I wanted someone else to decide what was for dinner

Dear Delyara, With confidence, with ingredients already in their mind, with some invisible internal map of the fridge and freezer and everyone’s mood and tomorrow’s needs already sorted. I wanted someone else to stand in that gap between family hunger and actual food and simply know what happens next. Instead, it was me opening cupboards with the dead-eyed stare of a person who has made too many ordinary decisions in one life. What gets tiring is not only cooking. It’s being the person who keeps turning household uncertainty into a plan. Dinner is just one example. A repeated one. By evening, I can feel how little I have left for one more plan that everybody else will treat as inevitable once it appears. Some nights I don’t want help chopping. I want relief from deciding.