Michelle Boyd Real Food Cook

Today would have been our 32nd wedding anniversary 💔

But did you know baby Michelle was married, ever so briefly, before. And no, that marriage didn’t have any anniversaries 😳

In a weird, “Adelaide is so small” twist, my ex-husband’s sister had gone on a date with my Ian before Ian & I ever met. There’s a bunch of people & places that Ian & I had in common before we got together. We were moving in parallel circles gradually moving towards each other.

Have you & your partner got any “it’s a small world” stories to tell?

Japan caters for all of the family

This ice cream is the BEST!

I’m going on a holiday.
And yes, I feel guilty about it.

There’s something very strange about packing a bag when your world has been turned upside down. About choosing a destination and the idea of a change of scenery when part of you wonders if you even deserve one yet. Of friends wrapping you in attention and warmth and you not quite knowing what to do with it, because being cared for feels unfamiliar after so long being the one who cares.

Grief, it turns out, is an excellent hand luggage companion. It comes everywhere with you. Sometimes it's light and sometimes you carry a lot of heavier stuff in it.

But here’s the thing I keep coming back to. Ian would have absolutely zero patience for the guilt. He believed in living. Fully, loudly, and without waiting for permission. It was one of the things I loved most about him and one of the things that made the last six years, despite everything, so fulfilling.

So I’m going. Not because I’m fine. Not because life has moved on. Not because the grief has packed itself away neatly in a drawer somewhere.

But because two things can be true at once. I can be heartbroken and also sit on a plane. I can miss him every minute and also laugh with friends. I can be someone who is still very much in the middle of the hardest thing — and also someone who is still, quietly, choosing to live.

I think that’s what he’d want. Actually, I know it is. 💙

Value. It's a word we throw around mostly when we're talking about money. Best bang for your buck. Getting your money's worth. A good deal. In the world of direct selling, value for money is practically the entire pitch, the cornerstone of every demonstration, every conversation, every sale.

But lately I've been thinking about value very differently.

I've been thinking about the value of a person's time. The value of showing up for someone. The value of a simple acknowledgement when someone in your world is going through something enormous. How companies can speak endlessly about their values — their mission statements, their culture, their people-first approach — and then say absolutely nothing when one of their own experiences a death in the family. That silence has a cost. It tells you more than 1000 words can.

In this thought process, I have been thinking about personal values. The ones that actually guide how we move through the world when nobody is watching. Integrity. Empathy. Decency. Being human. The quiet ones that don't make it onto a corporate website or a social media post but matter infinitely more.

Mostly though, I've been thinking about the value of a life.

Ian was 58 when he died. There were things he never got to do and places he never got to go. A future that was taken before it was finished.

And I find myself thinking, every single day — how do I live the rest of my life in a way that honours that? How do I do the things he never got the chance to do? How do I make sure that the time I have actually means something?

Value for money is easy to calculate. Value for life is harder. But I think it starts with paying attention to what — and who — actually matters.

My latest library borrowing. Would you give peas a chance? 🫛

LOST: Passion for cooking 🫤

I knew I’d be sad. I knew I’d be lost & confused.

But I didn’t expect to feel like a different person. Part of feeling different is the lost love of cooking. It makes me feel physically sick when I think about cooking meals.

I’ve done a couple of biscuits/muffins because it’s for other people I can deal with that. But meals - it’s been a case of assembling or reheating 😑

🤞🤞the heart for cooking comes back.

Can we talk about grief for a moment?

Because here's what nobody really tells you. Grief is a rollercoaster that doesn't follow a track. In a single day — sometimes in a single hour — I can feel confusion, loneliness, anxiety, acceptance, peace, anger, sadness, longing, and denial. Sometimes all at once. Sometimes in an order that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I held it together for 6 years. I managed and I coped. I spent years being the person who keeps going no matter what. I thought I'd prepared myself emotionally. But my Stoic Dam has huge cracks in it right now. And I'm learning to resist spackfilling the cracks as they begin and to feel all the feels.

For a while I kept saying I was fine. "I'm okay." And I wasn't. And somewhere last week I realised that pretending to be okay wasn't protecting me. It was just exhausting and I felt it was devaluing how much the loss of a partner I'd had for 34 years was affecting me.

So I'm choosing honesty instead. Some days I am okay. Some days I am absolutely not. Both are true and both are allowed. I miss Ian so much. I even miss the political rants and yelling at the football on TV.

If you're somewhere on your own grief rollercoaster right now, whether it's fresh or old or somewhere in between, just know you don't have to hold the dam together all by yourself.

Thank you to everyone who commented, sent messages & flowers as we said goodbye to Ian. Your support and love has been amazing.❤❤

📸 Little Oak Studio