I Used to Love This Part of the Day

Tonight we are making peanut butter noodles, and the sauce takes about ninety seconds.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Put a pot of water on for whatever noodles or pasta are in the house. In a bowl, stir together three big spoons of peanut butter, two spoons of soy sauce, a spoon of vinegar or the juice of half a lime, a small spoon of sugar or honey, and a grated clove of garlic if you have one. It will look wrong and seize up. Add hot water from the kettle or the pasta pot a spoon at a time, stirring, and it turns glossy and smooth. Drain the noodles, tip them into the bowl, and toss. Put anything crunchy on top, cucumber or scallion or peanuts or nothing at all. It feeds four, it costs a few dollars, and it takes exactly as long as the noodles.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the noodles.

It is that somebody reading this used to love this hour.

Not tolerated. Loved. There was a stretch of your life where six o'clock was the good part: the radio on, something with garlic in it, a glass of water on the counter, one hour in the day that belonged to you and produced something people were glad about.

And now the same hour arrives and what comes with it is dread. Actual dread, in the chest, before the pan is even out. And you have not told anybody, because it sounds ridiculous to say that you are afraid of making dinner.

The psalm that remembers the good version

There is a line in Psalm 42 where a man does exactly what has been happening in your kitchen.

When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise. (Psalm 42:4, King James Version)

Look at what he is grieving. Not a catastrophe. He is grieving that a thing he used to love does not feel the way it used to feel. He remembers going with the crowd, with the voice of joy, and the remembering is what undoes him.

And the psalm does not correct him for it. It lets him say it, at length, twice, and it never once tells him to be grateful instead.

You are allowed to miss the version of this that used to be good, and God has never once called that ingratitude. Psalm 42:4 has a man pour out his soul over a lost gladness rather than over a disaster, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes room for that in a kitchen at six in the evening.

You have not become a different person, and heaven has never once written somebody off for losing their taste for a thing they loved. It is written that he remembered and poured out his soul, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is in the room where the water is coming up.

What actually happened to six o'clock

Let me say what I think changed, because I do not believe you fell out of love with cooking.

Cooking used to have space around it. It was a thing chosen, with an hour attached to it, and choosing is most of what makes something enjoyable. And then, gradually, it became a deadline with four people attached to it, arriving at the exact hour when there is the least left in the tank, and repeating every single day whether there is anything left or not.

The activity did not change. The conditions around it did. What used to be an hour you took is now a demand that lands, and no human being enjoys a demand.

Dread at six is not a verdict on how much you love your family. It is an accurate response to an unrelieved obligation, and there is no character fault anywhere in it.

You are not failing at something you used to be good at, and God has never once read exhaustion as a loss of love. The passage grieves a changed experience of a good thing without ever blaming the person, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates the dread from the household it happens to arrive next to.

You have been doing this every night for years without a break in it, and nobody enjoys anything under those conditions. Psalm 42 is written by somebody in the middle of it rather than by somebody who has come out the other side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stays in the middle with a person.

Give it back one small piece of choosing

Here is the practical part, and it is one idea.

The thing you lost was not cooking. It was choosing. So the way back is not a better recipe or more energy. It is to put one deliberate choice back into the hour, and to make that choice tiny enough that a tired person can actually make it.

Tonight it is the crunchy thing on top. Cucumber, or scallion, or peanuts, or nothing. It genuinely does not matter which. What matters is that you stand there and pick one, on purpose, for no reason except that you preferred it.

That is a very small thing and I am aware of how small it sounds. But dread grows in a place where a person has stopped being a person and has become a function, and one free choice a night is how you get back in the room.

You are still in there, and God has never once let a hard season have the last word on what a person loves. Psalm 42:4 is a man remembering joy in the middle of not having it, which is itself the first sign of its return, and the Spirit of God is the one who puts one small free choice back into somebody's hands.