Sweet Savory Sustainable

As I enter my 49th year on this planet, I find myself in a place I like to call, purgatory. I feel stuck in the middle, and in this supposed middle, I am faced with a very hard to answer question. Who am I? Is this the midlife crisis everyone speaks of? Is this when I make outrageous purchases like an overpriced sports car, get liposuction, or have a heated affair with the pool guy? I know my analogies are dated. Something from the writing room floor of the movie scripts in the 80s. But really. Is this stuck in the middle, who am I question, just midlife bearing down or is it something more?

Life does not fit into 2000 characters, which is why I am returning to this blog. I’m rebuilding in this sacred middle of life and sharing it out loud. A middle we should not be afraid of but grateful to have survived the onslaught of bullshit to live through the experience.

I am rebuilding in the middle to reclaim the things I love and things that are good for me. Food, movement, and creative work, based on the life I am living and want to love.

So, I am rebuilding by cutting off the baggage. I am doing it out loud and sharing the long version of the story.

“Sometimes you must cut a piece of yourself off… in order to grow.” A quote from an unlikely individual of advice on life, Charles Bronson.

A dubious character, yes, but his statement is nothing more than true. Nobody really tells you how often this will happen in a lifetime.

Metaphorically cutting a piece of yourself off, not life changing advice from a notorious prisoner. I am here to say it is often.

We are forced into, passed down, and morphed into new versions of ourselves without consideration of the last version we lived. Society expects us to merge them seamlessly without disruption to our active lives. There is no time to transition, grieve, or choose which version of yourself you want to keep and which version you could have done without. Mother. Partner. Provider. Employee. Cook. Coach. Cleaner. Creator. Emotional support human. And so does the list go on.

Then one day, you realize you have been lugging around these versions of yourself. Versions that have become baggage of past lives. These bags have become an appendage, and the only way to release them, the only way to grow from the baggage we carry, is to cut it off.

The café on the water

Long before I was a mother, I was fighting for my space on the corporate ladder while attending university full-time. First for my bachelor’s and then master’s. I’ve come a long way from the proverbial trouble making high school dropout I was once known as (that’s another story). At the time, I had this lofty vision of running my own business, in food. I was motivated. I read every book I could find on the business of restaurants. I drilled colleagues who happen to manage their own food related businesses outside of their corporate lives. It had been over 5 years since I’d been in a real kitchen for work but my love of food and wanting to share it with others was fueling my desire to continue pursuit. Then, someone then asked me, what type of foods I would focus on, sweet or savory?

The idea of Sweet Savory Sustainable started as a romantic one. I decided on the name The Sweet & Savory Gourmet. I dreamt of a small café on the water, somewhere in the tropics or along the Mediterranean coastline. I would showcase local food, art, and music. Ingredients would be grown onsite for the menu. It would be a place that felt like home when you walked through the door.

When sustainable was a means for survival

I took a leave of absence from my career with my first son out of desperation. The village was non-existent and we were faced with childcare the size of a mortgage payment. We had to make a choice. It wasn’t easy walking away from the career I worked so hard to build. I was in awe, and in love with being a mother, but not having my career made me uncomfortably antsy. This decision also left us surviving on one income, which was also new to me. I had always worked, had my own money, and contributed financially. So now I had to find ways to stretch our dollars and make a living out of our lives at home. If I was responsible for someone besides myself, I wanted it to matter. So I went all in like I do in all things I care about.

That is when “Sustainable” was added to Sweet and Savory. I started a little blog and began to share my experiences and growth as a mother changing consumption and building better habits and skills. I learned how to make everything from scratch. Bread. Pasta. Applesauce. Yogurt. Granola bars. Every meal. Even condiments. I made ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise from scratch. I even tried making my own deodorant and laundry soap. Some experiments worked and I still maintain practice today. Some experiments should be buried in the yard under the roses, never to be spoken of again.

The season of stepping away from my career to be a first-time mother awakened something in me. I ventured out to explore my community. It was then I met a group of women who changed me in a profound way. Women ranchers and farmers raising organic, high-quality food for their local communities. Cheese, eggs, poultry, beef. Strong women doing real work for their neighbors. They gave me a bigger vision of what sustainability looks like.

I leaned into my love of writing and photography. I interviewed and wrote about these amazing women. I took a ridiculous number of photos. I learned from them. I learned how to build my garden from the ground up. I learned how to preserve food and can the harvest. I volunteered at a local organic farm that supplied food to community food banks. I taught canning classes. I got pulled into conversations about water and the environment. And I was raising a little man while trying to do it all. I was doing it all, except for surviving the rising cost of living.

Taking it All On

I went back to corporate life when my son started preschool. Because of the cost of raising children, paying bills, and planning for retirement was overwhelming to manage on one income. I know so many do and I commend you for your resilience and ability to navigate a system that is broken.

Soon after returning to corporate life, I became a mom, again. My career was accelerating rapidly, and our village was still nonexistent. Looking back, I wish I had tried harder to figure out how to slow down with my 2nd son, not because I couldn’t handle it, but because I handled it the way a lot of women do.

By outworking the problem. Taking it all on, on my own.

I did try to keep the idea of sustainable living in operation, even with two kids and a career that kept growing. For a while, I enlisted help. I had a nanny for two and a half years. We worked together to support the lives of our children because we do not have grandparents down the street. Our kids went to the same school. We traded support. I picked her child up sometimes and brought him home to her. I gave flexibility because she had the same school calendar pressures I had while still having to work full-time.

Eventually I had to let her go. Part of it was practical, my youngest was headed to preschool, but part of it was the slow realization I was still the entire operation. Even with her help, it still all lived on my shoulders.

When my youngest entered preschool, we discovered he was not getting oxygen while sleeping. He had surgery before his 4th birthday. That sleepless period was a boulder-sized slap on my face realization I couldn’t keep taking it all on. I couldn’t keep all of the balls in the air forever.

Soon after, the pandemic hit. The shutdown removed certain logistics. I was no longer managing the school and sports sprint while trying to do my 9 to 5. I was able to fit exercise in more consistently. I did okay for a stretch, but I was still carrying too much. I was still managing it all, despite having a partner at home. Because having a partner does not automatically translate into having a village.

It was 2021, and I chose to approach the health of my family different than many. This decision cost me relationships I thought were stable. Suddenly the village I assumed existed from a distance turned out to be conditional. Once it was gone, I went into an isolation I’ve never lived before. I began analyzing every nook and crevices of my life from as early as I could remember to present day. I was analyzing my life like the data I dissect routinely for work. It is easy to start breaking down every moment of your life, when it is very quiet around you. I was looking for patterns, trying to trace reasons, and figure out what was real, and what was a bunch of bullshit.

The collapse that forced me to rebuild

My health collapse started slow. Like a slow leak from the tiniest pinhole in a balloon your child brings home from a party. It is losing air but it is not yet noticeable. But the more the child plays with the balloon the larger the hole gets. Now before you know it, the balloon has shriveled up into a tiny prune of existence.

I was that balloon. I tried, on the surface, I tried to keep it all together, to keep the air from escaping me from that tiny pinhole. I tried to keep doing the things I loved but the depression, the alcohol, the bad habits bled into my home life. Like that pinhole, my problems only grew until all the air escaped me.

From that point, I started to fall into great despair. I slowly stopped doing things. I started drinking heavily. My boys were doing fine in school, but none of us were happy. I read a study once that said the emotional temperature of a household often tracks the person running the ship. I did not need a study to tell me that. I could feel it in every room I lived in.

Somewhere around September 2024 I hit below rock bottom. I remember thinking, I have had enough of this shit.

That was when I tried again. I tried to rebuild my routine and clean things up. I tried to bring the garden back to life and rebuild the chicken coop. I tried to get us outside again, moving again, and doing things together again.

And then November 2024 I got hit with a skin condition that knocked me out of commission completely. I could barely do the basics. It has been a fight ever since. It has been a fight with my body and a fight with the medical system with no answers. Living inside that uncertainty changes you. When you don’t have your health, you have nothing.

It’s time to tell the long version again

And now back to that little blog I started over 15 years ago. Social media has changed in a way that trained a lot of us to edit ourselves down to nothing. We are condensing our voices and cutting the context. I stopped telling the story and just gave the outcome. People no longer want your grandmother’s lemon curd story anymore. They want the jump to recipe button.

I understand it. I also fucking hate it.

Some things need to be cut off in order to grow. The pretending and people pleasing, all baggage. Cut it off. The version of me who kept shrinking herself down for everyone else until there was little left but baggage. Cut it off.

What does rebuilding look like in midlife? I’m not chasing skinny anymore. I have never loved that phrase. What I want is capability. I want to stand up from a chair or wipe my own butt without help when I am older. I want to get up off the ground if I fall. I want to carry water, lift what needs lifting, pick up my dogs, and pick up grandkids if that is in the cards. I want a body I trust.

And I want the rest of me back too. The creative part. The writer. The photographer. The artist. The person who builds things and shares them because she is proud of them, because it might be useful, because it might bring someone joy.

Sweet Savory Sustainable was never just a food page. It was the umbrella over everything I was trying to do by feeding my family well, staying strong enough to carry my own life, and keep making things that I loved.

I know I am not the only one at this stage in life, asking this very question… So maybe if you’re up for it we can do it together, learn from each other, and share experiences.

And if not, maybe you’ll simply be entertained by my shenanigans enough to forget about that sports car or the pool guy.