As we looked forward to marrying back then, one of the major preoccupation of my mind was how to make the kitchen task easier for my wife. I didn’t want her to grow old too fast. More importantly, I didn’t want kitchen work to hinder an excellent bedroom ministry.
A bedroom that is on fire is more important to the health of a marriage than food. If your kitchen breaks down, you can survive through the restaurant in your neighborhood, but if your bedroom breaks down, you’re in trouble as a Christian. That explains why the bedroom must take priority over the kitchen.
Sometimes this is the reason you join her in the kitchen those nights when there’s so much to do there and yet you have planned out a friendly match with a desire to have an active participant. You don’t want to hear, “I’m sorry dear, I’m too tired for anything tonight. Let’s do it tomorrow.”
And so even if she didn’t invite you, as a smart husband, you’ll go there and be grating the pepper while she sorts other things out.? My wife will look at me and say, “Haa, I know why you’re here to assist me. It’s because of sex.” I’ll say, “no now, I just don’t want you to stress yourself too much. Must you always misinterpret my good gestures?” ?
There are nights I’ll say, don’t worry yourself, I’ll do the cooking. You go and rest. Those are nights when I see that she’s already so tired before even commencing the cooking; and I feel, if the stress of the cooking is added to the existing stress, she’ll be totally unavailable. So I just completely excuse her. I know that no matter how much I stress in the kitchen, I can never be too tired for sex. Never! Tired for wetin? Me, the liquid metal! The Indaboski Bahose! ??
And those nights when I’m equally tired to cook and I feel if I allow her to cook, she will lose steam for the night, I’ll simply say, “it’s too late to start cooking at this time, let’s go and get something to buy.” You know now, wisdom is profitable to direct. ?
What was I saying self, before you people distracted me into sex talks? Ok, I was talking about providing support to make kitchen and domestic work easier for a woman.
The first focus for me was infrastructural support. There are some basic infrastructure that can make that department easier to handle.
A house where the tap flows is number one. Fetching water from the well is a great stressor; except there’s no financial capacity to rent such an accomodation. Then, with a freezer and generator, you can do bulk cooking that will last you for weeks, thereby eliminating the need to make fresh meals daily from scratch.
Then, a microwave may make defreezing less cumbersome. A cooker with multiple burners (even if you’re using independent cylinders & burners) can support simultaneous cooking to reduce overall time used. A washing machine will reduce the stress of washing completely.
Not once have I heard my wife complain about washing because there’s something to get that done. I will just wake up and see washed underwears and house wears. Before I’m done using up a set, a new set is ready. She fixes her own clothes too with the machine. I do the washing, starching and ironing of my major clothes. At a point, I began totally outsourcing them to drycleaners because it was consuming so much of my time in exchange for just a little savings.
So despite having a lean purse, I simply jettisoned having an expensive wedding in order to put these things in place before we married. If you have the grace to put these things in place before marriage, do the same. If not, nothing spoilt, you can still plan yourself well with the little you have. Some of them don’t even have to be brand new if you can’t afford them. There are solid fairly used appliances that you’ll enjoy without any hitch for years. I bought a few of these appliances as fairly used and none of them has developed fault even once to date. You only need to know the right place to get them.
Let me add for the benefit of our about to wed brothers (and sisters) that I didn’t buy all at once. I didn’t have such bulk money anywhere. From around a year to the wedding, I was buying these things one by one as the money came in. It was five weeks to the wedding that I stopped purchasing appliances that will make the married life more easy. Then I started praying for money for the wedding! Just five weeks to the wedding! Wasn’t that crazy?
It was deliberate. I knew that we will be forced to do a wedding within whatever we got in those five weeks and yet the wedding will be a success while I would have gained a lot of infrastructure for marital ease. If I had saved all those monies for infrastructure somewhere, we would have consumed all the money on the wedding and today our marriage would have probably experienced more stress. Which one is more important? A day wedding or a long lasting marriage?
Because of this, I was content to wear a fairly used shoe of #6,000 and a wedding ring of #1,000. The one my wife used was #1,500. And too many other things I don’t have space to share with you. But if we didn’t tell you, you’ll think the things we used were very expensive. I convinced my wife that having infrastructure that will make her life easy for the long run was more important than stuffs people won’t even know/care for how much you purchased them.
Why have I said this much? Just to tell you that this is not about having a lot of money. It’s about your priority. May you have sense!
Since we married therefore, we normally cook in bulk sometimes for the whole month, for two weeks or for a week as the case may be. Anytime we’re to do this bulk cooking, we do it together because cooking for a whole month at once isn’t something one person can easily face.
All my wife needs to then do day in, day out, is to bring out smaller portions of the soup or stew, defreeze and warm. She can then fix rice or “Swallows” within a short time to support the defrozen soup or stew. It then means that most times, within 30 minutes, she’s done in the kitchen and we are eating very sophisticated meals.
From our experience, after I have supported in doing the bulk cooking for the month or week, I usually won’t need to be involved in the day to day management that follows until it’s time for another bulk cooking.
This is how we’ve been able to reduce the burden of meal management for Madam President and her delictable deputy. ?
Despite all of these systems however, there are still times when there’s a near tension moment. Sometimes, despite the food in the freezer, you arrive home and yet nothing has been fixed. Sometimes, it’s because you’ve exhausted the bulk cooked food and you haven’t been able to make a fresh one. Those are possible tension moments.
Understanding and forbearance; and a few other useful tips which I’ll share in a bit will help you handle such tension moment.
An hungry man is an angry man. That mustn’t be true with you.
Your brother,
Peniela E. Akintujoye.
©️Peniela Eniayo, Akintujoye| hello@lovestraighttalks.com
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