‘I hate this meal, actually. It makes me feel sad and unexcited about dinner and I just don’t want to have it anymore’.

I said this to my nesting partner a few days ago, while we were about to prepare a meal that we have at least once a fortnight.

I hadn’t consciously processed how I felt about this particular meal until the words were coming out of my mouth. And then I knew how deeply true it was. My nesting partner was very surprised. Not least because I had shown no indication of my dislike until that moment. I had been eating this meal, regularly, for years, under the false impression that it was a meal of compromise. It is nutritious, easy to make, relatively inexpensive, involves foods we both like, and now that the baby is on solids they can eat it too. I thought I had been a willing participant in the planning, preparation and consumption of this food and that it met a compromise of needs.

I was wrong.

In the utterance of my true feelings and the need I had around it I had a spark of understanding. I had set aside my needs in this matter so early on, that I had dismissed them before even sharing them with my partner. I had done the internal acrobatics it takes to perform easy-going/low maintenance/’name your patriarchal too of oppression’. I had confused the minimising of my needs with compromise. It was then that it struck me how many of us are doing this, every day, with multiple things, and how it is slowly eroding our joy, our agency, our ability to connect and commune, and perhaps for some of us even our desire to live. If this sounds dramatic, it simply demonstrates how deeply conditioned we are to normalise neglecting ourselves.