Home Sweet Home

Looks Good!!

I would consider myself someone who likes deserts and sweets but does not love them. My body does not release the slightest tremor at the notion of going weeks without a morsel of cookie or a bite of cake. It saves its tremors for alcohol and cigarettes but barely lets me know when I have gone over a month without succumbing to Sara Lee’s siren song.

That being said, there are times when I enjoy putting a brownie or a piece of cake in my mouth and washing it down with a half gallon of 2% milk. It would almost be inhuman to not enjoy or crave a confectionary treat at least sometimes, but it is never something that I have to cave in to or would really even notice if I didn’t live at home with my parents. But since I do not I find myself mourning the absence of a steady supply of unnecessary and usually undesired sweets.

See at home, my mom would usually have some desert or confectioner’s dream already laid out on the counter for my dad and I to peruse and eat at our leisure, or at least until the next bit of baker’s magic came spilling forth from the oven and into our greedy little hands.

However, now my once in a blue moon craving for sweets goes unheard and unanswered by the neglectful masses of people who are not my mother. (It also helps to mention that since my dad was diagnosed with diabetes she has stopped baking all together so no matter where I rest my heels on this planet my calls for familial desert catering will go unanswered.)

My mom can bake horsehair in a cow shit pie and it will come out tasting like ambrosia from Mt. Olympus. I have noticed that no one else on Earth has this ability save for my grandmother and I sure as shit don’t live with her, so as it stands fresh, home baked deliciousness is not within rifle shot much less my immediate grasp.

I do however, have a girlfriend, a woman I love above all others on this planet, and, as misogynistic as it sounds, I look for her to come up with some form of edible sweet every so often. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t stand there brandishing my belt and cracking it behind her as she shuffles her bound feet around the kitchen producing various baked goods, but some internal mechanism inside me hopes that she will surprise me with a cake or a pan of brownies sometimes.

I do not know why, it is just there. Like racism or the unavoidable need to stare at someone with a physical handicap. It is innate, everyone does it, and everyone hates themselves a little more whenever it happens. The only difference in this case is I do not hate myself for expecting her to bake; I hate myself for expecting her to bake because she is a woman.

(It seems so much worse written down than it does in my head. Rest assured I am a 21^st century man and do not expect a woman to be baking and cooking and washing and rearing children all day, but I am still a man so stupidity creeps in whenever I turn my back.)

Besides, it’s not like she doesn’t bake for her coworkers or anything. I have seen her do it numerous times. Birthdays, anniversaries, or the first time one of the other woman in her office managed to finish the day without breaking a nail are just a few of the reasons she has strapped on the apron and whipped up desert. She might throw me a bone and do a little side baking for me but it’s not the same.

No matter what the dish, it never turns out the same as the one she packs up and takes off to work with her. The big fancy cake for her coworkers looks moist and delectable and the one she made for “us” looks like a giant shit meteorite landed in a baking pan, she heated it up, and now wants me to eat it. I can’t explain how two of the exact same baked goods could look, taste, and feel so much different.

Is this some test of my resolve for the future? Is she seeing whether or not my love for her comes and goes with the deliciousness of her baked goods?

She sure as shit would be in a lot of trouble if it did. However, as it stands my love for her does not come from the deliciousness of her homemade deserts but from something else entirely.

My love for her comes from her ability to put up with just about anything that I might throw at her, including a blathering rant about her ability to bring the world the most delicious sweets imaginable but to leave me with the negligible dregs of her labors.

It might also be the confidence she projects in herself to know that she is handing me the “special needs kid’ of baked goods and that I am just going to grin, chew it, and wash it down with the entire gallon of 2% milk.

All while wearing the world’s biggest smile and hearing the calls from my already latent sweet tooth become fainter and fainter.