Bringing Fruit to Work

Learning How to Take Care of Myself Post-Grad

Fresh Fruit

Today, I spent a longer portion of my morning routine preparing food to bring to work. For my work snack, I cut up and washed strawberries, apples, and blueberries. Now, I’m working from my cubicle, feeling a little brighter; the corporate beige environment around me has some color.🍓🫐🍎

As a kid, my mom packed my lunches. All day at school, I anticipated lunch hour: when I could see what snacks and notes she had made. Lunch was a sacred time for me, a time for me to remember home.

A little collage I made of the fruit I brought to lunch :)

Now that I live a couple of hundred miles away from my mom, I often forget my lunch. No handwritten notes, fresh-cut fruit, and sandwiches are waiting for me. My mom is no longer around to prepare them. It is up to me now.

Learning how to take care of myself has not been an easy journey.

In my junior year of college, I started grocery shopping and preparing my meals. For the first few months, I’d go to class until 3 pm and forget to pack a lunch. Well, I guess I did not forget my lunch; I just never even thought to make it in the first place. Around noon, after the appetite-suppressing effects of my caffeine wore off, I would feel starving and unable to focus.

Now that I have just graduated from college, I do much better with eating at regular intervals, but I still struggle to get all the protein and sufficient nutrients. Perhaps you can relate to this, too, as the U.S. food industry does not make nutrition accessible.

It may seem that meal prepping and eating at regular intervals throughout the day is self-explanatory—not something that needs to be learned through trial and error. But for me, it wasn’t. I had to learn how to live on my own. I had to learn how to fill the quiet spaces my mother’s love used to occupy. I had to learn how to parent myself for the first time.

A Juvenile Robin and her mom sitting at the pool. Photo by Beth Peazzoni

All this to say: it’s been a joyful (and tumultuous) path, learning to interweave my mom’s love into my life. This is a sewing project I’ll likely work on for the rest of my days. But, for today, I’m proud of myself. I learned that fruit tastes sweeter when it’s prepared with love.

Thank you for reading, and see you next time on:

xoxo,

Ally