me a message and asks for a recipe. This always stumps me.
Do people actually cook with recipes?
I don’t write recipes. I barely follow recipes (unless I’m baking) although I love reading recipe books (or media). To be clear, I’m neither qualified nor propelled to become one of those recipe-writing-talk-about-it-on-tiktok-or-youtube foodie influencers. I just like food, and I don’t mind telling people how to make the food I display all over the internet when they ask me. Just not in a formal recipe. Where’s the creativity in that?
I’m neither qualified nor propelled to become one of those recipe-writing-talk-about-it-on-tiktok-or-youtube foodie influencers.
Enter Stirred.
The idea behind Stirred is to archive my food-focused content. Not just the food I cook myself, but the food I eat outside of home. And, with an impending trip to a culturally acclaimed region known for its refined cuisine, I can’t wait to share my pictures and anecdotes about the food I eat with you in a future newsletter!
See, I’m going to take the pictures and write the words anyway. Why not keep them organized in a dedicated section?
(This is how my mind works.)
Meanwhile, the food pictures I’ve taken over the months remained cluttered in my phone with nary a visitor to salivate over. I need space in my phone for new pictures for my upcoming trip, so during a lull week in February, I loaded them all into my Canva app and began designing templates to use for future endeavors.
The future is here, my friends!
Each pictures is turned into an unofficial how-to recipe (aka a non-recipe recipe), illustrated with pictures, and presented as a PDF you can load from my digital store gumroad.
Gumroad is a platform where I sell digital content like books, worksheets, and PDFs like these how-to recipes.
The following recipe PDFs are available in my store as of now:
Stay tuned for bundles (discounts), freebies and more.
PS Once the templates were set up, the creation of these non-recipe recipe PDFs became much quicker and less time-consuming than during the initial creation process.
Utilitarian mom
A friend of mine is separating from her husband of almost 30 years. She is on a healing journey which has stimulated conversations between us for the past few months surrounding topics like roles in relationships, parenting as well as midlife dilemmas such as issues with self-worth, self-esteem and core identity.
In one of our conversations, the terms Micro-Manager and Utilitarian Mom came up.
Utilitarian: designed to be useful or practical rather than attractive.
To tell you the truth, the word utilitarian immediately catapulted me back to my own parenting life. I reflected how I became an overly-functional Micro-Manager (utilitarian, practical, efficient) on a seemingly continuous quest to make everything just so in order to preserve my very precarious state of mind.
I was deeply unhappy in the house we lived in with its incessant accumulation of clutter. I allowed this to distract me which inevitably became the main reason (at least in my view) why I failed at most endeavors I explored and pursued in an effort to not lose myself in the utilitarian mom-role. No longer a career gal, I missed having an outlet that wasn’t family/house/children/pets associated, especially after the kids began school. But I just couldn’t look past the inefficiencies of the house. Ultimately, it affected my mental and emotional health where checking out (going to bed early) became the default.
I forgot how to be me, I forgot how to be present for my children, I forgot how to be a woman and I forgot how to function in a relationship.
I lost touch with my essence, my individuality, and most importantly, I lost my creative spirit.
The small house with its awkward layout and lack of space for our growing family turned me me into a crazed pragmatic monster Micro-Manager as a way to improve a situation which was, essentially, unimprovable. Like a dictator, I scrutinized every item which entered the house knowing odds were high it would never leave the premises again. Purging became an obsession with the family resisting at every turn.
The family saw a simple solution to solve the small house problem: mom needs to get a job.
I pondered: would it work? Would each family member step up and help out with chores and pets to at least meet me (and my expectations) halfway?
Believe me when I say with affirmation that this simply would not have happened. I won’t get into the sordid reasons why, but I know my family. Their intentions are always good but never long-lasting.
I may have been out of the full-time job market for almost two decades but I remember very well what it was like working and commuting full time. Thing fall down. And that was before the kids came… Still, I knew something had to give. Could I risk working outside the home in the name of bringing more money into the home at the expense of my already deteriorating mental health?
“Work from home then,” they said. I did that, sitting at the cluttered table, surrounded by piles of stuff, taking on a few freelance jobs. Perhaps some people are capable of working under these conditions, but I am not wired that way. By the time I cleared everything from my temporary work space to begin, there were interruptions, obligations and other distractions to keep me from focusing on my task.
(Editing, proofreading and writing requires solitude and silence.)
"Embrace the chaos” was not a mantra I could follow. I strive for beauty and harmony to foster both calm and creative flow as well as improved efficiency in terms of running a household. I thrive in organized, tidy spaces where little time is wasted looking for scissors, coffee mugs, pencils, sports equipement, homework, socks or pillow cases. I enjoy puttering in the garden without having to spend twenty minutes searching for gardening tools. I like opening a drawer to take out what I need without spending four and a half minutes rooting through it only to discover hours later that someone put it over there instead of here (where it belongs).
Extensive (and expensive) renovations improved certain aspects in the home, but didn't add coveted space. I watched my son outgrow his bed and couldn't offer a practical solution as the room literally only fit a single bed. I watched my daughter pursue crafting and sewing hobbies for which she needed space for supplies so I gave her my corner on the main floor which immediately turned into an unsightly (distracting) pile of clutter. I pushed down my own desires to pursue interests requiring space and supplies in the name of letting the children discover their personalities in the already inadequate space barely available for them.
They wanted me to work outside of the home to bring in enough money so we could move into a bigger house, get a better car, get another better car, eat out more often and go on vacation. They thought about how the results of my financial contribution would benefit them, but they didn’t take into considertion how a new role - work-outside-the-home-mom - would impact me. Would they do the dishes, empty the dishwasher, mow the lawn, clean the bathroom? (The kids to this day struggle with pitching in with the housework under the ruse that my expectations are too high.)
‘Other moms work outside the house’ was a phrase they hurled at me time and again. How this was supposed to make me feel better is beyond me. All it did was increase my sense of inadequacy which in turn made me less inclined to continue to pursue my creative passions.
They were delusional and I was depressed. It’s not like I didn’t want to earn income again, of course I did. I, too, wanted to drive a better car, wear nicer clothes, go on vacation by flying somewhere instead of camping with the bugs. I understood how the limited household finances inhibited us, and that was despite a good-paying job in his chosen career field. It grated on all of us.
What I really wanted was to pursue a writing career and open a shop (online, at least initially) where I would finally work with the skills and talents I was meant to nurture.
So I continued to micro-manage the household, purged and rage-cleaned. I felt myself evolve into the crazed overly-functional monster Utilitarian Mom I never wanted to be but I didn’t know how to stop myself.
The tipping point was during one of the lockdown periods in the pandemic where I inadvertently announced I was moving out. The accompanying guilt I took with me was intolerable, but there were other pressing needs requiring my attention; my mom had an accident and needed full-time in-home care. I essentially switched roles from parenting and wife-ing in one house and became a caregiver in another.
Except; caregiving was a completely different realm. Taking care of a mom as a mom is very different from parenting and housekeeping in the family house.
Caregiving for mom meant one other very pleasant and happy thing, my saving grace:
I finally had a room with a door to call my own.
Still, I remained utilitarian for some time after I initiated the Living Apart Together movement (LAT). I continued to micro-manage aspects of family life although to a lesser degree, and mostly via texting.
It took a while for all of us to adapt, but once the pandemic restrictions were finally lifted, and one of the kids became a licensed driver, life did become a little bit easier, even for the remaining parent back at the house.
We found a rhythm that worked for us with me traveling back and forth as needed or desired. I’m sure it was not an easy transition for him; I know he was struggling with his own demons while working full time. And yet, a couple of years after we began to LAT, he hesitatedly admitted a key phrase which reinforced that my instinct to take some time apart was right.
“We’re all calmer,” he said.
*The LAT movement is a complicated and difficult to articulate relatsionship topic. In this essay, I barely touched on its essence. I will be addressing this unique living arrangement again. Stay tuned.
February’s Full Moon
There is a full moon in February called Snow Moon which is hilarious because here in my region of Canada we’ve had exactly two days of snow since last November. It’s been incredibly warm for the Greater Toronto Area, yet few people are complaining.
What’s interesting about February’s full moon is that’s in called a Micromoon. Farmer’s Almanac explains it like this:
February’s full Moon is a “Micromoon” this year. Think of this term as the opposite of a “Supermoon.” It simply means that the full Moon is at its farthest point from Earth (not the nearest point). In astronomical terms, we call this “apogee.” Specifically, February’s Micro full Moon is about 252,225 miles from Earth.
For those who enjoy a little astrology, the current planetary positions are as follows:
The sun is in Pisces (so if you’re born between the dates of February 19 and March 20, you’re sun sign is Pisces and you’re in your birthday period).
The moon is in Virgo.
Note: if you want to know where the moon was on the day you were born, you need the time of birth. My moon was in Cancer at my time of birth while the sun was in Libra. Once you have your time of birth and you want to know your moon sign, click here.
The Full Moon is a time of culmination and the promise of fulfillment of that which was started at the New Moon, so if you set a new intention on the last New Moon, now would be a good time to note what worked, what didn’t, what is still needed to accomplish desired results.
On a personal level, I find I dream more heavily during full moon cycles. I also feel more emotional and volatile. At the same time, the emotional volatility gives me a boost in my creative outlets; if I get enough rest, I can use this boost to improve output. If, however, my rest is interrupted, I end up with too many started projects which never end in fruition.
The Moon’s energy is associated with the element water (think rolling waves of the tide) which in the world of Tarot is related to emotions and feelings.
There is a Major Arcana tarot card called The Moon XVIII, it’s keywords point to illusion, things are not as they seem, deception, fear, insecurity, hidden things, anxiety but also the subconscious mind and intuition.
I like the moon card. The duality of the domesticated dog howling alongside the wild wolf, the path illuminated just enough so you can see where you’re going, the crayfish emerging out of the water… so much symbolism with which I connect.
Symbolism
the moon indicates dreams and the unconscious mind
dim light compared to the sun’s bright rays, illuminating the path toward higher consciousness
crayfish emerging out of the water points to unfolding consciousness as we begin our trip along the dimly lit path
you don’t always need to see or know everything, sometimes, you just need to see far enough to be able to take the next step
dog and wolf show that deep down we remain wild at heart despite being tamed by societal norms and expectations
Meanwhile…
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