NOURISHED.

The beautiful homecoming of arriving back in my body and learning the craft of ancestral cooking over the hearth.

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Today I raced home from the childminders, over-tired, over-hungry and thinking fuck I’ve done it again.

When will I learn that it’s not just skipping meals that’s a problem, it’s leaving it til I’m over-hungry which can be just as disastrous.

Let me tell you it has taken over 30 years to learn how to *truly* nourish my body.

Pregnancy and postpartum were a wild ride in arriving deeply in my body and realising that, actually, I hadn’t been looking after her very well at all.

There are many threads I could share here of a story woven deep into the collective feminine consciousness, about body dysmorphia, disordered eating and remaining small.

The irony is I thought I had re-wired them.

In my mid-twenties I lived on a “high vibe” island, was vegan, did regular juice cleanses and fasts. I considered myself one of the healthiest people I knew.

Looking back I can see how the short-term high of that lifestyle was my body going through a detoxification process (highly necessary after my wild teens) - but there comes a point where we need to nourish ourselves again.

I’m not going to go into the whole vegan vs meat eating debate, mostly because that’s a whole other post that I’ve had saved in my notes for probably about a year, but also because that will detract from what I’m really here to talk about today.

This article is about the beautiful homecoming of arriving back in my body and learning the craft of ancestral cooking over the hearth.

As some of you reading this will know, my mum passed away earlier this year.

But it feels like I’ve been grieving her for even longer.

She was diagnosed with terminal cancer in March 2022. I was 7 months pregnant.

The past year and a half has been the deepest shadow journey of untangling my grief from my rage, my sorrow from my disappointment, and to put it straight: navigating the mother wound whilst my mother was dying.

As I became a mother I was suddenly made aware of all the ways my own mother hadn’t loved and nourished me the ways I wished for. As I made conscious choices about the way I wanted to raise my daughter I realised, wow, my mother never made these choices for me. It’s okay and I know she was doing the best she could. But I had to go through this harrowing process nonetheless.

My heart breaks for my younger self, and for my mother.

There are many reasons why I felt this pain, and many many aspects of the mother wound, but to keep on track I really want to share along the theme of nourishment.

My heart breaks that my mother did not make me a fully home cooked meal. Not once.

My mother was a get something out the freezer and stick in the oven kinda woman.

She did not know, nor care, how to nourish herself.

I grew up watching her smoke 30 cigarettes a day, skip breakfast and lunch, live off chocolate biscuits and drink tea with sugar whilst never drinking water, everyday of her life.

We went to my grandmother’s house nearly every evening for dinner. She would make us delicious home-cooked food. But I was never there to see it.

We would arrive, eat, then I would disappear upstairs to my room to the make-believe world that I lived in.

I was never involved in preparing the food, I never took an interest.

When my grandmother died in 2017 I was living in Ibiza, eating my vegan diet, so it never occurred to my mother to pass down her recipe books to me.

They were all thrown away

It was the initiation of becoming a mother that got me to really understand how to nourish myself.

In the first trimester I put on weight fast. The people around me would joke about me “eating for two” but really I was just eating for one.

One hungry woman who suddenly realised how many meals she had skipped to remain the size she thought she wanted to be.

That couldn’t be the case anymore. I had a growing baby inside of me - I needed to eat.

Pregnancy hormones did strange things to me in those early days, I ate a lot of crap to be honest.

I thought I didn’t have the energy to cook well, but perhaps I just didn’t know how.

My meals were healthy-ish, but I had no idea how to balance out my carbs with proteins and fats, how to regulate my blood sugar, what to eat for nutrient density, or how to truly nourish myself.

I truly believe that it is a craft and one that is lost in today’s society.

In a world that chooses convenience over pretty much anything, it’s no wonder.

(You can see more on that here - Unpopular opinion - women do belong in the kitchen)

As I got closer to birthing my babe I was frantic about getting meals in the freezer. I dreamt of a meal-train but I was new to the area we were in, didn’t have many friends (and most of the ones I had made were pregnant too as I met them in pregnancy classes).

We lived on a piece of land between a yurt, caravan and a tiny cabin.

Our kitchen consisted of one electric hob, a tiny fridge-freezer and if we went out to the caravan we could use the pretty crap oven.

In hindsight I should have done a crash course in slow cooker meals back then, but I didn’t.

My partner would go to his sister’s house and batch cook me some meals but he knew very little about how to nourish a postpartum woman. I appreciated the effort but most of the meals were lots of vegetables and grains. My body needed hearty stews, bone broth, casseroles and soups. My body needed the kind of meals a grandmother cooks over her hearth - the craft was lost once again.

My early postpartum days were not how I envisioned. I was not held and supported by community. I was mostly alone, with a horrendous tear, worrying about my dying mother. Again, a post for another day.

I could barely move myself from the yurt, but even when I had healed every time I wanted some food it required strapping my baby to me and navigating myself to another building. Again, hindsight is a wonderful thing and it would have been worth the investment to create a more substantial kitchen - but at the time I did not prioritise the hearth. I did not know what it meant to nourish myself or my family.

That first year of Wrenna’s life in the yurt saw more uber and just eat deliveries than I would care to admit.

Landing back to my mother’s home earlier this year I began to really sink into my role as the heart of the family.

The kitchen became my creative hub and I found joy in trying new recipes and learning new skills - aka the craft.

I begun to learn what it meant to be a nourished woman.

We eat organ meat nearly every week.

I eat breakfast without fail.

I cook hearty stews and shepherds pie (that never ends up with leftovers because we love it so much).

We began to bake our own bread, make our own pizzas, and truly eliminate ultra-processed foods from our diet.

Our takeaways limited to a once in a while treat rather than the norm because we were too exhausted to cook.

& the more I nourish us, the more it gives me.

Yes it takes time and energy but it comes back tenfold.

So that day that I came home from the childminders, over-tired and over-hungry, I was so pleased to see my slow-cooker bubbling over the brim at me.

A delicious shepherds pie made with so much love.

What was meant to be dinner, suddenly became lunch.

I dived in and enjoyed not one bowl but two.

Not because I’m greedy, but because I’m nourished through and through.

With love,

The Wild Mother