Last night I had to face the music. I am a control freak in the kitchen. I didn’t physically injure anyone, but I wanted to, or at least yell at them a little.
I arrived back to my roomie’s house after spending the weekend at my mom’s. This is my roomie’s house. It is her kitchen, but I spent most of the evening cleaning it: dishes, cleaned out the refrigerator, wiped down everything including the cabinets, swept and mopped. I felt much better.
Her new beau who stays over fairly frequently is a bachelor of the Oscar Madison school of bachelorhood. He also likes to make fudge in the middle of the night. I can appreciate the overwhelming desire to phutz around in the kitchen at all hours, I’ve been known to do late night baking. However, in his bachelorhood, cleaning up isn’t really part of the kitchen ritual.
Plus, I am admittedly a bit of a food snob, and I spend more money at the grocery on fewer things because I buy organic whenever possible and try not to buy processed foods pumped full of hydrogenated oils and corn sweeteners. My roomie’s beau in his midnight fudge making used my $5.75 a pound butter. Which is fine, but he didn’t cut a piece off, he pinched it off with chocolatey fingers. I wasn’t even mad, I was floored and horrified.
When he came over, I tried to be teasing about it. But he also poured water in my sacred (long story) coffee go cup instead of getting a glass. I had to put my foot down. And I feel guilty. I feel like I kicked a puppy. It isn’t even my kitchen, but some of the stuff in it is mine.
It was almost as bad as when I came home and found one of my old roommates opening boxes with my chef’s knife. I was apoplectic. I feel like it’s abnormal for me to care so much about these things. I mean is it so important that I have to hurt someone’s feelings because I am so freaky about material objects that happen to reside in the kitchen?
And now I am all worried that my lovely husband will have to bear the brunt of my kitchen-goddess-turned-Kali-the-destroyer wrath. I have given my boychick room to spread his little wings in the kitchen without too much mommy hovering. Maybe it isn’t a total loss, I don’t want to be the uber-kitchen bitch, but I do want my space respected. Is there a happy medium? And how much of it involves claiming that space unapologetically?
