Ice Cream For Breakfast

Photo by Mieke Campbell on Unsplash

A woman walked onto a conference stage and put up a photo of her two daughters. The next slide was the same girls, spoons in hand, eating ice cream for breakfast.

“I have stage 4 breast cancer,” she said. “It’s not an if, it’s a when. We’ve done what we can, and I’m at peace with it. What matters now is that I make memories with the people I love.”

I was in the audience at a Generation W conference in Jacksonville, Florida, a women’s leadership event founded by Donna Orender, the former WNBA president. The lineup that day was full of people who’d built remarkable lives: women who’d turned their careers, their courage, their second acts into something bigger than they’d planned. I remember feeling something stir in me, the old, familiar pull toward a stage of my own.

Then she spoke, and the whole room went somewhere else.

She told us her daughters would never forget the day they had ice cream for breakfast. That wasn’t the point of the story, but it was the proof of it: she wasn’t waiting for permission to give her kids joy, and she wasn’t waiting for some later, safer, more deserving moment to live the life she actually had. I sat there praying her time would be long and painless, and that she’d get to tell that story to a thousand more rooms.

Years later, I was on a call with someone from a breast cancer awareness group. I mentioned the woman from that stage, almost in passing. She knew exactly who I meant, and told me she’d passed away years before.

I still think about her message more frequently than most of the others.

Here’s what she left me with: most of us treat joy, rest, and freedom like prizes. Things you earn after the work week ends, after the project closes, after you’ve proven you deserve them. It’s a useful pattern for measuring time, but it quietly convinces us that the things we already have (an evening with our kids, a slow morning, a bowl of ice cream before 9 a.m.) belong to some future, conforming, version of us.

Watch what happens to people who treat ease as scarce: they don’t get disciplined, they get desperate. Marathon runners gulp water like it’s about to be rationed. People experiencing a famine are apt to overeat the moment food appears. Take away the thing someone’s been told to ration, and you don’t get restraint, you get a binge. Whatever we treat as something we have to earn, we eventually grab at it. It becomes a great example of how scarcity creeps in. It is like a sheet over what’s really happening, fear.

The rest isn’t the reward for the life. It’s what makes life work.

She didn’t wait. She had ice cream with her daughters on an ordinary morning because there was no later to save it for, and there wasn’t going to be. She chose not to live from fear, but rather from freedom.

My then-husband and I were working out what came after our divorce, mostly home-bound with the kids during COVID. The four of us were circling each other in a house that didn’t feel settled anymore. One morning, I just knew it was time. I felt the sadness in the air. How could I do something to acknowledge how difficult this moment was, while knowing that it wouldn’t change the outcome? How could I make this a moment worth savoring? We could grieve and still find peace.

Make a memory of this moment.

Choose Ice Cream for breakfast. Choose the joy of what is.

My children and I sat in the middle of my bed with spoons and a few flavors of ice cream and sorbet, and I invited their dad to join us.

Ice cream didn’t answer that question. But it gave them a memory to hold onto while they waited for the answer.

He walked down the hall and stopped in the doorway. From the look on his face, it was certain that he thought I’d lost my mind. I let him wonder for a while before I explained. He understood before I finished. And for a few minutes, all four of us felt something we hadn’t felt in a long time: free, in the same room, at the same time.

Our separation was a peaceful one, but peaceful doesn’t mean painless. There was still tension under the surface, still worry, still questions that our children carry quietly: will things ever feel normal again? Ice cream didn’t answer that question. But it gave them a memory to hold onto while they waited for the answer. It reminded all four of us that things would be okay.

I expect to live a long life, but it is true that we don’t know when things might change. I don’t need an illness or any circumstance to be the excuse to live like her, and neither do you. When I sleep enough and protect my own morning, I’m more productive, not less. When I carve out a weeknight for friends or sit quietly with one of my kids instead of pushing through another hour of work, I sleep better that night, too. The rest isn’t the reward for the life. It’s what makes life work.

That’s the whole lesson, really. Stop rationing the good stuff. Create meaningful moments. Have ice cream for breakfast.

Healing is a success strategy for leaders. Explore the collective impact of your commitment to heal in my new book, Healing Is Required. Now available on Amazon and AnikaApple.com