Discovering Your Lovey

We see it all the time. Little kids who are attached to a stuffed animal or blanket. Their “lovey.” The item that brings them comfort to help them when the world starts to feel too big. And let's call it what it is - the world is huge to a little kid. So loud and overstimulating and unknown. It only makes sense to carry a lovey around.

But what about adults? The world is still loud and overstimulating and unknown. Why don't we get to carry loveys around??

Here’s my story.

In 2021, right as COVID was ramping up for a second time, we decided to move our family from our beloved home in Boulder, Colorado, across the ocean to Cascais, Portugal. I had no idea what to expect. I knew we’d feel homesick, and I did my best to guesstimate what we could bring from home to help in those moments.

But nothing we brought (aside from our family cat, Gladys,) hit that “lovey" feel for us. It became very apparent that what we actually missed most from home was the food.

Why couldn't we find a decent bagel in Portugal? Where was the Panera Bread Mac & Cheese?? Not even the bread tasted the same here.

Sure, we all missed our family and friends terribly, but in those highly-emotional moments of "missing home," what we craved way more than anything else was the comfort of the food we knew.

We came back to Boulder a year later and gorged ourselves on all the foods we had missed. It was heaven. But, moving back to Portugal was in our future. And this time, we’d be prepared.

My youngest daughter and I started perfecting a bagel recipe, so we could homemake the holey bites of heaven whenever we wanted. We found all the copycat recipes we could for Panera’s Mac & Cheese.

Great! My kids were set. But what about me? What helped when I felt homesick?  

I started some intentional journaling all around this question. What I discovered actually made me laugh a little. The bottom line came down to this: I got homesick when I drank Portuguese coffee.

Really? Coffee?? Now, here's the thing. I’m not a regular coffee drinker, so the fact that that’s what was coming up for me didn’t make much sense. But here's the other thing. When I do drink coffee, it’s typically because I’m in a bad mood. There’s nothing quite as comforting as curling up with a great latte and just emoting. I don’t know. Call me weird.  

But, my perfect latte exists in a tiny coffee shop in Colorado. Not in Portugal. See the dilemma?

And so, just like we did with learning to make bagels and Mac & Cheese, I took it upon myself to learn how to make my own damn lattes.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I didn’t know the first thing about coffee or espresso. And so, I took a class from the tiny shop in Colorado that makes my comfort latte. I subscribed to a bunch of YouTube channels and began opening this wormhole that is the world of coffee beans. It was fascinating. I splurged and bought myself an espresso machine when we came back to Portugal. Imagine! A non-coffee drinker filling her European-sized countertop with a bulky coffee machine.

And I have to admit, it’s made me really damn happy. I spend my free time with my new hobby. I visit different shops here in search of coffee beans I like. I geek out trying to “dial in” my espresso beans. And every time I do it - whether successful or not (usually not,) I feel comforted. I’m empowering myself to live in a foreign country that doesn’t have my creature comforts, because I can create them myself. I can make my own lovey.