Overreaction
I'm writing here about an incident that happened yesterday. It involved a carry-in dinner after church (or should that be a potluck or a fellowship meal?), which is what typically happens in our church on the day after a wedding. In particular, the overreaction involved one almost-full pint carton of cream and what happened to it at the carry-in. I'm trying to sort out what was going on inside my head and what I could have done differently when I discovered that my intended use for the cream had been circumvented.
I prepared two dishes for the carry-in. The Oriental Cabbage Noodle Salad was reportedly enough to serve 20 people and the Apple Grunt served 12, according to the recipe I used from Mennonite Community Cookbook--the only cookbook I remember my mother owning when I was beginning to cook and bake. I made those two dishes because I had the necessary ingredients on hand without grocery shopping. The apple grunt recipe calls for it to be served warm with cream or rich milk. When I baked it I knew that I could not manage to serve it warm, and I knew from having made it many times before that it would be good eaten cold as a cake without any topping.
The next morning, however, I looked at that cake and was pretty sure that to most people it would look simply like an unfrosted cake, and who (besides my family) regularly eats unfrosted cakes? Should I frost it? No. That would be ridiculous. Besides, Hiromi told me that doing something to make it less healthful would be a bad idea. Should I try to manage serving it with vanilla ice cream from the freezer? No. That would require too much extra effort from the food committee.
That's when I thought of the cream. I keep some on hand to add to my single cup of morning coffee. We've been eating our apple grunt with cream regularly of late. Maybe I could take that, but how could I be sure that it would be served with the apple grunt? First, I prepared a hot pink sticky note on which I wrote "For Apple Grunt" in black marker. Then I stapled the note to the top of the cream carton. After I had covered the Apple Grunt with clear plastic wrap, I wrote "Apple Grunt" on another hot pink sticky note and stuck it onto the plastic. In addition, I told someone in the kitchen what the plan was when I brought in the food and put the salad and the cream into the refrigerator.
After the meal when I was gathering up my leftover food to go home, Leroy was apparently still grazing and asked if my cake (about 1/3 of it remained) had apples in it. I said "Yes" and he said he'd like to have some of it. I was happy to oblige, but I didn't see the cream nearby. I thought perhaps it had been returned to the refrigerator or maybe it was all gone and the carton had been thrown in the trash.
I didn't find it in the fridge and then asked someone from the food committee if they know what happened to the cream that had a label on it. "It's over by the coffee. We ran out of the half and half so it got moved over there." I retrieved the carton. The staple and a tiny piece of pink paper still remained but the "For Apple Grunt" sign had been torn off. I was not happy.
What I said was something about not having cream for my own coffee the next morning. In reality, I had counted that cost before I left home and decided that I could do without cream the next morning, so that was really beside the point. What I could not think to say was that I was sorry that those who ate the food I prepared had to do so without the good and healthful topping that I planned for it. I was probably also feeling a little put-upon that my efforts to make things easy to understand and manage for the food committee had been in vain. It felt to me like the cream had been thoughtlessly misappropriated. I did recognize, even in that moment, that I was acting a little foolish and added that "It's no big deal," or something similar. It's just cream, after all. After I got home Hiromi reinforced those later thoughts by verbalizing them.
I'm "cursed" with a great deal of motivation to try to figure things out. Why did the cream thing bug me so much?
After stewing over it and now having decided to write about it, several things have emerged so far. I think I'm doing what most women are much more likely to do than men. In other words, my spaghetti-like brain is connecting "everything" with "everything else." I'm guessing that it was a male with a waffle-like brain (having many separate compartments) who moved that cream, and he had nothing in his highly-compartmentalized mind besides meeting a need at the coffee table. That silly pink sign on the carton was a minor inconvenience that was easily disposed of. I know for a fact that when things were being placed on the tables initially, one mother stopped her son on his way to the coffee table with the cream and redirected him to the apple grunt dish (as per the sign).
In this particular case, I'm connecting the misappropriation of the cream with what I've encountered in the past in relation to other kinds of misappropriation. I have felt judged in the past for having misappropriated funds in connection with the sale of the booklets produced by the composition class. That judgement felt unjust to me but I have nevertheless resolved to be vigilant about this in my own choices. In the process I have also probably developed hyper-vigilance when I observe misappropriation elsewhere.
Without being overly dramatic, I think I need to acknowledge that I often operate out of feelings of inadequacy within the constraints of limited resources. I've learned to ask the Lord for help with this, and I've seen His provision countless times. I thank Him often for this. Last week was no exception. Early in the week I had prayed for the Lord to show me what I should do about carry-in food, before Hiromi went to work on Monday in fact. This was his only work day of the week because of the eye surgery on Wednesday, so he wanted to know what groceries for the carry-in he should buy on that day. I had no idea what to ask for and decided that probably meant that the Lord would give me an idea for something I could prepare with what I already had on hand.
That's exactly what happened. Saturday evening after we got home from the wedding, I realized that I could not think of any hot dish I had the means to prepare, but I could do two side dishes, a dessert and a salad. Interestingly enough, it seemed to me that foods that showed up at the carry-in leaned heavily toward main dishes rather than side dishes, so I was glad I had not gone to heroic effort to bring a hot dish. The cream that went missing messed up the plan and the provision that I had already thanked the Lord for.
I'm sure it didn't help that I had just watched Marie Yovonavitch on the witness stand at the impeachment hearings and was incensed at what she had been subjected to previously--at the hands of others who had power and used it to indulge their own blatantly selfish and devious inclinations. I have never experienced anything close to being as egregious as what Yovonavitch endured, but I know exactly how it feels to have people in power run roughshod over anything or anyone that seems like an interference between them and what they want to do. People doing what they want without needful consideration of the principles of right conduct involved and the effect of their actions on others doesn't set well with me. I think my brain spaghetti was threading all the way back to this idea in the cream incident.
Leroy honed in on one more aspect of the cream incident in commenting on his preference for the simple pleasure of plain cream over other less healthful options such as frozen whipped topping. I have often thought of how ridiculous the whole idea of frosting on a cake actually is from a nutritional standpoint. The sugar in the frosting likely doubles the total amount of sugar in an unfrosted cake, although I'm as fond of good frosting as anyone. In the case of apple grunt, I like eating it with plain cream precisely because it tones down what seems to me like a marginally over-sweetened dessert. When I decided to serve plain cream (rather than whipped cream, to which I would almost certainly have added sugar) I was consciously making a choice to offer others the benefit of this simple, unadulterated and sugar-free add-on option. I didn't appreciate the intervention that removed that option for others. In this case, the brain threads were attached to information about diet and health (seeing unprocessed food as being preferable to highly processed foods, with sugar generally not serving a useful purpose nutritionally), and convictions about living simply without insistence on having the latest and greatest in everything, especially in consumable goods and perishable foods.
Now that I've dug deep and then pulled apart what I dug up, even though I haven't addressed perfectionism and who-knows-what-else, I think I understand my overreaction better. I think if my cream ever goes missing again, I may be able to avoid another overreaction. But please don't test that ability--for me or anyone else. Do the right thing and don't mess with the cream.
.
I prepared two dishes for the carry-in. The Oriental Cabbage Noodle Salad was reportedly enough to serve 20 people and the Apple Grunt served 12, according to the recipe I used from Mennonite Community Cookbook--the only cookbook I remember my mother owning when I was beginning to cook and bake. I made those two dishes because I had the necessary ingredients on hand without grocery shopping. The apple grunt recipe calls for it to be served warm with cream or rich milk. When I baked it I knew that I could not manage to serve it warm, and I knew from having made it many times before that it would be good eaten cold as a cake without any topping.
The next morning, however, I looked at that cake and was pretty sure that to most people it would look simply like an unfrosted cake, and who (besides my family) regularly eats unfrosted cakes? Should I frost it? No. That would be ridiculous. Besides, Hiromi told me that doing something to make it less healthful would be a bad idea. Should I try to manage serving it with vanilla ice cream from the freezer? No. That would require too much extra effort from the food committee.
That's when I thought of the cream. I keep some on hand to add to my single cup of morning coffee. We've been eating our apple grunt with cream regularly of late. Maybe I could take that, but how could I be sure that it would be served with the apple grunt? First, I prepared a hot pink sticky note on which I wrote "For Apple Grunt" in black marker. Then I stapled the note to the top of the cream carton. After I had covered the Apple Grunt with clear plastic wrap, I wrote "Apple Grunt" on another hot pink sticky note and stuck it onto the plastic. In addition, I told someone in the kitchen what the plan was when I brought in the food and put the salad and the cream into the refrigerator.
After the meal when I was gathering up my leftover food to go home, Leroy was apparently still grazing and asked if my cake (about 1/3 of it remained) had apples in it. I said "Yes" and he said he'd like to have some of it. I was happy to oblige, but I didn't see the cream nearby. I thought perhaps it had been returned to the refrigerator or maybe it was all gone and the carton had been thrown in the trash.
I didn't find it in the fridge and then asked someone from the food committee if they know what happened to the cream that had a label on it. "It's over by the coffee. We ran out of the half and half so it got moved over there." I retrieved the carton. The staple and a tiny piece of pink paper still remained but the "For Apple Grunt" sign had been torn off. I was not happy.
What I said was something about not having cream for my own coffee the next morning. In reality, I had counted that cost before I left home and decided that I could do without cream the next morning, so that was really beside the point. What I could not think to say was that I was sorry that those who ate the food I prepared had to do so without the good and healthful topping that I planned for it. I was probably also feeling a little put-upon that my efforts to make things easy to understand and manage for the food committee had been in vain. It felt to me like the cream had been thoughtlessly misappropriated. I did recognize, even in that moment, that I was acting a little foolish and added that "It's no big deal," or something similar. It's just cream, after all. After I got home Hiromi reinforced those later thoughts by verbalizing them.
I'm "cursed" with a great deal of motivation to try to figure things out. Why did the cream thing bug me so much?
After stewing over it and now having decided to write about it, several things have emerged so far. I think I'm doing what most women are much more likely to do than men. In other words, my spaghetti-like brain is connecting "everything" with "everything else." I'm guessing that it was a male with a waffle-like brain (having many separate compartments) who moved that cream, and he had nothing in his highly-compartmentalized mind besides meeting a need at the coffee table. That silly pink sign on the carton was a minor inconvenience that was easily disposed of. I know for a fact that when things were being placed on the tables initially, one mother stopped her son on his way to the coffee table with the cream and redirected him to the apple grunt dish (as per the sign).
In this particular case, I'm connecting the misappropriation of the cream with what I've encountered in the past in relation to other kinds of misappropriation. I have felt judged in the past for having misappropriated funds in connection with the sale of the booklets produced by the composition class. That judgement felt unjust to me but I have nevertheless resolved to be vigilant about this in my own choices. In the process I have also probably developed hyper-vigilance when I observe misappropriation elsewhere.
Without being overly dramatic, I think I need to acknowledge that I often operate out of feelings of inadequacy within the constraints of limited resources. I've learned to ask the Lord for help with this, and I've seen His provision countless times. I thank Him often for this. Last week was no exception. Early in the week I had prayed for the Lord to show me what I should do about carry-in food, before Hiromi went to work on Monday in fact. This was his only work day of the week because of the eye surgery on Wednesday, so he wanted to know what groceries for the carry-in he should buy on that day. I had no idea what to ask for and decided that probably meant that the Lord would give me an idea for something I could prepare with what I already had on hand.
That's exactly what happened. Saturday evening after we got home from the wedding, I realized that I could not think of any hot dish I had the means to prepare, but I could do two side dishes, a dessert and a salad. Interestingly enough, it seemed to me that foods that showed up at the carry-in leaned heavily toward main dishes rather than side dishes, so I was glad I had not gone to heroic effort to bring a hot dish. The cream that went missing messed up the plan and the provision that I had already thanked the Lord for.
I'm sure it didn't help that I had just watched Marie Yovonavitch on the witness stand at the impeachment hearings and was incensed at what she had been subjected to previously--at the hands of others who had power and used it to indulge their own blatantly selfish and devious inclinations. I have never experienced anything close to being as egregious as what Yovonavitch endured, but I know exactly how it feels to have people in power run roughshod over anything or anyone that seems like an interference between them and what they want to do. People doing what they want without needful consideration of the principles of right conduct involved and the effect of their actions on others doesn't set well with me. I think my brain spaghetti was threading all the way back to this idea in the cream incident.
Leroy honed in on one more aspect of the cream incident in commenting on his preference for the simple pleasure of plain cream over other less healthful options such as frozen whipped topping. I have often thought of how ridiculous the whole idea of frosting on a cake actually is from a nutritional standpoint. The sugar in the frosting likely doubles the total amount of sugar in an unfrosted cake, although I'm as fond of good frosting as anyone. In the case of apple grunt, I like eating it with plain cream precisely because it tones down what seems to me like a marginally over-sweetened dessert. When I decided to serve plain cream (rather than whipped cream, to which I would almost certainly have added sugar) I was consciously making a choice to offer others the benefit of this simple, unadulterated and sugar-free add-on option. I didn't appreciate the intervention that removed that option for others. In this case, the brain threads were attached to information about diet and health (seeing unprocessed food as being preferable to highly processed foods, with sugar generally not serving a useful purpose nutritionally), and convictions about living simply without insistence on having the latest and greatest in everything, especially in consumable goods and perishable foods.
Now that I've dug deep and then pulled apart what I dug up, even though I haven't addressed perfectionism and who-knows-what-else, I think I understand my overreaction better. I think if my cream ever goes missing again, I may be able to avoid another overreaction. But please don't test that ability--for me or anyone else. Do the right thing and don't mess with the cream.
.
posted by Miriam Iwashige at
8:32 AM
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