Humble Pie

Lemon pie, if done right, should hurt just a little. When you eat lemon pie, the tartness should make your tongue and your brain do a tiny wince, but then the cloud of meringue melts it away. The slice needs to be ice cold and paired with a cup of very hot black coffee, which is served in a thick white mug. This is the pie I had in a small diner in North Carolina, and it made me want to cry...
Humble Pie is about my long-term sobriety. It's also about middle age and food and menopause and marriage and parenting. All of these things trampled right on through my recovery, and then they helped transform it. And my recovery is everything. It is the music in my life; my soundtrack that keeps me marching forward, no matter the chaos around me. It's what wakes me up, and it's what lays me down.
But at that diner with my slice of lemon pie, I could no longer hear the music. The pie was so good. But I devoured it in seconds. I stared at the crumbs on my plate, and I was still so hungry. I wanted more. But also, I knew that the waitress could bring endless slices of pie. She could keep slinging plates down, like those marching brooms with their sloshing pails of water, overflowing the cauldron in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. I would never feel full.
My slice of lemon pie and I were on my tour for my second book, How to be Perfect Like Me. Book tours are super glamorous, especially when only two people show up to your signing and they are the store owner's parents. Weirdly, this happened twice on this trip. Shoutout to those parents for being so supportive. Meanwhile, my trip had also become the Tour de Cinnamon Roll, and I was placing first at every leg of the race. I was anxious and tired and supposedly celebrating my second book, but instead all I wanted was pastry, and a dark place to eat it.
I knew I was veering away from my sober path, into the land of food addiction and binge-eating, but I couldn't stop. Menopause, food-addiction's bitchy sister, had swerved me into deep weeds. I was menopausal; therefore, I had become invisible, or at least it felt that way. Months later, the isolation and fear of a global pandemic entered the mix, and I succumbed to even more unhealthy issues with comparison, scrolling, and frenetic over-exercising. Finally, my higher power finally threw up her hands and said, "Ok. It's time to deal." As is my way, there was a lot of whining about cupcakes, but eventually I got better.
So of course, I had to write about it.

Dana Bowman is the author of How to Be Perfect Like Me and Bottled: A Mom's Guide to Early Recovery, which was selected as a Kansas Notable book. She teaches writing at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas, and works as a librarian at her local branch. Dana lives in a sweet little town in the Midwest with her family and two cats. You can visit her at danabowmancreative.com.