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First comes love; then comes marriage; then comes the cooking ban.
I remember the exact moment. We’d just returned from dropping off my youngest child to his new home within the bosom of the Blue Ridge Mountains at West Virginia University. I shook off my lengthy car-a-thon paralysis, crawled into the house and sighed deeply. I put down my luggage, my Dramamine, the entrails of three lunches, my special neck pillow, my special lower lumbar pillow, my special afghan, my Depends and my 12 magazines. I sat at the kitchen table and slowly scanned the room that had been the epi-center of my life for 25 years.
I decided.
“Nancy. Guess what? I don’t think I’ll be cooking anymore.”
Jaw dropped.
“And now, because I took more than the recommended daily dosage of Dramamine, I’m going to bed for three days. Carry on. There’s peanut butter and there’s jelly. I really don’t think there’s much more you’ll need.”
Jaw remained dropped.
I meant it.
And I mean it.
After cooking and preparing three meals a day for 30 years, I’m tired. OK, well, let’s be honest: I never actually cooked breakfast. But Cap’n Crunch did, and I had to open the box and pour the milk. That takes real effort.
Why is the assumption that from the first week of marriage we wives are totally expected to make dinner every night? Who the heck made that rule?!! It wasn’t Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I’ll tell you that … but it may’ve been Henry VIII.
When my husband comes home, rubs his hands together in anticipation and asks: “What’s for dinner?!” I sometimes want to punch a wall. And when I reply: “Whatever you want to make for yourself is what’s for dinner,” he deflates. And when he makes the fatal error of complaining, I note: “If you were a bachelor, you’d have to feed yourself, right? Pretend you’re a bachelor.”
Under his breath, I hear mutterings of: “that can be arranged” and “my mother would make me dinner,” but it bothers me not one bit.
I am dead serious.
If an able-bodied man does not know enough to make his own food, then I can’t help it. It defies explanation that husbands expect us to work, clean the house, do the freaking laundry, buy the food and prepare the food. Something has got to give, and for me, it’s dinner.
Also, if I’m being honest, maybe a little cleaning.
OK, a lot.
When I awakened from my coma, I came down to the kitchen. And he did, indeed, fix his own dinner. An enormous popcorn bowl filled with Lucky Charms that he was digging into with gusto.
I laughed. I knew what he was doing. He thought the sight of him eating cereal would make me feel badly enough to rustle him up something from each step of the food pyramid. He thought so wrong.
I said: “Yum. That looks nutritious. So colorful …”
He replied: “I’m like, literally, starving to death. Can’t you make me something?”
“Sure I can! I can make you dial the phone and order Sabatini’s. It ain’t Lucky Charms, but it’s magically delicious.”
Bon appetit, ladies. Bon appetit.