(I’m listening to “Into You” by Fabolous.)

I can’t cook or bake.  Somewhere along the line, those skills passed me by, never to be learned.  I don’t know why I didn’t learn how to do them, I just didn’t.  Maybe it was because my mom always did the cooking or baking in my house and I never took an interest in it.  I don’t have recipe books that are handed down, not that I would know how to use them if I did.  I don’t know, I just never learned how to cook or bake.

If I think about it, it is kind of strange that I never learned how to cook or bake.  I was 30 when I got married, which meant that I lived the bachelor life for about 9 years.  What did I eat?  Hungry Man only goes so far.  I can make breakfast, but it’s really hard to screw up scrambling eggs, cooking sausage, and making pancakes from a mix.  Plus, that’s only one meal of the day.  What about the other two?  I can grill, but I’m not even great at that, plus, it’s not like I’m going to fire up a grill for myself.  I don’t know.  Somehow, I survived.

I’m really surprised I even was able to get married without being able to cook or bake.  Think about it.  I’ve made exactly zero dinners for Valentine’s Day, birthdays, anniversaries, special occasions, or any day for that matter.  Seriously, ask anyone.  Ask the wife, ask any old girlfriend.  I have never cooked or baked.  That’s not to say I’ve never “helped out,” but cook a meal from start to finish?  Nope, unless you count spaghetti a few times, which I don’t really count as cooking.  Anything that requires multiple ingredients has never been done by me.  I am oh for 38 years.

With that said, I do have two great skills when it comes to meal times.  The first one is: I can do dishes like it’s my job.  No pile is too big, no messes are too gross, no pan is too dirty.  I can clean up like a pro and I actually enjoy it.  Plus, I can put everything away in relatively the right spot.  I don’t ever use a mixer, but I know where it goes in the cupboard.  I don’t use a garlic press, but I know what it’s called and I know where it goes, even though I don’t know how to actually use garlic.  Yep, I stick to what I know.  I stick to where I’ll do the least damage.  I try to pick up a few cooking skills from the wife, but if you’re counting on me to make a dinner for company, you better hope they like tortillas with cheese and pizza sauce or mac and cheese (from the box, of course).  I can’t cook, but I will do their dishes.

Doing dishes really lights the wife’s fire.  It might be a simple pleasure for her to wake up to clean dishes, but it’s an appreciated one, and I know this.  It’s like a validation of her effort to make the meals and take care of our family.  So, when the kitchen is left like this:

I try my best to make sure it looks like this:

I get home from the day job between 5:30 pm to 6 pm and when there’s a meal on the table, which is almost always, I know she did that with a crazy 3-year-old running around and a 1-year-old on her hip.  She cooks with that degree of difficulty and it rivals that of an Olympic gymnast.  I can do the dishes, and a lot of times, she helps with that too!

Our dishes are really gross.  We have a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old.  There’s few worse things for the wife than waking up, walking to the kitchen to get her coffee, and having a pile of dishes with mashed up food on them.  It kind of reminds me of a good college buddy who was hit by a car.  One of the side effects is that he lost his sense of smell for a while which really played with his sense of taste.  So, what we could do is mash-up different foods in one of our cafeteria cups and pay him to drink it.  The concoctions my friends and I made were gross, but they had nothing on what my kids leave behind at any given meal.  One of the “few worse things” for the wife is to open the dishwasher only get a nice whiff of old baby formula bottles and mashed up food. I know she gags when that happens and she might even gag while reading this.  The smell is just awful and that’s the last thing she needs to start her day.  By the way, my college buddy made a full recovery.

Doing dishes may not sound like much, but it’s the little things like this that go a long ways.  The wife’s love languages are “acts of service” and “quality time.”  If the wife wakes up to an orderly house, that’s a huge detail off of her plate (no pun intended).  I did an act of service for her, and I saved her the time of doing the dishes which creates more quality time for us.  That fills her love tank.  Happy wife, happy life.  And, when the wife’s love tank if full, she tries to fill mine.  She knows one of the best ways to do that is to free up some time for me to go snowboarding, which is my stress reliever, which makes me a better human and a better dad.  It’s a simple cycle and everyone wins.

In a nutshell, that’s why I enjoy doing the dishes.  In case you’re wondering what my second skill is when it comes to meal times?  I can suggest going out to eat.  Then, everyone really wins.