Sweet Relish

For the past year and a half, I've been doing all the cooking at home.  All the shopping too.  Which has not been a problem.

(That my children are relieved to have me doing most of their cooking now is a sweet secret I smugly savor, like having a chunk of the best chocolate to enjoy in private.)

The only problem I've run into is this: we've had this no-sugar-added pickle relish as a staple in our home for years.  I would say, ever since we gave up sugar as a regular part of our diets almost thirteen years ago.  We went to Disneyland that summer, and the lower-than-in-the-house mirrors in the hotel revealed to me what I didn't want to know. So, we decided to try the Sugarbusters diet my sister-in-law had been having great results with.

As part of our sugar purification, my husband had found a pickle relish that was made with Splenda instead of sugar.  We've been using it ever since.  It's gone on hot dogs and hamburgers, into tartar sauce and tuna and egg salads.  We've just always had it around.  I took it for granted that I could keep getting it.

So, as the last jar has run out, I have searched for no-sugar-added pickle relish at the grocery store. No luck at Fresh Market or Costco.  I went out of my way to visit all the grocery stores I know he used to shop at.  He could make a whole weekend out of shopping at five or six stores, but I was pretty sure I knew the names of them.  Albertson's. Dan's.  Smith's.  Sprouts.  Looking for that relish, though, I bombed out at every one of them.

I NEED this relish.  Honestly, avoiding sugar is no small feat.  It's hard enough to avoid desserts.  I don't want it in my regular food.  If I'm going to eat sugar, give me a chocolate donut.  Don't hide it in there with my fish.

I took a good look at the nearly empty jar for the brand name.  Mt. Olive.  I went back to all the stores, inquiring about Mt. Olive brand. My regular grocery store has a whole wall of pickle relish.  Not a Mt. Olive in sight.  Not any other type of no-sugar-added relish, either. After I spent the better part of an afternoon reading each and every pickle label, the manager took down the information and said he would get it stocked.  The other stores said, basically, "Nope."

So after waiting a polite amount of time, I went back to my regular store and still didn't find it.  I talked to a different manager--the one who does the ordering.  He pulled out his flip phone, saying, "Don't judge," and called the person he orders from.  "It's not on the list," he said.  That was his whole answer.

I guess it can't be put on the list.  But, honestly, if they would put it on the list, I would come back to that store, faithful as an old dog, every time my relish got low, and buy some more.  For the rest of my life, which should be decades.  He and his flip phone were long gone, though, before I could get all of that out.

I looked up the brand name online.  Couldn't find out where it's sold locally.  Took the lid off the last, empty jar standing forlornly on my counter until I could figure this out. Took it to work with me. Called the 800 number in North Carolina.  Was told that she can't see where their products are sold in my state.

"But I know it's sold here.  We've always had it."

So she told me that Target and Walmart are two large chains that "don't participate" in their "store locator."

Bingo!  I thought.  Unless my ex was hiding more about his true thoughts than I've discovered he was, I know he wasn't shopping at Walmart.  No need to look there.  But Target--that sounded like a ray of hope.

I shop at Target but don't think of it as a grocery store, even though I know they have groceries.  I determined that I would stop in as soon as I could swing it, and finally claim my very own jar of Mt. Olive Sweet Pickle Relish.  Before I heated up any more fish sticks.

I know what you're thinking.  Why didn't I just ask him where he's been getting it?

Well, it's complicated.  I tried to keep things friendly.  I really did.  I even let him come into my home on a nightly basis to say goodnight to the children.  For half a year.  But he's made it clear, in more ways than the number of years of my life that I gave him, that he is no friend of mine.

I'm not going to ask him.

Most of the time, he pretends I don't exist.  If I texted him, "Hey, where did you used to get the relish from?" I would get this response:















It's the same response I get when I try to talk to him about the kids. I'm not going to assume that he would consider my ability to procure relish to be more important than they are.

Saturday was my next opportunity to get myself to a store that was not already on my way home from work.  My teenaged son came along with me.  He wanted new ear buds.  (When does a teenager NOT need new ear buds?)  He was sympathetic as I told him all about my relish woes. After some time walking around in the grocery section, looking carefully among places where other condiments were stocked, we finally found the relish inch.  Looking at the one or two options, I remembered.  I had looked at Target before.

So I said all the same things about it to my son again.  I know it can be found locally because we've always had it.  I've tried all the stores I can imagine.  But I supposed I would have to order a case from North Carolina and pay the shipping charges.

I didn't have all these genius kids for nothing.  He asked simply, "But which Smith's have you been to?  Just Smith's or Smith's Marketplace?"  I had assumed they were one and the same.  I had.

So on our way home from Target, we stopped in at a Smith's that I've only frequented when I've forgotten to pack pantyhose before my pre-work workout.  We parked, walked in, located the condiment aisle, and found ourselves face to face with a WHOLE WALL of Mt. Olive products!  I almost wet myself.

Drenched in the sudden luxury of endless Mt. Olive products, I feasted my eyes along the rows until I found pickle relish.  I picked up a jar.  Then another.  No sense being skimpy about it after all that. Laughing with my son about our good, though long-delayed fortune, and how fun it would be to blog about this adventure, I paid for the relish and we left the store.

I stopped dead in the parking lot.

"Wait," I said.  "I don't think I checked for no sugar."  I drew out one of the jars and examined its label.  "Mt. Olive," it said, and "Sweet Relish."  It did not say "Splenda" nor "no sugar added" anywhere. Anywhere!  And, yes.  In the ingredient list, I did find enough dreaded words to make me hastily avert my eyes.

Moaning, we headed back into the store. Right back to that Mt. Olive aisle.  I scanned the shelves. You're not going to believe this, but I could not find "no sugar added" on any of the Mt. Olive pickle relish labels.

I did find some no-sugar-added house brand relish, and I picked up a jar of that.  My son asked, "Are you going to get two?"  So I got two.  But it wasn't exactly the right stuff.

I mean, it was sugarless pickle relish, thank goodness for that, but it looked different.  I exchanged the sugary Mt. Olive relish for it, and I took it home.  I'll use it in tartar sauce next time I feel like having fish.  Not saying when that will be.

But it all makes a good story.  And maybe I can get a kickback for the free advertising?

Being Okay

So, here I am, on a lonely Sunday.  I went to church and came home.  I'm chilling out until the time when my kids will come home.  I tried to take a nap.  It didn't work.

I feel restless.  There are things tugging at the corners of my mind.  Vague shadows, like monsters in the closet or under the bed.  There are things bothering me that will never go away.  There is work to do that I don't feel up to doing.  I'm stuck in a kind of neverland between the busy I was yesterday doing everyone's laundry, et cetera, and the busy I'll be as soon as everyone is home.

It's silent.  No one is expecting anything of me at the moment.  These are the moments I yearn for when everything is noisy and I have five or ten demands on me.  But this doesn't feel like a moment I yearned for.

I should be enjoying it.  I should be able to sleep.  Or maybe I should stop trying to sleep and get my outfits for the week set up.  Maybe I should cook dinners for the upcoming week, do something to make the time ahead of me easier.

Will the time ahead of me ever be easier?

I feel like I've lost myself.  I am always older than I've ever been.  Will I ever be the same again?

I keep going to the gym and cutting what I eat, but I keep gaining weight.  I want to write, but I'm allergic to the imaginary voices finding fault with whatever I might have to say now that my life is upside down.  I keep cooking meals, cleaning the house, tending to the household, but it seems to keep falling into disarray anyway.  I keep taking care of and protecting my children, but they seem to keep spinning farther away from me.  It's their job to do that, I know that.  But who am I now?

I keep going to church, paying tithing, praying.  I keep fasting when it's fast day, and even sometimes when it is not.  I read my scriptures most days.  I still believe.

I think I still believe, but where are the blessings I need?  Where is the promised land I've been trudging toward for at least forty years?  Are my prayers actually piercing the ceiling, or are they just bouncing off like soft billiard balls, making endless arcs and curves throughout my empty bedroom?  I know I'm loved, but where are my friends on a quiet day like this?

The invisible arcs of the billiard balls curve through my bedroom, hitting the closet door, the wall, the floor, the light switch, the ceiling, the blinds, the bed, my chest.  All the thoughts and questions and images and restless feelings just keep bouncing all around me like waves.

I try to catch one and pin it down.  What on earth is really the matter?  What can I pin down?

Yes, my life is different; I wanted that.

What is wrong?

Are the people I love still out there in the quiet somewhere?  Has God forgotten me?

I sit still on the bed for a while, just waiting for the arcs and curves of the balls to form some kind of pattern, to settle somewhere, for heaven's sake.  To spell something out.

I finally get a coherent thought.  It is this: Will I ever be okay again?

I stand up and look for something to eat.  I close the fridge.  I already ate and don't need anything.  I pick up my pile of laundry and smooth the bed covers.  If I do something, maybe I will feel better.

Will I ever be okay again?  I want to text my best friend and ask her.  But I hesitate.  What is she supposed to do with a pregnant message like that?

Will I ever be okay again?  I pick up a newspaper to move it off my bed.  My eye catches the headline to an article I had meant to read.  "Senior LDS missionary back. . .from Belgium."  I start to scan the article.  This is the man, older than I, who was blown up by a bomb but has lived to tell the tale.  And there, like a ball that finally found the pocket in the table, is my answer.  I read, "The first blast broke Norby's left fibula and left heel and sprayed him with shrapnel.  He also suffered second-degree burns to his face, ears, sides of his head, leg and the backs of his hands.  He later suffered an infection while hospitalized. . . ."  All of this happened almost four weeks ago.

I shake my head at my self-pitying self and get up to write.  There is nothing so wrong with me that I cannot proceed to be me.  Maybe writing will help someone else.  Or maybe it will help me.  I have to keep being me.  That is what being okay is. 

Spanish Rice

Several coworkers commented on my lunch today.  I often get a "That smells good" or "Whatcha eating?"  But I had more comments than usual for this very ordinary lunch. It's a dish I grew up with.  My mother used to make it.  It smelled and looked good, and it generated interest.

"What's that?"

I stifled my impulse to say, "Well, I call it Spanish rice."  It was not easy to stifle that, which I'll explain in a minute.  I forced myself to just say, "Spanish rice."

But then I added, "My ex-husband would say that it isn't really Spanish rice."

"Why is that?"

Because I don't make it the way he makes it.  Because it's not "authentic" Spanish rice.  Because real Spanish rice would never have meat or something as Anglo as canned tomato juice in it.  Because, he regularly asserted that the things he did were superior to the things I did.

He is a good cook.  He is a better cook than I'll ever be.  I'll give him that, no problem.  I always have.  I don't know where my mother got the simple recipe she used for her Spanish rice.  I don't care.  That's not the point.  And maybe it's true that he had learned somehow how to make "authentic" Spanish rice from some region of the Hispanic world.  I'll give him that, too.  But it occurs to me that Spanish rice in Spain could be different from Spanish rice somewhere else.  Is there even only one authentic way to make it?

I'll even concede that there's no way my mom's Spanish rice could be "authentic."  Sure.  She grew up in a white family in an Anglo state during the Depression.  She raised her family in the fifties and sixties in an Anglo neighborhood.  And she used ground beef and tomato juice.

That's not the point, either.

I once had a little boy who dubbed his red plaid pajamas his "Spider-Man pajamas."  There wasn't anything remotely Spidey about them, other than the red.  But who was I to tell him they weren't Spider-Man pajamas?  To him, they were.

It's work being around someone whose truth always trumps your truth.

He could have opened his mind to the possibility of there being at least two kinds of Spanish rice that had value.  What he considered to be authentic had value to him; the comfort food from my childhood had value to me.  He could have allowed himself to see that those two options could have equal, if different, value.  It shouldn't have been a problem for me to make it that way.  Even to call it Spanish rice, like my mother did.

So there I was, fully separated from this person by law, a parade of negative experiences, and more than a dozen months, still struggling to not qualify the name of my Spanish rice in deference to his opinion.  Still feeling, even though I knew all along that his ways did not necessarily surpass my ways, like I had to say, "It's not real Spanish rice--that's just what I call it."

Gah!

There could be fifty ways to make Spanish rice.  This is my way.  It's delicious.  It's comfort food.  My children love it, and one always asks for it for his birthday dinner.  My mother raised me on it and kindness.   It attracted the interest and compliments of a handful of people who work with me.  There is nothing wrong with it.  I'm eating it.  And it is Spanish rice.