grrlTravels

Happy homemakers need not apply

Lately I have been masquerading as a happy homemaker. It's in part because we have a house guest. My BIL has come to live with us for a time. Since he's been here I have been cooking a LOT more than usual. I guess I need to show that I am a good wife to his brother, definitely not the kind of person that orders takeout four nights out of five in a good week and scrapes together a halfhearted attempt at dinner on the fifth which includes many frozen items and canned soup. No sir, that person definitely does not live in this house.

Tonight in a misguided attempt to provide a nourishing meal for my family I decided that I was a TV Cooking Show Host and used 3 pots, 4 lids (one didn't fit right), two cutting boards and numerous utensils. What was I thinking? I can't remember in my postprandial exhaustion.

What I do remember is that I had a flashback to summer camp while I was wading through all of the dishes. I was a picky eater as a child. I have had many, many conversations with K. where I say, "You really don't think I'm picky???" and he says, "No, why do you keep asking me that?" in a patient tone of voice which means perhaps I should stop asking soon. But I was picky as a child and still think of myself as picky.

As a picky eater, summer camp posed many problems when it came to dining. For example, I don't really like any normal breakfast foods except for cereal, and at camp I was faced not only with pancakes and waffles but oatmeal and cream of wheat. Oh, the horror of sticky, lumpy, cold and ever thickening oatmeal that you "just have to try". And then there was the yearly serving of Spam. (It may taste somewhat like baloney, but it smells like old socks when it's cooking and that's the truth.)

But the food was not the worst of it. No, the very worst of it was that each day you had to have a different job, and one of the jobs was scraping the plates at the end of the meal. Asking a child already traumatized by the "You-Just-Have-To-Try-It" Rule and heading towards the fourth day of not enough nourishment to scrape plates, in effect causing this very child to sit neatly in front of a large pile of congealing summer camp food while not throwing up on the spot, is perhaps too much to ask. It was too much to ask of me. I would do just about ANYTHING to get out of the scraping of the plates duty, including foregoing the much anticipated trip to the camp "store" to buy candy by faking illness, losing a limb, or worse.

Tonight I was rinsing all dinner debris right down the drain into the lovely garbage disposal, with nary a thought as to whether all dinner debris was actually garbage disposal approved when the summer camp recollection popped into my head. Garbage disposals, a great mystery to me. I grew up sans garbage disposal, sans dishwasher, sans air conditioning for that matter, and always thought I was pretty well adjusted considering the privations I endured. Perhaps a quick lesson in the proper use of a garbage disposal would not go amiss, but I'm limping along here, pretending I am an accomplished homemaker, deft in the use of all kitchen appliances. It's just that I am happiest when dinner is takeout, and paper plates are appropriate.

Posted by grrlTravels at August 31, 2004 8:38 PM