Come and Get It or I'll Throw It Out

Due to circumstances involving cancer and pregnancy, MacGyver and I have moved into my dad's house. In a few weeks, we will move into our own house, unless I just jinxed the closing by believing everything will be fine and go as planned. Fuck. Our FutureHouse has about 174 things wrong with it, but only a few that truly make it uninhabitable, like a gas leak and a loose toilet and an unusable bath. Besides the important stuff, it also needs new electric and plumbing and some foundation work and non-ass-sucky replacement kitchen cabinets and a new furnace before it breaks. Moving into my dad's is sort of practice for living in a house that's older than Utah. He has let a few things go unfixed, to put it nicely. He doesn't cook, so he doesn't care about the kitchen unless it's burning down. Really, he probably doesn't care at all because I can't find a fire extinguisher and he can't hear high-pitched noises like smoke alarms anymore. The oven fan is broken and makes a loud buzzing sound at random intervals, so his solution is to turn it off at the breaker. Also, I can't remember when all the burners worked, but we're down to two now. One of the reasons I'm living there is to provide dinner for him and my brother while he's recuperating. Can you see the problem here? That problem would be cooking with half a stove and an oven that drives me guano crazy. It's only been a week of cooking dinners, but already I'm nominating my mother for sainthood. For forty years she made dinner for eight people and served it at six o'clock sharp. I'm cooking for four people that want to eat things I don't deem healthful for a cancer patient and they plain refuse to eat certain foods and I'm awesome if I can get dinner on the table at seven o'clock two nights in a row, plus I'm doing all the clean-up and most of the grocery shopping. HOW DID MY MOTHER DO THIS? How did she manage dinnertime by not drowning the pickier eaters, not ordering pizza more than once a month, and not threatening us with steak knives and the Cuisinart to eat our vegetables? It's comforting to use her pots and pans, to use her knives that my hands have known since elementary school, to look out her window when I'm washing dishes and imagine she felt this way once when she was my age. Oh mom, it's so easy to find more reasons to miss you.