Free If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon by Jenna McCarthy Page A

come over to my house and prepare it right in front of me. I bought the organic, free-range chicken myself, so that she wouldn’t be able to inject it with some sort of tenderizing flavor booster on the sly. When Jill arrived, she prepared the chicken just as she’d instructed me and cooked it precisely the same way I had. As usual, it was orgasmic.
    “I don’t get it!” I cried. “I did every single thing you did! I used your damned spice rub and I even got the kind of pan you have at the restaurant. Do I need to be wearing checkered pants and nurse shoes? Is it the hair net, because I’ll get one. Just tell me, what am I doing wrong? What’s the secret?”
    “You have to cook it with love,” Jill said, shaking her head sadly. Honest to God, that’s what she said.
    Well, fuck me, then.
    I don’t love cooking. I used to, back in another lifetime when I was doing it for other appreciative adults and had untold hours to scan cookbooks for ideas and peruse gourmet markets for inspiration and exotic ingredients. Once I had kids, putting a meal on the table became a chore that ranked up there with getting my annual mammogram or cleaning the oven on the intrinsic-joy scale. Like most working moms, I had managed to assemble a meager arsenal of five or six familyfriendly meals—meaning the kids would eat them without threatening to puke or actually puking—that I cooked and served on a continual loop. It got to the point where the kids knew what day of the week it was by what was on the table.
    “It’s taco Tuesday again ?” they’d moan. The only day that was a universal crowd pleaser was Saturday, also known as “breakfast-for-dinner day.” On BDD they could have any breakfast item of their choice—cottage cheese, fruit, French toast, pancakes, waffles, hash browns, bacon, omelets, or green eggs and ham if it meant quiet acquiescence. I bought an appalling selection of cereals, hoping to entice my family to the uncooked side. Occasionally it worked, which did slightly mitigate the pain of having to fire up the oven the other six days.

“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
    When I go grocery shopping I’ll typically buy myself a couple of special treats, something I like to nibble on from time to time. At the same time, I’ll buy my husband a few treats I know he likes, so that he’ll keep his hands off mine. I’ve even been vocal about it. “Please don’t eat my stuff. I bought you your own.” Does it help? Absolutely not. He even knows I’ll get mad about it, so now he tells me that he ate my stuff and he’ll pick me up some more on his way home. If you think I tell him not to bother, you’re wrong. Making him go into a grocery store is his punishment.
    SUSAN
     
     
    When we were first married, Joe didn’t cook and I didn’t expect him to. Once the kids came along, however, I began to plead for his help. Not with the actual adding-heat-to-ingredients part, or even the shopping, slicing, dicing, battering, breading, puréeing, pulverizing, or cleaning up. What I wanted more than anything else was for someone else to plan an occasional menu, to say, “Tonight we are having this .” What a dream that would be, to have an assignment I could carry out on autopilot. No more torturous self-doubting parade of “Will everyone like this?” or “Has it been a week since we had it last?” or “What should I serve with it?” Not my problem, I could say. I just work here. But I’ll be sure to pass your complaint along to management.
    Because I didn’t exactly relish the hours I spent slaving over the proverbial hot stove, I tried to minimize them by cooking in bulk. I’d buy twenty-pound turkeys for our little family of four (only two of whom actually had full sets of teeth), stuff as many meatballs into the Crock-Pot as it would hold, bake a dozen potatoes at once. I wouldn’t just make enchilada pie, I’d make four enchilada pies! My theory was that if we could live off leftovers for a few