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

pooling in and around my newly massive cleavage, weeping openly for the floating SkyMall table tennis set I would never have, the legendary water polo parties I’d never host.
    “What about an outdoor kitchen?” Joe asked one night as we stood on the freshly tamped mound of dirt where my overpriced Pottery Barn double-wide lounge chair was supposed to go. You know how they say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach? I’m thinking a knife to the chest would be a lot faster.
    “Ooh, just what I always wanted,” I said with an extra dose of sarcasm. “ Two kitchens!”
    “Jenna, you know I love to barbecue,” he replied. “I’d totally cook all the time if we had a kitchen outside.”
    I didn’t believe him for a second, but he had some compelling arguments. First of all, our inside kitchen sort of sucked, so this would make life better for both of us. Second, if we built a kitchen instead of putting in another pool, I wouldn’t have to play neighborhood lifeguard, which—now that it was a little cooler outside—sounded like a relief. In the end I negotiated an al fresco fireplace in exchange for a beer tap, and the whole thing sounded way better than the current dirt pit I was tired of looking at, frankly. It’s all about resale value , I justified to myself. If I wound up getting an occasional cheeseburger or veggie kabob out of the deal, it would be one of those unexpected little delights of life, like finding that something you were already going to buy is on sale, or discovering one last Tic Tac stuck to the inside lid of the box when you thought it was empty and you were desperately craving one and a half calories of minty freshness.

“At Least You’re Not Married to Him”
    I call him the food economist. This has nothing to do with nutrition or
finances or cooking. No, it is all about the way he eats his food. No
matter what he eats, he plans it out in his mind so that each item on
his plate is eaten in one of two ways, and which way depends on how
much he is enjoying his meal. For instance, if he loves everything on
the plate (say a nice rib eye, potatoes au gratin, and grilled asparagus),
he will eat everything in unison, rotating bites of each but maintaining
the exact proportionate quantities of each so that his last bite may
include all elements of his dinner, or at least, so he can then decide
which to eat last. It’s maddening. Sometimes I have to reach over and
grab that last mushroom just to fuck with his organization.
    ELIZABETH
     
     
    Within a year’s time we had a new baby and a new kitchen.
    “What do you want me to cook tonight?” Joe would ask eagerly several nights a week, the picture of the helpful, enlightened superdad.
    “Something, anything, I don’t care,” I’d mutter resentfully. I know, he was offering to cook and I should have been grateful, but I wasn’t. I was a ravenous nursing cow, and here we were with two kitchens and I was still having to make the dreaded call on what we were going to eat for dinner. Only now I had to do it balancing a squirming newborn on my padded, postbaby hip while yellowish milk dripped from my nipples. (Forget the condom talk. This is the image they should show in high school sex ed classes.)
    For a while this was how it worked: I’d shop for all of the food and assemble the day’s menu. An hour or so before dinnertime, I would hand Joe a platter containing a hunk of the marinated animal flesh du jour, then proceed to sauté the veggies, toss the salad, boil the requisite starch, assemble the necessary condiments, fold the napkins, set the table, and dole out an assortment of beverages. Proudly manning a shiny variety of high-tech appliances with a frosty draft beer in hand, Joe would gingerly lay the meat onto the hot grill (five to thirty seconds, ranging from a single small pork loin to multiple chicken breasts or some nice carne asada). For the next ten to forty minutes, he would be free to talk on the phone, check his