Menu-pause, the grey table and the gym

'Anxious, happy, anxious, content, happy, anxious, sad, confused, happy,' Hollywood actor Steve Buscemi said when asked about his state of mind. Navigating a sea of overlapping emotions, all at once. We know the feeling. Or at least, I do, including feeling guilty about it.
“I think you are in menu-pause, mama,” I am told as we are eating our pasta with cherry tomatoes while sitting opposite each other at the decades-old dining table in the living room. The air smells like Parmesan cheese, garlic, butter, and frankincense. No knives (cutting spaghetti strands breaks the hearts of Italian nonnas, or so a friend in Florence once told me).
No devices at the table either, except for a TV playing Al Jazeera in the distant background. A soft murmur about conflicts across Europe, the Middle East and Africa that never seem to de-escalate, bringing into the home the heaviness of the world. Two voices are going on about some plumber who, they say, became a hero overnight, while elsewhere people are still being displaced and killed.
I inherited the grey, oval-shaped dining table from my parents. It recently travelled all the way by sea from Amstelveen to Muscat. I have sat at it for many dinners over the younger years, evolving through different versions of myself, including that of a grumpy teenager. Emo is what they would call that today.
“The feelings of kindness and gentleness, which I had entertained, gave place to rage and gnashing of teeth.” Perhaps the author of Frankenstein best described my parents’ and my own experience of me hitting puberty.
Rage is a big word, though.
But I do remember being annoyed by the soft sounds my father made while eating the fantastic Italian and French meals he often prepared after a long day at work. I also recall being irritated by the voice of my lovely, loud, wildly beautiful, and present mum who did not like to cook.
“When you were a baby, you were always so happy to see me,” she would say, or sing, in response to me rolling my eyes at her, before breaking into a loud whistle or a little tap dance, once her profession. Looking back, I suppose this meant she, in turn, was annoyed by me but trying hard not to show it.
Being a teenager around my parents felt mostly like wanting to be warm and kind, but sometimes feeling trapped inside a shell or armour, unable to let that side of me out.
In the winter of 2025, I laid my head on the grey, decades-old dining table. I had just arrived in the Netherlands to care for my then-dying father. I ran my fingers over its many scratches as if they held memories of all the discussions, debates and laughter we had at this table, usually all at once. Lying there, it felt as though a sometimes misunderstood, sometimes lost, sometimes wise teenage version of myself was still there, waiting to be accepted by me.
That winter of 2025, and into the spring that followed, many had some very good meals with my father at that table, while my mum’s legacy was palpable in the scratches and unique plates she got from Paris decades ago.
Now, sitting at the same grey table in Oman as an adult, I am apparently suspected of being in menopause (although I have not even reached pre-menopause yet) by a self-proclaimed ‘pre-teen’ sitting opposite me. We both laugh at her menu-pause comment, for different reasons. She is being funny; I am being a neurotic, laidback, sometimes uptight mum, especially once a month, who just went to the gym to jack up endorphins.
Although she meant PMS, I guess real conversations around the dining table, what you might call an actual ‘menu-pause’ (a pause to enjoy a chat and the menu), and exercise are what work best against anxiety about problems in the real world and in our personal worlds, and against fears over shoes that may or may not drop.
Apart from the real conversations at the table, there is the gym. Hidden in a Muscat mall that barely looks like one, I recently found an affordable little gem called 7s Wellness, with a holistic, uplifting approach for ladies only. From the outside, you would not expect this place to transform your mood.
I enter through a service lift in a shabby supermarket delivery area where stinky trucks get their loads checked. The parking pavement is covered in dark old stains, baguettes sit in plastic crates, and smoke from seemingly bored Lebanese salesmen in suits.
Once inside, the laidback and energetic atmosphere, largely created by the women who go there, and who have their own stories to tell, helps me lift those endorphins against the mood swings, even though I am no longer a teenager and not yet in menopause.
Some of us ordinary people may sometimes navigate a sea of emotions, all at once, and we need a menu-pause at the dining table and gym to do so.

BREGJE VAN BAAREN The writer is a freelance contributor