I'll Make An Awful Wife Someday

My boyfriend, Garren, is a saint among men. Luckily for me he had done shockingly little dating at the time that I met him for being as good looking as he is; he was slowly and carefully conditioned to believe that my unique combination of high maintenance slovenly-ness was actually somewhat normal. If he ever finds out that some women actually cook, clean and do laundry I will be operating on my looks alone.

His mother, however, is about to blow my cover. She called me the other day to ask me what I was bringing to their family's annual summer party. The following conversation ensued:
Kathy: "So... don't get mad at me..."
Me: "OK."
Kathy: "You promise you won't hate me?"
Me: "I promise."
Kathy: "I'm going to make you actually cook something..."
Me: "...Oh! Uh. OK."

This poor woman knows first hand the story of how I almost burnt down our apartment. As someone who has literally screwed up Easy Mac in front of an 8 year old (and unsuccessfully tried to trick her into thinking it was mac and cheese soup) I can tell you that what I was doing hadn't even gotten to what could be called "cooking" yet. I tried to pre-heat the oven to bake pre-made frozen crab rangoons and didn't think to check the oven beforehand to make sure there was nothing in it. Long story short, it ended in me making a frantic call to the fire department while fanning my smoke detector and calling Garren sobbing and screaming "WHO KEEPS PLASTIC IN THE OVEN?!?!"

Once the fire department had cleared out, I had accounted for all my cats and had flopped onto the couch to indulge in a loud cry, Garren's family could be seen out my window running hell-bent for election across my parking lot to save me from what Garren had led them to believe was an all-consuming inferno. They found me in Garren's basketball shorts, a sports bra and mismatched flip flops and it was likely at that moment they knew that I would be dependent on their son forever if I was going to spare myself nearly impossible death from domestic ineptitude. They dutifully cleared out my kitchen and comforted my psycho dog while his Dad finally worked up the courage to ask "So... what were you trying to do in here?"

Against all odds, I am actually pretty good at cleaning but dishes are not my strong suit. My house remains fairly clean most of the time but since Garren and I both hate doing dishes, we constantly have a stack of dirty dishes in the sink. My mother has an adorable pre-diagnosable case of OCD and she loves nothing more than cleaning, so, growing up there was not much left to make chores of, especially dishes. My mother doing dishes or toothbrush-cleaning a sink induces in her a happiness akin to the animals at the end of Splash Mountain. It would be like poaching Brer Rabbit to take those kinds of tasks away from her, though I have never dared test the theory. I have let dishes sit long enough to algae because I am really only half sure that I'm doing it right. I never washed a dish until I moved out of the house, much to the chagrin of my college roommate. She walked in on me putting hand soap on a plate and just running it under water and waiting for the chunks of food to disappear as soon as the water got hot enough. "Where is your sponge?" she asked, taking the plate from me as though helping a house cat out of pants. "This is so awkward, I cannot look at you anymore."

I was rather proud of myself the other day for picking up a rather extensive "dog accident" all by myself. Usually, when these sorts of things happen, I generally pretend to be asleep on the couch when he gets home and when he asks me why I didn't pick it up I say "He must have done that while I was sleeping!" prompting the obvious question of "Why is it cold, then?!" which is when I generally pretend to be asleep again. This instance was unavoidable - it was right inside the front door. I wouldn't have been able to miss it on my way in and I had very clearly dragged the door through it. I was sunk. That and he wouldn't be home for hours and I couldn't confine myself to the back of the house to avoid the smell until he got home - I would have to microwave a corndog eventually and I would have to pass by it again and feel the awful sting of disgust with myself (for leaving the dog shit there, not for eating a corn dog.) I did manage to clean it up; Garren could have done it with three paper towels and a Lysol wipe but it took me an entire roll of paper towels, two trash bags and thirteen Lysol wipes. But. The job got done and isn't that what's important?

If you think the corndogs are bad, you will be disgusted to hear what I usually eat. Garren likes to cook and is very good at it, but I have never really tried. Thus, when he is not home, I eat like a 12 year old boy with the house to himself:
Typical meal when Garren is home: meat/couscous/steamed vegetable or dining out.
Typical meal when I am home alone: PB&J (two bites eaten before it's determined that the ratio was off), deviled eggs, stale tortilla chips, Red Vines and Sprite.
My coworker found out about this the other day and challenged me to cook for a week and I laughed.
Me: "No one actually does that."
Stephanie: "Everyone does that!"
Me: "Well... yeah but..."
Stephanie: "NO MORE STALE TORTILLA CHIPS!"

I am fairly good at laundry but I only had to start doing it myself because Garren made the near-fatal decision of machine washing a silk shirt. I think he may have sacrificed that shirt so he wouldn't have to keep doing my laundry, but I've never confirmed that.

So, in a move usually characteristic of late-December/early-January, I have decided to start actually cooking, doing all the laundry and keeping the house clean. Today I cooked the first thing I have tried to cook since the crab-rangoon-inlaw-rescue: fruit pizza. I basically only made one large Pillsbury sugar cookie, softened some cream cheese and arranged some fruit. When Garren got home and assumed that he would have to hold my hand while I crashed dishes around until he took over a recipe for me, heactually found the pizza already done and in the fridge and he looked at me hopefully. His eyes seemed to say "...But I'm going to have to do the fucking dishes, aren't I?"