Getting rid of demons, a book about motherhood and an eggplant recipe I can't wait to make

I am still not good at titles

Thinking

‘I’m not sure what made me wake in the middle of the night thinking about a small storage box I thought was tucked away in the garage, I just know that once I remembered it was there I couldn’t sleep.’ I wrote in an article for Mamamia about seven years ago

‘Suddenly I was acutely aware that, in that box, lay a whole part of my past that I had clearly tried to package up and tuck away. I had never spoken to my son about it and I didn’t ever intend to. I knew that I had to get to that box and dispose of it before he was the one who uncovered it. You know that urgency that creeps up on you in the middle of the night? When you begin to imagine you are mere hours from death and you need to deal with that thing hanging over your head right now even if it’s the last thing you do? That was me and the box of stuff. ‘

Seven years later I can admit I never did find that box, I didn’t stop worrying about it but I never actually located it. Until last week when my son, the very same person who I was hiding it from, cleaned out his cupboards and there it was amongst his old toys and martial arts uniforms.

The box had taken on mythical proportions in my head, it felt dangerous, the secrets real and powerful, like snakes that would slither out and poison anybody who read them. But when my son held it in front of him it was just a box, a battered and slightly broken box with too much paper stacked into it.

I braced myself, thinking on my feet as to how I would explain the contents but he didn’t even question it. He doesn’t need my past spelled out in black and white, and to be honest, he wasn’t that interested in a stack of papers from last century (gulp). It’s not that he’s unthoughtful or uncaring it’s just that he’s able to see that this was a box of papers and I am a human being. We are separate entities.

It is both humbling and liberating to realise that the contents of this box were just papers that could be thrown out, things that I had tried to keep hidden were is my son’s room all this time and they didn’t poison anyone and it turns out they didn’t have any power.

I threw the contents of the box into the recycling bin and am now working on scraping it from my mind…

Reading

I don’t know who I would recommend this book to - other than everyone reading this of course, but I would issue a trigger warning if you were pregnant. And although that feels like a very weird thing to say, because the demographic for this book is probably women of childbearing age, I say it because the characters in this book feel like real women and their stories and their experiences are not sugar coated - I would be petrified if I read this when I was pregnant.

But that’s something the book makes you think about - how much do we ‘warn’ pregnant people about the early days of being a parent? How much do we feel free to share the really hard parts for fear of judgement? How have we allowed social media to make us think that looking after a newborn is easy if you just breathe and parent softly and teach your baby to sleep without letting them cry in distress?

So Thrilled For You tells stories of birth, pregnancy, motherhood, infertility and the choice to be child free with no holds barred. It is honest and searing and it made me cry quite a few times - but it also a riveting read and the narrative keeps you on your toes until the final pages. Told from the perspective of four women after a house fire at a baby shower, it is written in a similar vain to Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty and is as absorbing and gripping. If this becomes a movie - and it should, I will watch the hell out of it.

Read with caution if you are pregnant, read with a knowing nod if you have kids.

Food

I am moving house this week which makes me wonder how I am managing to write a newsletter but not managing to put food on the table. And then I remember that the food is packed, the table is covered in boxes and Uber Eats is a very handy app to have. Unfortunately it makes this part of the newsletter quite hard to write so I’ll just leave you with this recipe I am planning to make when my kitchen is not box-based.

sivanskitchen

A post shared by @sivanskitchen

Thanks for reading to the end.

See you next week

Lana