In my last post, I shared about processing jars of home cooked stews and meats for my boys in a dorm. It’s shelf-stable and they just have to heat it up. In response, someone commented:

>>The soup/stew solution seems like a really good start, but hard on you.<<

I appreciated the intent to offer suggestions that would make it easier for me and put the ball in their court.

My kids are very capable – very. Though I understate my kids’ abilities and capacities when writing about them, I can safely say you won’t find many boys their ages as capable as they are. They can certainly shop and cook for themselves; they don’t need me to help them find a solution for this. Since they don’t have cooking facilities, their solutions are unlikely to be as good as mine, but they aren’t spoiled and have a make-do-with-a-good-attitude ethic.

But you know what? I want to do this for them. In so many ways, doing this for them says, ‘I love you’. Every time they heat up a jar of food I prepared for them, whether they think of it consciously or not, they’re imbibing some of my love, knowing that I went out of my way because I love them, and connecting to that love.

I’m not interested in skimping on that. I’m not so busy with more important things in my life that this is a pressure for me, or one more thing to do on my overly full to-do list. I do have a list that doesn’t seem to get much smaller regardless of what I do, but being present for my children and having a relationship with them is high on my list – even if they’re far away and it’s a non-verbal food interaction. Not only is making this food not hard on me, I welcome the opportunity to show them how much they matter to me.

There are different ways to show love, and people perceive love that is given to them in different ways. For my older son, I know this is meaningful for him. Someone else might say, ‘Meh, nice but it really doesn’t matter much to me.’

I’m so, so aware of how quickly time goes by, how short the time with our children is. The process of growing up is gradual, a constant spreading of one’s wings and becoming more independent. Independence doesn’t happen suddenly when they go away to school or get married. The relationship with a child changes as they go through increasing levels of independence, and by necessity your active role in their lives shifts.

We tend to associate food with times we spent with love ones, with warm memories, with feelings of being cared about and taken care of. Good food, served with love, has the ability to reach a person in ways that other things don’t.

I can give my boys money to buy food if they need to, and I’m glad to do it. But feeling loved through the money for food is more distant than feeling loved by eating the food itself.

Preparing food so my boys can have a home cooked meal whenever they’re hungry is something I can do for my older son this year. This is when he needs it and especially appreciates it. Next year he’ll be in yeshiva gedolah, where the food is usually much better, so this probably won’t be needed.

I’m embracing the opportunity that I have now to send my sons love from a distance. It only looks like jars of food sitting on their shelves. But now you know what it really is.

Avivah