Cooking strike

Yesterday was a bad cooking day.

It wasn't that the meal was bad, really. It was the chickpea meal that we eat when I can't figure out what else to eat, which is always fine in a pinch. Only I tried to make home-made pita bread to go with the chickpeas, and the recipe was a little more time consuming and overwhelming than I had anticipated. So come 6 o'clock, my husband found me covered in flour, rolling out pitas, the baby screeching and my 6 year old grazing on popsicles while playing a game on the computer that had a soundtrack that felt like it was boring into my brain. Oh, and dinner was probably about a half an hour away.

My eternal companion volunteered to go the store to grab some milk, and he even volunteered to take the baby because he could tell we both needed a break from each other. I told him it sounded fantastic, and we proceeded to search for my keys for the next 15 minutes, all the while with the baby crying, the pitas cooking, and the beans burning.

I swear, those keys were hiding just to piss me off.

I got so frustrated with it all that I threw a dough ball across the room. It gave a satsifying smack against the wall, then bounced off and rolled into the playroom. The dog went for it, but my husband caught her before she could make herself sick eating uncooked yeast. Good thing, too, because having to deal with dog barf at that moment may have sent me directly to the loony bin. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200....

I did my best not to burst into tears, as my husband and son looked on. I took deep, cleasning breaths, got dinner on the table, and remarkably felt less like attacking everybody with a spatula once I had some calories in me.

(Funny how that works, huh?)

After dinner, when the kids were down, the dog walked, and the kitchen cleaned (BLESS that man of mine--he washes a mean dish), he and I talked about my meltdown in the kitchen.

"I'm tired of cooking. It depresses me. Every time I face the kitchen, it reminds me of all the changes we've had to make because of my PKD. And I hate having PKD," I told him, this time letting the tears come.

I'm not like this all the time, I promise. For the most part, I've been able to look at all of this as a good thing--we are eating healthier than we ever have before, my weight is good, I've been forced to learn some advanced cooking skills that I would have never learned, and I've made some pretty impressive dishes, if I do say so myself. But yesterday, the combination of a couple of lousy nights with the kids (when one parent is in one room rocking the baby and another is in the other room rocking a sobbing 6 year old who has an outer ear infection, and it's only 2am, you know it's gonna be a long night), a crazy summer schedule, and good 'ol PMS turned me into a dough-ball throwing, spatula wielding, PKD hating banshee from hell.

That last part is actually a direct quote from my husband.

Yeah, it wasn't pretty.

So, this week, I'm on strike. Or, rather, I get the week off. I told DH that I would get up with the kids to feed them breakfast and get my oldest off to swimming if he would take responsibility to plan, shop for, and put on the table a meal for our family that I didn't have to think about. He's excited to be cooking, I'm excited to NOT be cooking, so hopefully it will be a win-win.

Tomorrow we're having stir-fry.

This week may very well go a long way in saving my sanity.