All aboard the meal train

They come quietly, like an invisible phalanx of midlife lady love, and drop old grocery bags filled with lovingly spiced green curry and vegetable Shepherd’s pie and lemon bars made by little hands and handwritten notes on postcards. I serve the beautiful food to my mom and tell her stories about the women who made it—cancer survivors and authors and yoga teachers and doctors, bee keepers and immigrants and mushroom foragers and freedom seekers. I feel overwhelmed with their gifts, loved somehow even by the giant glass jars and the well-used Pyrex that the food comes in. The reheating instructions make me weepy.

I am learning to say yes when people offer their help. It is stupidly challenging for me. My brain is trained to seek out opportunities to help others, but when it comes to my own life, it is trained in the opposite art—quick and intricate explanations for why they shouldn’t put themselves out, why there are other people more in need, why I’m not really deserving of this kind of labor or service. Or as I texted my bestie…

Obviously I’m being facetious, but the sickness is real. Too many of us are too attached to feeling like the benevolent ones. For me it’s also tied up in this ego trip I’ve been on for 45 years about being easy, flexible, allergic to drama, not the kind of woman who would talk about her #firstworldproblems when the world is burning. It doesn’t lead much room for being human, as it turns out, being frail and fucked up and in need of a delicious gooey slab of vegetarian lasagna made by a woman who loves you.

I’m learning so much in this season, as previously described, but this is among the most sacred of the lessons. What I’m coming to understand about being helped is that it is sometimes about the very specific thing someone does—braves a bureaucracy for me so I can strike something from my to-do list, let’s me say the thing I don’t want to say out loud, cooks a meal for my family—but often, and sometimes simultaneously, it is about having my vulnerable status acknowledged and our connection reinforced. The meal train is less my community saying “you couldn’t possibly cook your own dinner tonight,” and more them saying “we see you and we’re here with you through this roller coaster of a year.” The language is chana masala and home baked granola, but the message has little to do with food.

And the impact went far beyond nutritional sustenance, too. The impact last week of these delicious offerings was: the dusk hour spent, not cooking, but chatting with my mom about my dad’s health and providing one another with solace and laughter, sharing inspiring stories of women I know at dinner and excitement over all the new tastes, snuggles and Harry Potter 4 with my daughters after dinner rather than endless pots and pans to clean. Time and presence—two gifts that feel so endangered when you are a sandwich generation caregiver with a parent in chronic crisis.

Some evenings, the phalanx arrived, the paper bag appeared, and it had been a decent day with my dad. I would be tempted to think I had put one over on my friends. I didn’t really need this food. I really could have handled it myself. Was I a compassion con artist? But the next day was different. My dad would walk for ten hours without stopping, up and down the block, and then it would get dark and he would still try to leave and none of my invitations—Montessori-style “work” (the napkins, the silverware, the sorting), puzzling, slow dancing to The Beatles, none of it could convince his body to stop. On these days I would pull the containers from the paper bag and feel held by a sanity-saving grace. And these brain-breaking days helped me understand that even the easier days, the days where my dad can stop long enough to enjoy the sunset with me, are days where I am worthy of care and attention and food.

The point of being helped is not that you have earned the help in some measurable way, some litmus test of extraordinary suffering. The point of being helped is actually the opposite—that you are ordinary, which is to say human, and going through a thing, and people are moved by the universal reality that we are sometimes the person going through a thing and sometimes the person showing up for a person going through a thing and all of it is immeasurable and sacred.

You may be reading all of this and thinking, “Duh, dumb dumb.” I don’t blame you. I think there are a lot of reasons I’ve come so late to these life lessons—starting with the culture of my family, especially the Western women who pride themselves on never getting manicures or complaining about anything. But also I have been made dumb by whiteness and wealth and saviorism and so many other cultural stories that have run through my life in subtle and not so subtle ways. These cultural currents have come together to make helping others my default and being helped a quiet shame.

But it’s never too late to unlearn the stories that threaten to kill you (supremacy and self-containment being some of the most deadly). Maybe some of us unlearn best when someone we love is dying; it makes our world unrecognizable in such intimate ways that some of the cultural scripts can lose their hold on us, too. Or at least that’s what’s working on me these days.

Death is everywhere. My dad is dying. The country is dying. The earth is dying. My arrogance is dying. But in the midst of all that decay is a phalanx of midlife lady love, a warm bowl of daal, my dad’s undiminished capacity to kiss me on the top of my head every time I rest it on his shoulder, and my ability to unlearn and grow and soften and surrender, to give and receive.

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What are you unlearning in this moment? Are you a dumb dumb like me and what taught you to accept help?