Mother Jennifer no longer cooks for her family

Jennifer doesn’t know how it happened, but one day she stood in front of the gas stove and came to her senses. Why was she still doing it, cooking for her family? “I’ve always hated it,” she writes on ScaryMommy. “When I was single, I’d rather eat cornflakes or frozen pizza for dinner than being in the kitchen. But then I had children, and I had to. So I did it.’

Not that she transformed into a kind of second Nigella Lawson, so she just copied what she found so quickly on Google, and especially asked for help from her children. Only, the older they got, the busier their schedules, and conjuring up a normal meal that everyone liked at a time when all family members were present became increasingly impossible.

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‘My son cooks better than me’

Until that day when she came to her senses, she writes. ‘I thought: why is it my responsibility to put food on the table every night? My husband and I both work full time, he might as well take care of the cooking.’ In fact, one of her sons is a better cook than she is, and likes it too. ‘The children are now teenagers and perfectly capable of making pasta and eggs. Exactly as much as I can cook myself,” writes Jennifer.

So she changed course, announcing that she would only cook for the family when she did prepare something for herself. Then the rest can just as easily eat along. Or else? ‘Then they’ll figure it out; I’ll take care of a full fridge.’

If ever since then the usual question ‘Hey mom, what are we eating?’ echoes across the room, Jennifer has only two answers: “I don’t know, what’s your father cooking?” and “You tell me that.”

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