She is not a bad woman. She is not a bad wife either. When it comes to being a wife, she performs all her wifely responsibilities dutifully. All but one. My wife does not cook. This is not to say that she does not know how to cook. I have never eaten a meal she prepared that did not taste like a serving of heaven. She is what some people would call a magician in the kitchen. However, she does not like to cook.

I noticed this whenever she would compliment my mother’s cooking. I know some women feel out of place in their homes when their mothers-in-law visit and cook. Not my wife. She actually looks forward to my mother’s visits for this very purpose. She would hype my mother up whenever the food was done.

Just as she is excited to have my mum cook in our home, she doesn’t attempt to lend a helping hand to my mum when she goes over there. My wife would sit back, relax, and watch my mother cook. After that, she would happily eat while telling my mum, “You are a special cook. I enjoy your food so much. More than my own cooking, if you ask me.”

After she had had her fill she would tell my mum, “Mama, I wish you would be cooking for me all the time. If it was possible, I would have hired you to prepare soups and stews for me to take back to Accra.” My mother never takes offense at these statements. She rather takes them as compliments. She even accepted the fact that every time my wife visits, she likes to pack food to send home. So my mother always makes sure there is enough for her to eat and take home with her.

There were times when she would even ask me to send money to my mother to make soups and stews for us. One day I refused and it caused problems between us. There are also times when I just want to eliminate the stress of getting a home-cooked meal. So I go ahead and request my mother to cook for me. My wife would gladly join me to finish everything and praise the meal at the end. When she is not eating my mother’s food, she buys foodstuff and tasks her closest friend to cook for her.

If she did not get her friend or my mum to cook for her, my wife would eat out. I don’t have a problem when she eats meals prepared by people we know and trust. It is her penchant for buying food from street vendors that causes problems for her and our family to a large extent.

She is so used to buying from outside that she sees nothing wrong with feeding our children the same thing. Because of this, our children have acquired a taste for eating street food. They are kids who don’t understand that home-cooked meals are better. So they always insist on eating out even when we cook at home.

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If eating from outside had worked perfectly for her, I wouldn’t have cause to worry. As I stated earlier, it has caused problems for her. She has experienced food poisoning, stomach ulcers, and, hospitalizations as a result of contracting typhoid fever. You would think these misfortunes would cause her to reflect on her lifestyle choices and introduce some changes to her life.

However, these alarming health consequences have not altered her attitude toward buying cooked meals from street vendors. She continues to choose these meals over her own cooking. If there was no one available to make us food at home, then we have to buy from town if we want to eat. From all indications, she is not ready to change her ways no matter how many times I talk to her.

After living with her over the years, I just had to accept that this is also part of the amazing person she is. You can’t have it all. She is a supportive wife in so many ways. Although we don’t make a budget for the house with her money in mind, when I am down she holds the fort. I know she is more than capable of taking care of our family.

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I know her attitude toward cooking is unconventional. I was raised to believe that when you have a woman at home, you won’t run out of home-cooked meals. Nonetheless, I have grown to learn that we were raised differently. This means that as individuals, our priorities vary. It may be important to me that my wife cooks but I have come to know that cooking her own meals is not her priority in life. As long as she gets food to eat, she is fine.

So I have trained myself to be fine with what we eat as long as we are all fine and not starving. It’s not as if I can’t make an issue out of it. I have just chosen not to. Simply because she is a whole being. There is more to her than her ability to cook. She may not toil away in the kitchen for us to eat, but when it comes to other areas of being cared for, she’s got us. That is what I choose to focus on. Her positives. Life’s too short to hold onto things that won’t make a difference in many years to come. At the end of the day, all that matters are the people we hold close to our hearts.

— Sedem

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