Once upon a time, there was a woman named Shauna. She met a man named Dan. They were 39 and 37, both of them late bloomers who fell in love the minute they met. They both loved children, baseball, Amnesty International, small towns, South Park, talking most of the evening, and the Beatles. But mostly, they fell in love through food. Dan was a chef. Shauna wrote a food blog. They talked, breathed, explored, and lived together through food.
They kept up the food blog, but with the two of them creating recipes, instead of Shauna alone. They wrote a cookbook, another cookbook, and another cookbook. They kept talking about food. They loved visiting new restaurants. Dan looked at videos and photos of incredible dishes from places like Rustic Canyon, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and Gramercy Tavern, then rose up from the couch to move to the kitchen. Whatever inspired him, he had to make it. Sure, Shauna thought. We’re bound to eat well tonight.
They never stopped being inspired by food and how it connected them.
And then the children arrived.
Let’s skip to the beginning of COVID, in March of 2020. Dan had left the restaurant business, for good this time, he said. Shauna was working a job in Seattle, at a molecular gastronomy food business. As soon as the lockdowns and terrible unknown began, she couldn’t quite understand why she was doing that work. (Actually, she began doubting it a couple of months before.) In the face of a global pandemic and suddenly homeschooling 2 frightened children while trying to work full-time, none of it made any sense.
She left that job. And she realized something powerful. Everything had shifted inside her. The curiosity that caused her to ask the questions that became the answers after her mini-stroke? They had led to so much healing that she felt like an entirely different person than she had in 2015. Who she had been in 2006? That felt like another world, another woman.
This woman knew that her curiosity had grown far beyond recipes or even healing from cPTSD. She wanted more joy in her life, to take the place of worrying. She wanted to give this gift to her kids and her husband too.
Later, she started teaching workshops on this.
But in that moment, the third month of COVID lockdowns, she focused on making time and room for as much joy as possible in this crazy time.
On the other hand, Dan dove more deeply into food than ever. In fact, by week 2 or 3 in the house with the kids, he began making delicate dishes for dinner: quinoa with pickled beet stems, pale white fish, raw greens, and pistachios. It sounds good. But it wasn’t the right food for the time. The kids didn’t want this for dinner. They wanted comfort food.
Shauna wanted comfort food too.
Suddenly, there was disjunction between them. The food was only the first symbol of it. All that fear started to build in Dan’s head. He started to disappear into it. This was the first big time of disconnect in their lives together. It lasted for a couple of years. It was hard.
Everybody had a hard time the last couple of years. Everyone we know and you know. It’s not only us or you. These two years were hard, hard, hard on us all.
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