When No Other Muffin Will Do

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Before I even gave birth, I started to get questions about what kind of food I would make my child, how I would change my cooking style once I had a baby, when I might start to release postpartum recipes, or when I would start to consider a cookbook for toddlers (probably never).

As a person who’s not great at seeing more than two weeks in front of them, I of course did not (and do not) have a suitable answer for any of those questions. In my mind, not much would change. It remind me a lot of the discourse around fashion for expectant/new moms: “who am I now,” “what do I wear now,” “can I still wear this,” etc.

The assumption that our identities would change as drastically as our bodies was not something I connected to, which is to say, I’m still as confused about what I should wear as I was before. Like are high-waisted pants so uncool that I might simply evaporate into the air as soon as I step foot in Dimes Square? Sorry, they are the only pants that look good on my body!

I feel similar in regards to my cooking and eating. As a new parent, would I all of a sudden become a person who did “meal prep?” or pivot exclusively to sheet pan dinners or high-protein snack bites that work great in the freezer? So far…no. So far, I’m cooking the same as I was pre-baby, more often than not ignoring the nutritional cries for help in favor of something extremely delicious because feeding my soul is more important, and plus, that’s what the vitamins are for. I still don’t plan ahead, my grocery store trips are as frequent and chaotic as before, and I’m just as disorganized as ever, still trying to defrost a chicken two hours before dinner time, which is now sandwiched somewhere in the 33 minutes between second-to-last-bottle of the night and bath time. These things aren’t doing me any favors, but I am who I am.

But now, three months postpartum, I guess I am also…muffins? Muffins are me. Becomes a mother, makes muffins.

About one month after