The Joy of Cooking — After You’re No Longer Married to the Wrong Person
The future is on the tip of my tongue, and I am creating what I hope will be a decidedly delicious life
It happened while I was loading the dishwasher, a tiny, foot-wide appliance squeezed inside the equally tiny kitchen of my first apartment in Washington, D.C. Prying the top off of my favorite to-go coffee mug, I placed it next to the mug on the upper rack. Looking down, I noticed that I hadn’t opened the sipping part of the lid to ensure the whole thing would get clean, and froze.
I used to stand on the cheap linoleum next to a much bigger dishwasher in the kitchen of my old house in Western Maryland, bracing myself for the fit of rage my ex-husband had whenever I did something that didn’t meet his standards. The unopened lid of my coffee mug in our dishwasher was a serious offense that typically led to his relentless criticism for at least 20 minutes afterward.
But here, in my own space, the smooth stone floor in my post-divorce kitchen beneath my bare feet with their newly manicured toes, I could do whatever I wanted with the coffee cup lid. I could open it, or not. It didn’t matter anymore because I was no longer married to a controlling jerk.
