You Eat The Stew You Cook

You eat the stew you cook. 

When you are a parent, everything you do, say and make your child feel is making a pot of emotional stew.  If you put in mostly good ingredients, the stew will taste good.  You might occasionally put in a little too much salt, or a drop of bitter vinegar.  But a drop of something unpleasant can’t ruin a whole pot of good ingredients.  When your child’s overall experience with you is loving, supportive and pleasant that is the recipe for a delicious stew.  You can make mistakes and correct them.  You can balance out the flavors with care and effort.  Without realizing it, every interaction, every day you are writing out a recipe that is being “cooked” inside of your children.

When you children become adults, the stew is finished.  You can’t go back and change it. 

This is the stew you will eat as an old person.

If you made a satisfying, healthy, nourishing stew for your child, then you will have a satisfying, healthy, nourishing relationship with them in your old age.

If you permeated that stew with spicy anger, sour feelings, and ingredients that don’t add up to something pleasant… I can promise you that your adult children will serve you a bite of that very stew every day and in many ways.

 Don’t act like you are surprised, and that you don’t deserve it.  You, my friend, are the one who cooked it.

I hope that it is delicious.  I hope that it is a recipe that keeps them coming back for more.  I hope it is one that is worth being passed down to the next generation.

Either way, you will eat it.