Bring Dessert to Dinner

Tea with Colleen (01)

“I’m giving up all dessert.”

My mom’s most restrictive Lent happened the year I moved home after graduating college. As an avid baker, I thought her choice was steep but admirable. I followed suit, giving up “after dinner dessert” so the sugar-packed breakfast muffins and scones from coffee shops weren’t off-limits.

We were roommates for several months. Both of us dealing with our awkward reality of the early 20’s adult moving back home, seeing more clearly how much we’ve imprinted the best and worst parts of each other and trying to empathize with that… yet there were times that our actions surprised each other in that unexpected, delightful way.

One week into our arduous forty-day Lent, I found my mom finishing off an 8x8 of brownies. I prompted her in the typical, borderline condescending, you-fell-off-your-Lent, questions; WHY (you gave them up?), HOW (did you eat the whole tin?), WHEN (did you even make them?)

In a straight face, she reasoned, “those brownies were my dinner, not my dessert.”

What stealth. Her decision-making felt ludicrous at the time, but I was impressed with her ability to sell it to me, herself, and the God she was practicing Lent for.

Earlier this month I wrote an article on desire.  To desire/wish/long is a natural, and necessary emotion to creating a full life, yet with our heads constantly '“dipped into an aquarium of internet things,” our main struggle now is to discern what desires we pick up from others versus which are our own. We don’t need everything the internet tells us we need. If our social community shows us something do we actually want it or do we just want the joy they’ve experienced from having it?

If we aren’t taking the time to understand ourselves in the context of what we want, we confuse what to bring more of into our life.

My friend, Maura, was a dancer all her life. Her days of highschool competition spilled into dancing at parties, parks, bars, and New England beaches. On her own journey during covid, she looked for tools to make her ‘stay at home’ days brighter; noting long walks, meditation, yoga, pilates, baking, had worked for others. We spoke recently on what to incorporate this year, and she told me what she does the least, she desperately needs the most- to dance.

We often restrict our daily joys, wringing our little spirits dry, and then splurge on inessentials to recoup. The amount of times I’ve bought something random from a well-advertised Instagram ad versus putting it towards a massage, one of my favorite gifts to myself, is mind-boggling. For years I journaled out of work branded notebooks (bland but free) stumbling upon deeply personal notes between note-taking at client meetings. Finally, I was gifted a bright orange moleskin and laughed at the absurdity that I never thought to spend money or put thought into something I use every day. I now buy fun colored journals every time I run out, picking each color deliberately based on the season and my mood. I feel a rush of pleasure every day when I write in them (all for $20).

What can we move from ‘dessert’ into dinner? What have we all been calling inessential, or even glutinous, and restricting, when really it’s essential to being full in our lives? We deserve to reincorporate it. Maybe when we are satiated in these small, unique ways, other habits that actually aren’t serving us loosen their grip. Perhaps then they fall away more naturally without it having to be so hard.

(FYI, my mom, Bev, never gave up dessert for Lent again. She is happily baking brownies and all the pies. Maura is back on the train- breaking 3 min between emails for hip swings, pirouettes, and sometimes wall twerks)

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