Potato Salad — A Life Redefiner
It’s late afternoon, Nov. 2, 2019, and I begin making a large amount of potato salad for the 15 or so family members coming over the next day to celebrate five family birthdays. Six pounds of golden potatoes were cooked earlier that day, along with hard cooking eight eggs. There would be two batches of potato salad. A regular batch and the batch for the vegans, made without the hard cooked eggs, using vegenaise. instead of mayonnaise.
It took me several hours to peel the cooked potatoes, chop them up, and divide them into two containers. Numerous stalks of celery were chopped and put into the two containers. Ditto the green onions. I cracked, peeled and chopped four of the hard cooked eggs adding them into the non-vegan bowl. Why am I telling you this? Is it because I feel you might want my recipe? Not really.
This past June I injured my back. Even though it has healed quite a bit, standing for a long period of time to accomplish the tasks I just described becomes painful.
Early in the process, as I began to notice this taking place, I moved everything, knives, cutting board, containers and garbage can into the dining room, sitting at the dining room table to do this. I placed a pillow on the chair so I could sit higher as I don’t have a higher chair or stool on which to do that.
It took me several hours to get this all completed. Even though I was sitting the entire time, physically I was hurting big time; my hands and wrists from rheumatoid arthritis, plus my back. When it came time to put the largest container of potato salad, the non-vegan, into its serving dish, I was in such pain, I was not able to lift the bowl while standing, and scrape its contents into the serving dish. In the last seven years or so, I have physically shrunk from being five feet tall, to probably four foot nine or ten inches. Because of this, my center of gravity is now lower. Lifting up a filled-with-potato-salad bowl which more than likely weighed over six pounds, I couldn’t do it. I was too exhausted, aching and paining, all I wanted to do was lie down. My husband finished putting everything into serving bowls, covering them, refrigerating them for the next day’s family gathering, and cleaning up the kitchen while I went to bed to read and mourn.
Mourning – I could no longer do what I did in my younger ages.
Mourning – that years ago I was an excellent cook who entertained three to five nights a week and now I couldn’t do it (The fact I no longer desired to do it anyway, didn’t count. I was busy mourning.
Mourning – the hours it took to make potato salad, which even if it took the same amount of time years ago, I wouldn’t have been in pain and intense discomfort from doing so. So I mourned. I called it mourning, yet I was feeling sorry for the current self who could no longer be like a past self. Current self was in self-pity.
The next morning, having recovered from potato salad making, I wanted to make biscuits for breakfast. Again, I noticed how challenging it was for me to go through the physical actions of standing and hand manipulations required to make biscuits. Drop biscuits at that. Then the aha moment flashed! Cristina, you are being redefined. Are you going to embrace it or resist it?
I knew that embracing was the “correct” answer for me. So I embraced this new me, knowing the more I resisted and mourned over what had been, the more I would hurt physically and emotionally. This was such a glorious opportunity. I accepted it and felt a beautiful release of all I had been mourning.
We elderly (this is how I am categorized by the outside world), remember our younger days and do not feel older. It’s a mystery – how can you feel “older” when you remember the “younger?” I’ve decided to celebrate all the younger days, which also had their pain and sorrow, be grateful and appreciate my current living, feel safe while doing so, and celebrate accepting my redefinition and all the redefinitions I have experienced in my life. With every choice I’ve made throughout my life I have redefined myself. So, now I made another choice – embracing the next new definition of who I am.
My younger self wasn’t an author, she was working, running a business, raising children, and I appreciate all of that. My younger self hadn’t realized she was filled with wisdom, which my now self feels enriched by. My younger self was emotionally immature in many ways, she needed all those opportunities to make choices along the way to become the self I now am who enjoys emotional maturity.
Life is a constant process of redefinition. I joyously and whole heartedly embrace it! And, I am grateful to the potato salad. It was an awesome teacher. The family enjoyed the potato salad in addition to all the delicious foods they brought. The remaining vegan potato salad went home with grandson and his lady friend to enjoy, and I feel really good, physically, emotionally, and spiritually in my newly redefined me. Accepting the redefinition lifted a burden. I feel lighter, happier, more joyful.
The potato salad was delicious!
©2019 Cristina Whitehawk