What Am I, or, Why I’m A Lousy Stay-At-Home-Mom, part 1

This is the first in a 268-part series on why I’m a lousy stay-at-home-mom (“SAHM”).

One of the issues I’ve struggled with since having children and giving up my career, at least temporarily, is who I am. I identified myself as an attorney for so long that the shift to SAHM has been quite the mental (and physical) jolt to my system.

As an employment attorney who advised and defended companies, I went from making important decisions that determined the potential liability of large businesses to deciding whether I should let my children play with the electrical outlets and whether little Fred could survive another two hours in that god-awful poopy diaper that I don’t want to go near.

The truly difficult part has been what hasn’t happened – I didn’t turn into Martha Stewart. I honestly thought that I had a domestic diva lurking just beneath the surface and all I had to do was put myself in the appropriate environment to conjure the She-Beast. Perhaps I should have realized that this wasn’t the case back when I started decorating our house and nearly agreed with GrumpyDaddy’s suggestion that we paint the kitchen bright orange.

Let me just put this out there: I can’t cook to save my life. I burn spaghetti. When I boil water, it flows over and makes a mess on the stove. I even manage to burn things on the George in under three minutes. I’m hopeless.

To top things off, I have a husband whose eating interests run from pizza to spaghetti to Cheetos. I call him my third child because frankly, he’s pickier than my toddler.

So I have two options – cook simple, unhealthy things that my husband likes and that I can only sort of ruin, or try to cook healthy things that end up tasting awful because I CAN’T COOK.

Isn’t the ability to cook supposed to come naturally to those who spawn? All of my SAHM friends seem to be very good at cooking delicious food, as evidenced by the silver-plattered gourmet dishes that show up at potlucks (who brought the out-of-the-box mac ‘n cheese? Oh yeah, that was me).

Perhaps more significantly, they actually seem to enjoy cooking. As for me, I see it more as slaying dragons on a nightly basis: it’s difficult, it’s messy, and there’s a good chance I’m going to catch on fire at some point. The scariest part is that I have yet to find a single SAHM who doesn’t enjoy cooking and/or is not good at it. Who are these women and where do they come from??

So I fully admit to being a kitchen failure. If I had my druthers, we’d be one of those get-your-own-damn-dinner kind of families (my kids are 14 months and 29 months respectively but hey, they’ve got to learn at some point). But I spawned and quit my (paid) job, and therefore I must cook, if for no other reason than to avoid eating Cheetos every night. Who made these rules anyway?