MY LIFE AS I KNEW IT IS OVER

‘You deserve a break,’ my husband says to me when he comes home from work to find me folding the laundry with one hand and playing with Miss Q with the other, ‘why don’t you go and do the grocery shopping.’

This is what I’m dealing with.

This is the kind of delicate, tactful bloke I shacked up with.

I’ve got no one to blame but myself.

Now, now, before you pepper me with emails about how it’s not too late to walk away, (arguably it is, since I don’t have a job and I do have a human) it had been a Miss Q-is-very-demanding kind of day and as odd as it sounds, (and believe me, it sounds odd to me too) doing the grocery shopping somehow seemed like just the mind numbing activity I needed.

I think I got a little excited that I had the use of both my arms though, because I came home with bag after bag of groceries.

Two hundred and fifty dollars worth.

Items I’d never bought in my life ever before.

Things that mean you’re putting down roots. Setting up house. Staying put.

Things like golden syrup in case I want to whip up a batch of my grandma’s ANZAC biscuits.

A doormat. Desiccated coconut. Muffin tin.

A muffin tin for heaven’s sake.

Never before have I owned a muffin tin.

Now all I need is a cookbook.

I may be married to a chef, but trying to use one of his recipes is like having to translate Mein Kampf when you’ve only done high school German.

And if you did the kind of high school German I did, that wouldn’t help you much at all.

I am thirty-two years old and I appear to have entered the age of domesticity.

Next thing I know I’ll be buying an iron.

Still won’t know how to use it though.