Seriously. It's just food.

Of all the ways my life has shifted since having the baby, I think the one I despise most is the ongoing "what should we have for dinner" discussion. I hate that it comes up every single day.

It's always the same conversation:

"What do you want to have?"

pause "I dunno. What do you want to have?"

"Well, we have chicken in the freezer."

"I had chicken for lunch. How about pasta?"

I want to stab myself to change the conversation.

I do not love cooking, neither do I mind it. I'm not a foodie by any stretch of the imagination, but I like the eat, so it seems only fair that I'd be willing to do something to make that happen.

But true to my general Issues With Authority, I don't like feeling overly bounded which is where I'm at these days.

I don't like feeling obligated to put something that looks like a meal on the table every night even though I know that kids who have regular family dinners tend to be I dunno... better adjusted? More normal? (Fat chance of other of those with these gene pools.) Frankly, she needs all the help she can get, so regular meals at a dinner table it is.

I don't like having to find foods that will work for my toddler, who is not so much a picky eater as she eats like a bird. We count ourselves blessed if she eats two bites of whatever. It's really freaking hard for me to handle that my 2.5 year old weighs 24 pounds and I can't seem to do a damned thing about it. I put full fat ice cream and all manner of ridiculous fried junk foods in front of the kid and she happily goes through life without eating a bite. Maybe she's not hungry, which is very fabulous and French, but right now I want her to be a fat American baby. She eats fine at daycare, I hear. But she won't eat at home. She's otherwise quite happy and energetic, boisterous and developing appropriately in every way. She just won't eat, and that's demotivating for the persons doing the cooking.

And now my husband has dietary restrictions that need to be considered. It used to be that I had to work around his refusal to eat uncooked tomatoes and cheese. But now, there are a whole host of other things he does not eat in an effort to manage his GERD issues. He's scrupulously avoiding foods with pH levels above a cut-off and, frankly, everything he can eat sounds dreary.

I don't diet. At best, I limit my portions on a few things every once in a while. I graze throughout the day. Left to my own devices, I'll eat carbs and fruit all day, with generous handfuls of something vaguely chocolate-like. On occasion, I get excited for a recipe I come across online and will make an elaborate something or another that requires one of those kitchen tools that no neighbor has, and I'll have to buy from Williams Sonoma and then never use again.

I want to cook what I want to cook and when I want to cook it. All this stuff is dragging me down, man.

So when my husband asks me over IM during the workday if I've given any thought to what I want for dinner, I really just want to fold up and cry.