By Marijean Oldham

You shake off yesterday, its stress and excess, and face the day, thinking ahead to the fresh fruit and oatmeal you’ll have for breakfast, then you open Instagram and see the bakery near your office is featuring extra gooey cinnamon rolls and it’s hot chocolate month and there’s a different flavor for each day, and next week promises salted caramel day, put that on the calendar, you set down your phone, and with renewed resolve you head to the kitchen and pull out blueberries and pour coffee, reaching for Splenda and not sugar and for milk, but there’s half and half, you should have a salad for lunch, and as you put the blueberries back in the fridge you see the containers of food you stacked away, the Brussels Sprouts Mac and Cheese you made for dinner last night, untouched as usual, as well as her last two dinners, and you wonder when was the last time she ate, then you see the biscotti on the counter and you dunk a cookie into your coffee before you eat the oatmeal, think of the fiber, you won’t be hungry before lunch, and then for dinner you can make pearled barley and baked tofu with roasted broccoli, when she was tiny, she called broccoli “trees,” and there’s a low-calorie peanut sauce you can make to spice it up, to make it gourmet, to attract the other palate in your household even though she doesn’t eat, won’t eat in front of you, especially now that she’s older, an adult, you think in air quotes, so why do you try, because the less she eats, the more you do, and you know it’s going to kill you, if you don’t get it under control you’re going to spiral and with your family history, that’s a terrible idea, so you go for a walk after breakfast and get a damn salad at lunch and plan to make a reasonable dinner and rinse your bowl and lace up your sneakers, zip your jacket and slip in your Airpods for a quick three miles, and when you get tempted to quit, forget your feet and what you’re doing, what you have to do, and how you pretended not to notice as she slipped out the door without eating breakfast, taking nothing for lunch, how she left without saying goodbye, but you saw and you noticed the sweatshirt that surrounds her and drowns her, and maybe you and a friend could go for a cocktail after work and you could get some dinner, too, because who wants to go home to a house where you make a reasonable, delicious, low-carb dinner; dinner’s the only time you might catch her before she goes out, and you’ll struggle not to shovel food into your mouth with the hunger of a thousand days while your daughter sits there, sullen, looking at you like she doesn’t want to eat ever again because she doesn’t want to look like you, she doesn’t want to be you, and you feel the weight of that, and you tell yourself to focus on the positive, the walk, the salad, and your plan and each day you will try to take good care of yourself, it’s just the two of you, despite what she does or does not do, you never could control her, and you can only lead by example, and Rome wasn’t built in a day, but oh, that velvety pasta sauce you had in Italy, the trip, post-divorce, that marked your independence, the start of the new you, you saw a recipe online and the secret is butter, because the secret is always butter, but in this one there’s an onion cut in half and put in the pan with the crushed tomatoes, and an entire stick of butter and you don’t even keep the onion, just cook the sauce down and mash the tomatoes into the melted butter then discard the onion, throw it away, as if the essence of onion is what makes it sing and you would like to make that tonight, and forget the grain bowl with the tofu, but keep the broccoli, you wonder if she still thinks, “trees,” and roast it and serve it alongside the pasta and sauce and my god, it’s been a hell of a week, you could use a Manhattan like they serve at that place where you and her father used to go when you were together, and you wonder if you will see your daughter before you go to sleep tonight, or if she will slip in after you’ve gone to bed, and you think of the way she used to get the giggles at the dinner table, how the two of you would make her favorite Mac and Cheese together and listen to music while you ate and later that night, you’ll open your eyes to the sound of a closing cabinet, the hum of the microwave, the thwack of the refrigerator door and you’ll grimace in the dark, thinking it’s just theater and you won’t exhale until there are dirty dishes in the sink in the morning.