I Love My Mother-in-Law

As you might have guessed by the title of this post, here's R's guest post about his experience preparing for the wedding. I warned R that he may not be "preaching to the choir" here. But, I'll let you come to your own conclusions.

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Psychgrad and Giz seem to thrive when the kitchen is overflowing with open cookbooks, dirty dishes, and ridiculous amounts of food. I, on the hand, find it draining. In fact, I am still recovering from the wedding preparations. This posting will expose the dark side of the Equal Opportunity Kitchen and shine a light on the signs of an addiction to cooking.

Most of my family members and friends were scheduled to arrive in town a few days before the wedding. Luckily, I had booked off a couple days in advance of their arrivals in order to run a few errands and do a bit of cleaning so that I could spend time with them once they arrived. Much to my dismay, the place was a disaster. There were cookies everywhere. There was flour on the floor. There were stacks of dirty dishes filling the sink. At times, I couldn’t even see the kitchen counter surface because there was so much stuff on top of it. The mess overflowed into the kitchen and even into the office as we needed more storage space. I tried to clean the place, but it was a losing battle. It just kept getting worse and worse. How on earth could I explain to my family and friends that they couldn’t come over, because the place was too dirty? Below are a couple of photos that show what the place looked like.





One day I came home and Psychgrad and Giz seemed really overwhelmed. A bunch of people were coming over for supper the next day and we had a lot of food left to prepare. I jumped into the role of Project Manager and tried to motivate Giz by telling her to work faster, but to no avail. An important part of Project Management is understanding the “Scope Triangle” and that time, cost and quality are the trade-offs inherent in every project.


I couldn’t get Giz to work faster and we couldn’t postpone the event, so I couldn’t change the time aspect. Giz wasn’t open to ordering a pizza or anything else and I couldn’t pay anyone enough to squeeze into the disaster of a kitchen to help out, so I couldn’t change the cost aspect. The quality aspect was going to suffer. It was clear that we needed to change the scope. We needed to eliminate a few options from the menu. However, when I suggested to Giz that we don’t make everything as planned, she replied, “what are you getting at?” She couldn’t fathom the idea of hosting an event and not having an insane amount of food. This was a moment of clarity for me. I realized that Giz has an addiction to cooking and she needs help. Here’s the proof:
• Instead of reading regular books, she reads cookbooks.
• Instead of watching real television shows, she watches cooking shows.
• Instead of checking normal web sites, she checks out food blogs.
• She asked me to go to the grocery store at least twice each day.
• She is so out of touch with the real world, she hasn’t even heard of Usain Bolt. He was only named Sportsman of the Year!!!

We need to have an intervention to save her. Who is willing to help? Please post messages of encouragement. Together, we can help her beat this addiction to cooking!