I stood in the kitchen and could not decide what to cook

Dear Delyara, There was food in the fridge. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I had already made too many decisions that day. Work decisions, child decisions, money decisions, timing decisions, mood decisions, what-needs-answering decisions, what-can-wait decisions. By the time I opened the fridge, my brain just stared back at the shelves like they were speaking another language. I think people underestimate how exhausting decision-making is when it happens in ordinary domestic forms. Dinner is not just dinner. It is money, energy, effort, time, leftovers, tomorrow’s lunch, who will complain, what’s easiest, what’s healthiest, what won’t create more washing up. In the end I made eggs on toast. No one died. I still felt like dinner had taken something expensive from me.