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

e-mail, watch a few snippets of the news, catch some ESPN highlights, or play with the kids until it was time to “check the meat” (fifteen seconds). He might have to repeat this burdensome inspection phase two or three more times (thirty to forty-five seconds) before it was officially time to remove the cooked flesh from the flame (ten seconds) and carry it to the table (twenty-five seconds).
    Make no mistake: If I sound like a bitter, miserable hag as I reminisce about this time period in our marriage, it’s because I was a bitter, miserable hag during this time period in our marriage . I may have tried to hide it—I genuinely can’t recall if I had any will at all at the time—but even on a good day, I am sure my miserable hagness was never far from the surface. Like many modern-day moms, I was working, shouldering approximately 98 percent of the new-baby burden, keeping up the house, sleeping an average of two hours a night, and still trying to fulfill what I felt were my wifely duties (provide sex and dinner, mainly). So while he was “helping” with dinner, Joe’s total time contribution to any meal averaged about two minutes and five seconds, and that’s being patently generous. If you factored in the time I spent doing related meal-preparation minutiae like circling the grocery store looking for a parking spot, comparing prices, reading ingredient lists, waiting for the ninety-eight-year-old lady in front of me to painstakingly write out her goddamned check and record it in the accompanying check register (Dear God, why? I mean, I know she has nowhere to go and nothing to do, but does she have to bring me down, too?), cruising the neighborhood for an hour because the kid had fallen asleep on the way home and she needed her nap so there was no other choice, loading and unloading the groceries, and searching online for recipe substitutions when I opened the lid on the sour cream container to find a mass of furry blue goop where creamy white deliciousness should have been, let’s just say it’s pretty clear who was doing the lion’s share of the work. (Ahem. Roar.) Compounding my agony was the fact that my friends, my mother, my stepmom, and one very envious sister constantly, woefully bemoaned how “lucky I was” all the flipping time because my husband “cooked.” I began to think they should congratulate me on how much “money I’d made” each time I traipsed down to the bank to deposit my beloved’s latest paycheck.
    “Most guys don’t cook at all,” Joe would argue if I dared to suggest he step up his efforts a notch or two.
    As much as I hated to admit it, he sort of had me there. Still, I wasn’t about to let him off the hook.
    “Big deal,” I’d huff. “Most women don’t work and take care of the kids and keep the house as immaculate as I do!” So there!
    “Yeah, but you’re the only one who cares about the house being immaculate,” he’d point out with an annoying combination of accuracy and matter-of-factness.
    It was usually right around this point that I would come to my senses and realize that things were never going to change, so I’d better learn to just suck it up and be grateful for whatever measly contribution I could get. The vocalization of this highly evolved sort of epiphany usually sounded something like this: “Oh my God I fucking hate you and I am totally not ever doing your stupid laundry or shopping for goddamned groceries again EVER so good luck with that, jackass!”
    Of course that was a total pack of lies, and I kept doing the stupid laundry and the goddamned grocery shopping and the hateful, mind-numbing meal planning because apparently I was the only one who cared about a clean house and also not getting scurvy. (True story: When I met Joe, the only food in his house was a twenty-pound bag of pierogies. If you’re like I was and have no idea what a pierogi is, picture a potato-filled ravioli dumpling, your basic nutrient-free, white flour gut-bomb.