What Making Chili Taught Me
Last Friday night, for the first time in 20 years of marriage, I felt how my wife must feel most evenings.
She had to attend a meeting, so I fixed dinner while the kids finished up homework.
I made chili and it came out really good. We all sat down and started eating and the kids said the chili was yummy, better than Wendy’s, in fact the best they’d ever had, and I felt like their Mom must feel.
The pride welled and the nurturing feeling flushed through me, and I started to explain to the kids how we’d been out of chili powder, and when I went to Fred Meyer they didn’t have the usual bulk chili powder, but they did have some sort of deep red powdered chili pepper flakes, which looked hot and potent as the devil, so I bought a little bag of that stuff and used less than I normally would because I didn’t want to take the roofs off our mouths, ha ha. And the chili came out perfect, sweet and spicy but not too hot, and so forth and so on.
But the kids interrupted to talk games and movies, happily uninterested in how clever I’d been with the chili powder, in my minor improvised success. They were like me, quickly acknowledging good food but ignoring the rest of a homemaker’s small triumph, taking me and the chili and our home for granted, as children will.
And suddenly I realized, for the first time (again, in 20 years), why at dinner my wife always talks about the food and how she made it, and how to me — who wants to discuss Important Things — her food talk had seemed like, well, prattle. And for the first time ever I truly felt myself in my wife’s place, and knew the taken-for-granted feeling she must know so well. Yet amidst insufficient acknowledgment, amidst all-too-fleetingly expressed gratitude, I felt happy, too.
Now as I write this, I marvel at how many years — how so very long — it took me to understand this feeling.
So I recommend making chili. It can provide a glimpse of the Important Things.
You may also enjoy:
“Three Phrases Men Stumble Over — Yet Women Long to Hear“
6 Comments to What Making Chili Taught Me
I’m touched. My husband is a cook, and he must feel all the time like Your wife, because im never interested in cooking…
Changing perspective, like You did, really can help to understand others point of view. Must try it more often.
[...] pierwszy na ciekawy blog o ..?yciu i finansach? Chyba to najlepsze okre?lenie. W ka?dym razie, Mark Cunningham opisuje w swoim po?cie pi?kn? histori? o tym, czego nauczy?o go robienie chilli. Historia Marka odnosi si? do [...]
I’m going to try it more often, too. I want these understandings to happen on purpose, not just by accident.
I appreciate your story for several reasons, but what I’d like to know is how your wife responded to your insight
To tell the truth, she hasn’t read it. Let me get back to you on that one
Yum, yum, I think I’ll make vegetarian Chili this weekend!