that gagging sound you hear is my husband choking on my cooking

One week ago, I made oily slabs of rubber steak for dinner. In my defense, the time we had to cook and eat before Andy left for work was about 20 minutes.

In a voice that expressed just how fed up I was that my natural cooking skills were once again missing in action, I told Andy I had ruined dinner. Don't even try it.

He did the good husband thing -- it's probably not that bad -- and bit in.

Immediately, with a jerk of his shoulders and a loud gagging sound, he spit the turd food back onto his plate. He couldn't help it. His heaving disgust was followed quickly by his chagrin at failing so profoundly at the good husband thing.

That night, I spent a decent amount of time upset by my huge, flopping failure and all the ones before it. Annoyance took its place. Then weariness. "I'm done," I told him. "I'm just done with cooking."

I wish that were true, but it isn't an option.

I can say with complete sincerity and with no underlying meaning that Andy has been making better dinners than I. That neither of us knows what we're doing, but he's made better decisions, with better results. That I'm proud of him for taking on a large amount of the cooking, as well as the other household chores and child raising. That I expect to continue being let down by recipes as well as my instincts, but I'm resigned to continue to try, because we need to eat and it isn't fair to expect Andy to cook every meal.

But you know what? My failures have been so horrendous that I'm kind of proud of that too. I'm probably the only person on planet earth who could make something so bad that my good husband would gag on it.