Microwavin’ Mama

Last night I served microwave dinners to my family. My husband wasn’t in the mood for baked salmon, much to my delight, because I needed to get a "Grey’s Anatomy" article I’d written bookmarked and tagged to the cyberworld’s high heavens before the show’s season premiere.

It worked. I promoted the piece, then rushed around serving three different meals to four people, who sat down to a chocolate-candlelit dinner that quickly dissolved into me screaming and my son in tears over his failed attempt to pour water on his chicken as a means of hastening dessert. Glad I didn’t serve the pricey salmon.

The day meshed well, like me and my husband, food-wise. Chris doesn’t like to eat (at least stuff other than pizza and burgers) and I don’t like to cook.

"I wish they made some kind of pill people could take in place of food," he once said. When I repeat his desire, it prompts some bewildered folks to ask, "Is he black?"

Yes, he is, in case you’re wondering, too.

While a boatload of busy moms agree that they’re all about fast food too, others start judging me when I say that many of my family’s meals are already made by somebody else like Mickey D’s, Donatos, Stouffer’s or that blessed Marie Callender.

Only once or twice a week (or more often when my funds run low) will I toss together what some deem a real meal, one with pretty colors representing all the food groups. But I grow weary of trying to force green beans down my kids’ throats. At times I succeed in filling them up with salad and good stuff. Other days, it’s: Fine! Go get the SpongeBob crackers and sit on the couch and leave me alone!

"That stuff is so bad for you," people tsk tsk, maybe rightly so. But if the only healthy stuff I get inside us is a salad with grilled chicken from the drive-thru on any given day, so be it. There are plenty of starving people in the world that deserve more attention. Plus, I’d rather be writing than fighting.

I distance myself from those who just won’t let it be and keep harping on my lack of culinary skills. There’s an undercurrent running through their sharp commentary of something beyond mere concern for my family’s health.

Maybe it’s jealousy over the fact that I got away with something. Why should I get to escape kitchen enslavement while other women can’t? Or maybe it’s the yucky feeling of self-righteous indignation and frustration that comes with trying to force a female into a box of tasks that all women "should" inherently know how to do.

It reminds me of the firestorm of controversy unwittingly created by freelance journalist Helen Kirwan-Taylor, a 42-year-old Notting Hill, West London, resident and mom of two boys. Her name traveled all the way over from Big Ben land across the pond when she wrote an essay in the Daily Mail titled, "Sorry, but my children bore me to death!"

Kirwan-Taylor was vilified for actually admitting that the menial tasks of motherhood tired her to tears. Many of the negative comments the paper received were unprintable. Doth those angry mothers protest too much, me thinks? I couldn’t help but ask myself.

Only depressed and repressed moms secretly feeling the same melancholy would attack so vehemently. I say cheers to Kirwan-Taylor for being brave enough to write her own truth. At least she’s no down-in-the-dumps, I-hate-my-life-and-therefore-everyone-around-me sullen mom wishing for her skinny glory days.

It sounds like Kirwan-Taylor knows herself, outside of the societal pressures of what makes an ideal mom. I’m getting there. While I do use constructive criticism to better areas where I’m slacking, I’m not going to pour myself into the wrong mold.

I know that the good Lord blessed me with an awesome vocabulary, coupled with a gift of expressing it that I’m honing in on like a sharpened laser. Flowing in my talents fulfils me in a way that would make me only a shell of myself if I buried them to instead create unappreciated Martha Stewart-perfect meals morning, noon and night.

And I like to clean, though the clumps of dog hairs on my kitchen floor and stained carpet don’t always attest to that fact. I’m good at serving and entertaining, but the rare dinner party I throw is more about companionship than couscous.

Every mom has areas where she excels and others where she falls short. Instead of deriding each other’s frailties, moms do better when we fit together like opposing puzzle pieces. Take my sister, who hates cleaning but cooks wonderfully. She warmed my microwavin’ heart when she exclaimed, "Together, we make the perfect wife!"