Freedom Burger

In early November, Joe and I drove to the Fillmore Theater in downtown Detroit to see the Indigo Girls in concert. We hadn’t had dinner, and we had some time, so we tucked into the bar/restaurant next door first.

I got a cosmo, Joe got a beer, and we ordered burgers. As we talked during the meal, I said, a couple of times, “Wow, my burger is REALLY GOOD,” and I ordered another cosmo. Now, this was the most I’d had to drink in one evening since before I was pregnant with Neve, so I was feeling pretty tipsy, but I was also really enjoying myself.

And I had a great time with Joe and friends at the concert, so it was a fabulous night overall. But for days and days afterward, I’d think about that burger, and my mouth would water, remembering how good it was.

“I don’t know what it was,” I said to Joe one night, “but that burger I had before the concert tasted amazing to me. Were the burgers that good?”

I’d questioned this afterward, because the place wasn’t a cult local favorite for burgers – just a run-of-the-mill bar in an advantageous location. And my suspicions were confirmed when Joe said, “They were good, but not that special.”

So I finally figured out that although I may have had cosmo goggles on that evening in regard to the food, the main thing that was heightening my enjoyment was the sense of freedom I felt (or “tasted,” as it were). Freedom to have a couple of drinks; to spend time with Joe and some dear old friends from college, listening to music that I love; freedom from absently, mechanically shoveling food down in order to feed an increasingly disgruntled baby or comfort a sensitive 3 year old; freedom to re-visit the person I had been before I became “Mommy.”

It was such a relief, and a release, to find that I could still locate that person within myself. But the opportunities are few and increasingly hard to come by.