Muhahua! I’ve actually been having a few days of cackling gallows humor over Matt’s post, “Poor Meal Planning Can Ruin Your Marriage.”
The post is well written and poignant, it is not that, it is just that I am such an extreme case of absolutely devastating epic fail on my family’s part to recognize the importance, the emotional significance of allowing a woman to have some control of her kitchen. It is not entirely their fault, we have had extenuating circumstances.
We have had so many extenuating circumstances, events seem to have organized an entire battalion against me and left me flattened out like a bit of collateral damage, muttering incoherently and making snow angels on what is left of my kitchen floor.
I have to laugh, because she who laughs lasts, and I am so far beyond the struggles of simple meal planning or men who don’t help with household chores, so over the edge and off the cliff, I am a bit like the Road Runner now on a permanent plunge into the abyss. It is so ludicrous as to be downright cartoonish and all I can really do is run about going “Beep, Beep,” and hoping Wiley Coyote is not hiding around the next corner.
My kitchen situation is one of those life issues that I cannot change, I cannot accept, and I cannot adapt to. That is how we survive, we either change it, accept it, or adapt to it. When you have a situation where none of those solutions will work, you have a real problem.
Marriage is often just one act of forgiveness after another. Then there is the acceptance that things are not always going to turn out exactly like you pictured them. Then there is the adapting which often involves finding other ways to get your needs met.
Did I mention the importance, the emotional significance of allowing a woman to have some control of her kitchen? Yes, I probably did.
I now have no kitchen of my own, it’s very small, more like a hallway to the kid’s rooms really, so a high traffic area already, one that is often in the process of some form of remodeling or another. It is completely owned by others, often my son, my daughter, their friends, my husband, my mother. It is such a hangout, sometimes I feel as if I should knock before I go in there.
Our kitchen is also like a black hole, a quasar for power and control and dominance, like people playing king of the hill. Like anyone vastly outnumbered in a game of tug of war, I did the only thing I could, I simply dropped the rope and walked away.
It’s a tough one, I have to tell you. Did I mention the importance, the emotional significance of allowing a woman to have some control of her kitchen? Yes, I probably did.
The hardest part is my husband’s desire to keep the peace when I really think he should have backed me up. He did not. My husband doesn’t understand, he said, “it’s just a kitchen, let it go,” but it wasn’t just a kitchen at all, it was my status in this household, it was my position, it was my territory, it was how I showed my family love.
Let me guess, would that be your kitchen of which you re speaking? I think I noticed that you may have mentioned that your kitchen is important – is that true? I’m just deducing from your comments, of course so I may be wrong – it my not be your kitchen at all..
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LOL! Yes, I want to be perfectly clear here, because people in these parts just don’t seem to get it, or rather, they have chosen to completely ignore me.
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Put up a toll booth. 😀
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“It is completely owned by others, often my son, my daughter, their friends, my husband, my mother. It is such a hangout, sometimes I feel as if I should knock before I go in there.”
Umm, and the dog is in there too, right? ; – )
(or does the dog know not to “violate” your “territory”?)
Our dog is where ever the action is, and under foot!
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Oh, I’ve never made a claim on the kitchen. My failures in the kitchen are common, and occasionally epic. My husband is the true master of the kitchen, especially when my own family comes over to dine. It is far safer for everyone that I deal with my family without knives in my hands.
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I’m with you, IB. My kitchen and my cooking are definitely an area where I often needed forgiveness for my fails as well as an area where I often needed to forgive (a whole stinking LOT) for my husband having zero love, understanding, esteem, support of my efforts, etc. Sadly it was an area where he never tried to do better for his mistakes till at least ten years into our marriage and I was pretty far gone in desperation and pain over it by that time and he was only willing to make an effort in extremely limited ways. Plus he subjected me regularly to his same mistakes still without remorse or apology each individual time but with lots of expectation that if there was any difficulty at all happening it was because of my failures as a wife to not do meals perfectly and my failures as a human to not do forgiveness perfectly, which was all proof that I was bad, a train-wreck. His version of repenting and doing better like in the other few areas he tried to improve in was extremely limited and quite prone to repetition of error, as is often true of all us lowly humans and our mistakes. I’m guilty of that as well, in my own faults.
Husband: Hey, I know, we should have family meals. That would be a good thing.
(Me, in my head, flabbergasted, should I be sarcastic? Glad? Cooperative? Running for the hills, knowing he’s going to play games with my heart and use the whole thing to try to destroy me?)
me: OK
Within 12 hours or less:
(Me working hard all day to overcome my chronic fatigue and my organizational difficulties on top of constant interference from the needs of young children and one of them a special needs child and on top of the downward spiral of trying to run a generally chaotic unsupported, unloved family and household to plan and prepare a meal and a time and place to have a sit-down meal, quite likely stretching all that effort over the entire day from the moment he left till the moment he returned.)
Husband: oh I had to eat a late lunch. I can’t eat now. (Disappears to his hiding place for anywhere from three to seven hours.)
(OR, husband makes a disparaging comment or twenty about one of a thousand different foods that he normally eats just fine but apparently doesn’t like in this little window of time because that is an integral part of his eating-as-a-family-tradition from way back that meals require negatives and defensiveness brought out in offensiveness. Husband may or may not swallow his meal in three to five bites that he must not have had time to chew and in five minutes or less run from the table to hide and leave me single parenting our children again.)
(Me: struggling through till the kids are fed and can be dismissed from the table and later crying silently on the bathroom floor)
Twenty years later: me having struggled through, having finally let go of every negative to try to work through a marriage as a permanent commitment because that matters and because people are not meant to be disposable, here I am, dumped anyway.
And you can imagine how difficult and dysfunctional my kids became about meals and meal etiquette with that scenario playing out repeatedly over the years and a whole bunch of me just feeding them in front of the tv more than anywhere else even though family prayer, followed by family meal and family conversation every single day was one of the solid and good things I grew up with. Strangely it was even the one and only thing the serial cheater did right. That ungodly excuse for a husband praised my cooking to the high heavens and ate with gusto. (Not to brag but most people do like my cooking. And though I know I shouldn’t be prideful or vain about it, I did really feel destroyed whenever I’d have a kitchen fail as well as when I’d hear all of my husband’s complaints every single time I fed him.)
But the funny thing is that since the King of negativity left, my daughters have grown by leaps and bounds in their relationships with each other and with me. Being rid of a man who was emotionally and spiritually abusive really has played out as better for them than living with his constant chaos, dysfunction, and sin. God is so good to us. I know the girls will someday be able to (and actually will) overcome every dysfunctional habit and pattern about meals and mealtimes.
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“…..family prayer, followed by family meal and family conversation every single day was one of the solid and good things I grew up with.”
Yes! It’s kind of sad, I think there’s been a real attack on all of those things. So many families today can’t sit down together and have that one solid moment of the day that you remember so well. People’s crazy schedules and work and the invention of cell phones have all come together to make it so much more challenging.
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Forgiveness and laissez-faire is crucial. My favourite sentence when angry is “it doesn’t matter”. And that includes the kitchen. Because almost every time I say it, I realize I’m right: it doesn’t matter. I thought Jon was feeding the pets, but he only fed one of them. Doesn’t matter. I asked Jon to hang the laundry during my lesson and it’s not JUST like I wanted it. Doesn’t matter. And, to back it up, I don’t “fix” it. If it doesn’t matter, then I can feed the cat without bothering him any more. If it doesn’t matter, I can leave the laundry out as it is.
I think literally ONCE I have stopped myself saying “it doesn’t matter”. I can’t even remember what it was that happened. But I DO remember looking to him and saying “I want to say this doesn’t matter, but it kind of does”. And he just nodded and understood that it needed redoing and not doing the same way again. But every other time in over five years, it didn’t matter.
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On meal planning: my frugality helps. I buy what’s cheap. Then I look at what we have, come up with 2-3 recipes I could cook and ask what he wants. Sometimes he will turn them all down, again, another favourite sentence: “You can have what you want.” Which meant last night he had potato waffles, scrambled eggs and beans despite a fish curry and BBQ pulled pork stiry fry being available, because he fancied waffles, eggs and beans. No complaints, we will get through the curry and stir fry anyway.
Laissez-faire homemaking. It works. 😛
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