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Good Letters

My husband Ben just started his third year of medical school: running the gauntlet of twenty-six-hour shifts, cranky surgeons, and “pimping” on the rounds—the crude term for masochistic bedside Q&A sessions. Meanwhile, back at home, the brutal schedule has required yet another consideration of how we share domestic duties. I wasn’t alive when Peggy Lee sang “I’m A Woman” —and barely born when Enjoli lent the cheesy chorus to pop culture history—but I’ve found myself singing it, sarcastically, under my breath.

The real domestic problem is food—and who cooks it. This is partly due to the fact that Ben will gladly subsist on peanut butter and jelly and take-out barbecue. I want three home-cooked meals a day, including a hot, non-processed dinner. When things get hectic, we end up consuming a lot of sandwiches and corn flakes. It’s a diet that tends to leave me hungry and, to be honest, slightly bitter: I’m a modern woman; don’t I deserve a modern man? Like, one who can make me dinner every now and then, after I bring home the bacon?

I’d like to mention that Ben is a fabulous cook. He orchestrates the big meals: Easter, Thanksgiving, complicated desserts. But when it comes to making dinner, there seems to be an unspoken rule that the responsibility falls to me—or else we eat mac and cheese again. There have been nights when we have sparred, mouths shut and stomachs growling, waiting to see who will cave and cook first.

Why, with the simple, daily grind of food, is it so hard to serve, and so much easier to be the one served? The quotidian mysteries notwithstanding, sometimes I harbor a suspicion that whoever attends the body’s regular physical appetite puts herself in danger of joining the caste of the untouchable: necessary mainly for the base task she completes.

I think our skittishness with food has to do, in part, with love. Which of the two of us wants to be the vulnerable provider, the mother whose hands overflow with good things to eat and whose esteem rests on the affection that food will stoke? Or, thinking of the table I attend more frequently than the one in our dining room: who wants to be the Host whose spread reveals a willingness to sacrifice one’s total life for the beloved?

Which brings me, circuitously, to the wedding vows I recited several years ago—in full knowledge that I would follow Ben to medical school, where everyone promised that my ability to love, serve, and submit to him, as he submitted to me, would be duly tested.

If it takes recalling holy declarations for me to keep cooking and keep domestic negotiations in the clear, then, with God’s help, I’ll do it. I’ll gratefully accept his sandwiches, and, as much as possible, bite my tongue and take up the maligned crockpot, the beleaguered casserole, the fixings for the brownbag lunch: more taxing than take-out, but good for both of us, body and soul.

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