You Can Do This!

A friend of mine is a first-class lady, happily married and mother of two boys. She never cooks. She doesn’t want to cook. She doesn’t like cooking. And if all that weren’t enough, she doesn’t know how to cook, which isn’t too surprising. The kids get a microwave-something for breakfast. Lunch is brown-bagged. The evening meal they eat in a restaurant. Every night. She claims this is easier than cooking and cleaning up after, and even that it’s cheaper. She’s certainly right on the first count, maybe even the second. But is it fun? Does it bring the family closer? Does it make her happy? Most importantly, how does it make her feel about herself? You’d better brace yourself because I have a confession to make—this cookbook that you’re about to spend some disgusting amount of money on isn’t really a cookbook. Sure it has recipes and some pretty good ones if I do say so myself, but its real purpose is not to teach you how to cook. It’s to teach you how to live. Buy it. You’ll learn things about living without doing it the hard way, like I did. So how’s a cookbook that’s not really a cookbook going to put spice back into your life? Simple: the objective of this book is to help you build a happy life for yourself and those you love. It’s about doing things, small things, that make you feel good about yourself, and it uses meal preparation as the means to do that. Other cookbooks don’t. Their objective is to produce a dish or a meal; the objective of this one is to help build your sense of self-esteem. Why meal preparation? Because we all do it, we all value it, and doing it well gives us a sense of accomplishment. Best of all, we do it for people we care about. There are many people who try to do it all—cooking, cleaning, kids, job, wife, husband, dog—and end up passed out on the couch. Maybe that’s what The American Dream has come to mean. It’s too bad but for many people, that’s what life has become—get up, go to work, come home, eat, go to bed. O I forgot—take the kids to soccer, get the car washed, cut the grass, pay the bills, etc. etc. For most of us it’s a way of life. The only positive thing about it is that in six or 12 or 15 more years the kids will be grown up and move out, and we can live life the way we’ve always wanted to. Yea, right. Do any of us really believe that? This is a life? Frustrating. Discouraging. Purpose-less. A terrible way to face each day. I think it’s one of the reasons we Americans have high divorce rates, too much debt, and a host of other stresses. I know, I’ve been there. Over the course of my life I graduated from college, married, got a job, bought a house, raised kids, and bought a new car every other year. I ended up in an alcoholic treatment center. I was broke and divorced with identical twin boys to raise. I could not understand it —here I was doing all the things adult males are supposed to do in our society, and yet I my life was a mess It took me a long time—and a lot of help—to figure out that the problem was me, and that unless I did something to change myself, this misery would never end. In the process of learning how to do it, I discovered that focusing on success in small things gave me more successes with big things, because it created within me a feeling of self-confidence. So many of us are unhappy. So many of us are alone, even with others close by. So many have no dream. So many have a low opinion of themselves, which keeps them from trying to fix their lives. As a good friend of mine, a Priest, once told me: “Most people live their lives and dream their dreams, but the people who are truly happy live their dreams. You must live your dream. I can’t tell you how to do it, all I know is that when you’re doing it, you’ll know.” “You must live your dream. Believe in yourself.” Wow. When he told me that, I couldn’t even come up with a response. I just sat there, dumbstruck. But he wasn’t done. “When you were a little boy, did you have a dream?” he asked. A dream? Yes I’d had one when I was little—I wanted to go to Africa and live with the animals. I loved animals. I even persuaded my little sister Mary to go with me. She wasn’t too thrilled with the idea but agreed to go if she could take her Raggedy Anne doll. One day we packed a suitcase with socks and long underwear (it’s cold in Africa) and of course Raggedy Anne and started to the bus stop to catch the bus to Africa. I know it sounds pretty silly but hey, my Mom didn’t raise no dumb kids; of course I knew that bus didn’t go to Africa. But I did know that you could ask the driver for a transfer to another bus and that one went to Africa. Just then Mother called us. “Where are you going?” she asked. “To Africa” we answered. “Well,” said Mother, with the wisdom of mothers everywhere, “wouldn’t you like to go to Africa after lunch?” “What are we having for lunch?” we asked. “Chicken noodle soup with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,” Mother said. Needless to say, we didn’t make it to Africa, but the dream remained. Little boys can dream things like that, but big ones can’t. So what was I supposed to do? How could I figure out what my dream was, and how could I live it? I sure couldn’t go to Africa and live with the animals. I had absolutely no idea what to do. But he said it again: “You must live your dream. Believe in yourself.”