Sam does all of the buying of the food, and pays for the meals when we eat out, and he does all the cooking. I do the cleaning of the kitchen after the cooking, and I pay the rest of the bills. I also do the clothes washing and any home maintenance that may need doing. We both share the cleaning of the house, I vacuum and he dusts, on a Sunday. I don't know if that is fair, but both of us seem happy enough with the arrangement.
So, Sam goes to work full time and he does all the cooking when he gets home. Thankfully. I am so glad I don't have to cook. Shake of the head. He comes home for lunch every day, we usually eat leftovers from the night before, or we go out to eat. I stay home and I don't work. I say that I am on long service leave, I'm just lucky that way. Someone said the other day, the boyfriend of a friend, "You are so lucky that you work from home."
Sure, let’s go with that, I thought.
Truthfully, I have been pissing around since we got back from Europe.
So, the shonk bit is... I race around, literally for 10 minutes and clean up the kitchen before Sam gets home for lunch at midday and again at 4.30pm before Sam gets home from work. Literally, it takes me 10 minutes, sometimes 5 minutes. Twice a day. Twenty minutes tops, and the house is clean. That is my day done. The rest of the time, I do what I like.
That's what I have to do on a daily basis. Some days I just feel like a con artist, when it is 4.40pm and I am finishing my 5 minutes of work, wiping the last saucepan and sliding it into the cupboard, as Sam closes the front door having just got home.
"Tea?" I ask, smiling sweetly.
Today, just now, after collecting historical photos of Melbourne all day on the internet, I thought, Jesus! I better get the kitchen done, Sam will be here soon, only to realise, after I was done, that I had raced around an hour early. Stupid me, I'm even losing track of the day.
There is apart of me who thinks, You really should cook. Poor Sam works all day and then has to come home and cook. Then the other part of me says, shrieks, ARE YOU FUCKING MAD? Cook? Everyday? Like a life sentence? No thank you.
Because I can cook. Actually, I'm a really good cook. As Shane found out once. After being housemates forever, with Shane cooking often, (He started training to be a chef, when he first left school, until he discovered what the hours were like, or something. Truthfully, Shane is pretty ambitious) if anyone was going to cook, I casually whipped up a dinner party for a friend I hadn't seen for some time. And then I met some guy I fancied and I cooked for him. Shane stood in the kitchen doorway with his mouth open, saying the words,
"You can cook? You've never cooked for me."
I can, it just bores me. Every night, day in, day out, going to the supermarket, thinking of something to cook, every night, for the rest of your life, no, ah, ah, shake of the head, no thank you. Occasionally, in a spasm of sisterly generosity, I have whipped up a lasagne, or a spaghetti Bolognese you know, something simply, for Sam, but every day, for the rest of our lives, people do less time for murder.
In the kitchen for 20 minutes a day, that's enough for me.
I should just stop feeling guilty about it.
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