For an idyllic couple weeks several years ago, my mom cooked the meals on weekdays. I cooked on the weekends. The kids get dinner faster. It is, as I described it at the time and stand by completely, like having a wife. I mean, when it worked and while it lasted. 

This arrangement works. It works the way most good arrangements work — not because it’s frictionless, but because both people involved have decided it’s worth the friction. The friction, in this case, is the grocery list.

There are nuances to the grocery list. Specifically: how specific she is when she tells me what to buy, and how specific I am when I tell her what I need, and whether these two levels of specificity ever actually align. This morning as I scrambled to find bell peppers for the stuffed bell peppers I was making, I remembered. They do not always align. We had a whole morning about it in 2023.

The 9am Incident

We sat down to plan the menu. This should take twenty minutes. It took longer because I was frustrated, and I was frustrated because the pest control situation in the attic was not resolving itself, and by the time I got to the menu conversation I was carrying more than the menu conversation could reasonably hold.

I cried. At 9am. Over a grocery list. Which is not, technically, what I was crying about, but the grocery list was the thing that was in front of me, so the grocery list received it.

I apologized. She was more gracious about it than she needed to be. We made the list. I was going to make zucchini boats on the weekend — I had decided this, it was on the list, I was going to finally do the Pinterest board thing — and I placed the grocery order.

Then I got a text on the drive that said Kroger has substitutions.

They did not have substitutions. They did not have zucchini.

God laughed and said: be nice to your mom, tell her thank you for cooking.

What the list is actually for

The thing about two people sharing a household is that the logistics are, in fact, the relationship. Not a metaphor for the relationship. The relationship. The question of how specific to be on the grocery list is the same question as: how well do I know what you need, and how well do I let you know what I need, and are we willing to do the work of finding out? Will the unmitigated ADHD between us prevail or will we?

We had to sit down and write it. That’s not a failure of the arrangement. That’s the arrangement working. The writing is the part where you find out what the other person actually requires, which turns out to be different every week depending on what happened the week before.

The crying was not about the grocery list. The grocery list was just the place where I finally admitted I didn’t know what I needed and didn’t know how to ask for it. She knew. She was already making dinner (in her mind with good intentions– we still needed a list).

Plan B

I made something else that weekend. I don’t remember what. It was fine. The zucchini boats exist as a concept, as a thing I will make eventually, as proof that the plan is not the point.

The point is that we hammered it out. The point is that I apologized in the moment, not three days later. The point is that she was gracious when she didn’t have to be, and I recognized it, and I said so.

These are small things. They are also not small at all. They are the entire thing, repeated in small doses until it accumulates into something you could call, if you wanted to, a life.

The zucchini was a casualty. The list was a success. Plan B was dinner.