Like this:

“Marge, your cooking has two speeds: Shake and Bake.”
- what I repeat to myself every time I make what I made last night.

Some days all I can do is give myself what I give Blake when there’s nothing else: cheese, crackers, fruit, yogurt and if we’re lucky, meat and olives. But the best days are those when there is enough leftover from dinner for a hot lunch. Yesterday I asked my dad to take us to the grocery store so that Blake & I could have dinner in style: pork chops with Shake n’ Bake, rice cooked with chicken broth, and roasted root vegetables that have survived from other, better meals. I only cook once a week these days, when Mason is teaching and I need to feed Blake before his skating lesson. Some weeks I don’t even get to cook once. Mason is a much better cook than I am, and one of my deep convictions (which he routinely denies) is that he doesn’t like my cooking. Thus, an inferior skill continues to atrophy, and the result is this aggressively bourgeois cooking when I do have to cook.

Many women consider me exceedingly lucky that I’m with a man who loves to cook. And it is truly a special blessing to sit down to the meals he routinely makes for us. (Dinner the night before was tacos, which we always joke are coming straight from the Old El Paso kit. In reality, Mason’s tacos contain beef and vegetables from local farmers and spices he crushes by hand. Last night he decided he wasn’t going to put up with bland mass-produced flour tortillas any longer, so he made and fried corn tortillas.)

The only tiny caveat is that I like to cook. Oh, I don’t like the drudgery of meals, and just like everyone else, I get tired of the constant need to eat. Pixie used to long for a “piece of food” that she could eat and be happy, a non-cartoon equivalent of Bachelor Chow that would require absolutely no thought, and sometimes I wish for the same. (First world problems, yeah.) But I like making things and I like eating things: cooking is a double-dose of what I like, and I can share it with the people I love. Plus, unlike a hat that is too whimsical or too large, the evidence of my creativity doesn’t stick around forever, mocking me with its floppiness. Nowadays my usual outlet is baking, but since Blake likes to do it with me, I rarely bake without him around to enjoy the process (and the product).

Clearly I need a new delicious hobby.

Yesterday was a bit weird. Blake has been getting more and more uncomfortable with my visits to his teachers, and when he found out yesterday that I had to speak to his teacher, he had a meltdown. We were already late, and we spent twenty more minutes making each other miserable before I called it off. At this point, Maggie had just stopped screaming from her sling, Blake was hiding behind a tree, and I seemed to be the only one who wanted to go to school. So I gave him an out, and he spent the day home with me. It was a cross between a mental health day and punishment, with chores filling the morning and reading filling the middle hours. And whatever Blake was struggling with yesterday was gone today: Mason helped him get up and get ready in the morning while I fed Maggie, and I was able to get to school early. I think some of his issue was with his class seeing me, so having a talk with his teacher before any one else got there made him feel much better.

I feel a little weird about my decision to keep him home, as it’s certainly not something my parents would have let me do. It’s easy to wonder if I just taught him that he can duck out of anything he doesn’t like. But maybe I taught him that when he’s freaked out, it’s best to just try again later instead of pushing through. I certainly need a mental health day every once in awhile, so why shouldn’t he?

And maybe I taught him that his mom loves him, despite all the doctor’s visits and teacher conferences and new baby. I can’t say that it wasn’t fun to have a somber contrite kid around all day to help me with the laundry. I even had a chance to teach him to sew, as he just earned a new badge. I just can’t let on how much I enjoyed it, because that definitely would send the wrong message.

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