Real

I indulged and bought a block of Real Butter this weekend. Usually we stick to the cheaper margarine blocks (which are used for both cooking and spreading), but I had this sudden urge for the Real Stuff.

So yesterday I took a sliver and mixed up a bit of garlic butter to go on fresh-from-the-grill homemade bread. HEAVEN! My son had the leftovers for supper and I heard him exclaiming his delight as he munched his way through the last few bits.

It's been a very long time since we had real butter on anything. A year ago I bought a block to make one of those chocolate cakes that consist of butter, melted dark choc and not much else. I used the small bit of butter left over for a batch of muffins. I couldn't believe the taste difference!

After using the "plastic" margarine for so long, it's easy to forget what the real stuff tastes like. It's easy to get used to the stick-on-your-gums fattiness of hydrogenated vegetable (and other dodgy) oils, and not realize what you're missing out on. And it's easy to go for cheap over great when trying to stay within a budget.

I've been margarine for a while - not the real me, not true to myself and not leaving a good taste with those I come into contact with. I want to be Butter. I want to live authentically and be the me that's too often trapped inside. I want to melt with warmth and love as easily as butter on hot fresh bread. I want to be the kind of person others enjoy, relish being with.

Just this weekend I was thinking back to high school, to my first boyfriend and the other guy who beat him up over me. And wondered what happened to the girl that guys would fight for. She seems to have disappeared - she's turned into a bland version of what society expects a single mother to be. But then again, I don't know any guys who would fight for a girl these days either, so maybe it's not all "me".

Making butter takes hard work. I once did it for a living, along with cheese production. Besides milking a cow and seperating off the cream, that cream has to be churned for quite a while at the right temperature, washed and salted and moulded until it's just right - or it will end up as junk.

Making the real me appear again is going to take hard work too. I need to seperate out the rubbish that's taken over, that's got me living a surface life and merely existing. I need tempering and washing and compacting into something worth having. I've got to make a couple of very hard decisions on a daily basis instead of taking the easy drifty way out. I want to be someone worth fighting for again.

The thing is, I've been this margarine me for a very long time. It's the me everyone thinks they know. They don't suspect what's hidden beneath, though little bits of it sometimes surfaces. It may surprise my family and friends to see what's in there, what I'm really made of. If I get it right to be Real, I don't know what reaction I'll get. But I'm really tired of just plodding through life, living the things everyone expects from me, the things I've let myself believe I am. The things I really am not.

As I savour that block of Reality in my fridge, I'm going to be picking through the Artificial to see if there's anything left of who I really am. Bit by bit, I'm going to seperate it out and grow it until the outside of me matches the Real inside.

(But first I'm going to get some sleep - staying up late to watch the Olympics close is not helpful to reality-checks)

::update::
So I decided, after the above, to go write out what the Real Me is all about, just so I'd know. After 2 pages of frantic typing, this is how it ended:

"And none of this is the real me. It’s either fantasy, or layers. I don’t know the real me."

Great. Seems I've been margarine for so long that there's not even a buttery flavour left! Perhaps all I really am is just this, the me I wish were different, but is never going to change anyway, so I may as well just make the best of it. oh well...