Slip-Ups and Guilt

Last Friday I got all the kids dressed after breakfast, buckled them into their car seats, dropped the oldest off at school, and took the youngest three with me to the grocery store.

Shopping with young children is not for the week. I pushed that car cart around the store, gathering the necessaries. I was feeling under the weather, so I added cough drops and a vaporizer to the cart full of groceries and 85 pounds of children. The kids were well-behaved, and nothing notably awful happened in the store. Once we had made our purchase, I successfully buckled them all in again.

And I was done.

You know that point you hit where you know you do not have the strength to do anything more? Not even one little things? I had hit that point. Exhaustion settled on my shoulders like a heavy fur cape. Anything I did next – getting into the van, herding the children into the house, making a meal – was going to cost an extraordinary effort.

Now I know that in many places, when you hit the end of your strength, you have to go on anyway. I have been in that situation. (Especially while pregnant. Childbirth is the definition of pushing past your own perceived strength.) I know that many women around the world do not have the option of deciding they are too tired to make a meal. there are no fast food joints on the corner, and if there were, mom wouldn’t have the money for it anyway.

Sometimes circumstances force us to go beyond our strength. But when circumstances don’t, we are left with the force of our own wills. The pay-off of slow food is not big enough to rally my will when I am exhausted. The kids had a fast food lunch AND supper that day.

I don’t feel guilty about it. Sometimes when I write about our fast-food slip-ups, commenters rush to reassure me that I don’t need to feel guilty. This is surely a sign that I am not writing for a hardcore foodie/slow food/vegetarian audience. But the reassurances are also unnecessary. Our Slow Food Experiment is just that: an experiment. We are trying this – and writing about it – to document our own experiences, thoughts and feelings in this new effort of eating. The failures are part of that experiment.

By the day’s end, I was moving even more slowly. The cough drops were not enough to soothe my swollen throat. I could not keep warm. I kept shaking. By 7pm, I had a fever of 101. The next day the doctor would confirm I had strep throat.

So I don’t feel guilty for last weekend’s shortcuts of pre-made food. But I do think about the parents who don’t have the option, even when they are sick, and how grateful I am for choices we cannot earn.

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