Wifin' it up

Today I'm experimenting with the concept of enjoying wifely chores. I'm a naturally clean person, but it tends to happen in sudden violent bursts of scouring and scrubbing that tend to happen around 10 p.m. This tends to look crazy. So today I decided I would clean slowly and methodically, in daylight, after I got home from work. Actually making space to clean made the whole process suspiciously relaxing, and I began to imagine myself in black and white with industrious-sounding classical music playing softly overhead and a little gleam shooting off of my calm, not-crazy smile.

I even cooked dinner last night without it turning into a bad episode of "I Love Lucy." I made sauteed basil chicken cutlets, garlic couscous, and broccoli. Cooking without scowling is a new thing for me. I went through long periods in college and my early twenties where my oven was used for extra storage space and I lived on a diet of power bars, apples, edamame, and microwave popcorn. Cooking anything just made me angry-- it was messy and time-consuming and if it was just me eating, the effort hardly seemed worth it. Even sitting down and clearing a space for food seemed ridiculous, so I ate while walking to the mailbox or sitting at my desk at work. For years, breakfast was a glass of milk and a glass of cereal which I would alternately take shots from while driving. The only times I used silverware were at restaurants.

Two factors were at work here-- loneliness and a pathological fear of getting fat. I hate eating alone. When I was growing up, my mom made what I recognize now as a heroic effort to fix family meals. Mostly, these were pleasant affairs with civilized conversation, but even during the occasional spectacular disaster-- burned mangled food, a huge family fight breaking out-- I had company. So in this dynamic food equals not being alone.

My fear of getting fat is more complicated. I don't see it as the logical outcome of consuming too many calories, a biological process that happens slowly over time. I see it as something Kafka-esque, something that happens suddenly without you even knowing it-- you wake up one morning and BOOM! you're huge, like you pulled some sort of auto-inflate ripcord and now your body could serve as a survival floatation device. (Obviously this is not logical. Few fears are. In fact, even now as I'm trying to describe what it feels like to be afraid, I can hear the exasperated voice of an ex-boyfriend who worshipped at the Temple of Logic--"If you know it's not logical, why are you even wasting your time with it?" Replace "it's" and "it" with "I" and "me," and you get the central dynamic of our doomed relationship.) Here food equals over-indulgence and greediness leading to the condition of being fat which in turn leads to being no longer worthy of love, hence aloneness.

So it's push/pull. In fact, if you just substitute the whole concept of food with the idea of love, then you get a pretty good picture of a lot of my relationship fears. Loving and being loved are desirable because they mean not being alone, but one must always be on guard not to get too close or dependent because if one were to become suddenly unlovable, the loss of love would be devastating.

I think Freud should be an active verb, as in "I just spent way too many paragraphs Freuding myself."