Out of Mongolia

Is it child abuse, or survival?

I came back from Ukraine with only my son, leaving wife and daughter behind (she doesn't trust me to look after two children). It's tough. I have to get him ready for school, make sure he gets his homework done, and most challenging of all: feed him.

When we married, I was actually a better cook than my wife, since she had always eaten her own mother's cooking and couldn't do anything except boil water and fry potatoes in buckets of oil. Given her Soviet heritage, I didn't want her to even try. I was ready to become the family cook.

But in marriage, you get many surprises, some of them good. It turns out that she loves cooking, and is really good at it. When we lived in the States, she would get excited watching the Food Channel (I think this is why we had a second kid). She loved shopping at Whole Foods and learned to cook healthy, delicous meals. Whenever we ate something good in a restaurant, she would somehow manage to recreate it, with improvements.

As her skills grew, mine atrophied. I never even noticed, since when I'm living alone I just spend more time with friends in restaurants and bars. But I can't do that with a boy in the house. He has to do his homework and he doesn't like beer very much.

Before our trip, my wife bought hundreds of chicken drumsticks and put them in the freezer to make sure there would be something for us to eat when we got back. Very thoughtful (except to the flock of chickens that had to die for her cause). For a while, that was fine, but soon we both got tired of drumsticks. So I took him to the supermarket. We came home with bread, spaghetti, canned food, eggs, and apples.

Now he's learning to eat like a 22-year old right out of college. It's horrible, but he loves the change. And it should keep us alive until my wife gets back.