Laura has some good news. Her blog is now included on the website of WorkingMother.com. This is exciting not just because it will help broaden her own website’s brant-reading audience, but also — and perhaps, most importantly — because it legitimizes the fact that Laura is indeed a working mother.

The fact that Laura has always felt a little weird referring to herself as a “working mother” might seem ridiculous since, of course, Laura does indeed work — writing books, magazine and newspaper pieces, and lately her (almost) daily brants. But somehow she has always assumed that the term ‘working mother’ applied only to women who worked outside the home, so she has always felt a little bit like a fraud whenever she didn’t describe her job-status in exactly this way:

A stay-at-home mother who works at home, sometimes, when she’s actually working on something.

Laura had always liked this phrasing because when Laura is “in between” projects (not working) she feels guilty saying she works from home because to be frank, she’s not really working at home. Unless you consider trying to think of something to write about and wondering what to do if no idea ever comes and starting things and throwing them away because they suck — working — in which case she’s working overtime.

Of course, when Laura is working on a book in progress she actually does work at home — like a fiend — dropping her son off at school and then racing home to sit at her desk from 9:00 in the morning until the minute before she has to leave her house to pick him up at 3:00. Even that schedule seems a little cushy to her since her definition of work was shaped at the age of 15 by waitressing at IHOP which meant that anything short of running around with plates of pancakes with faces on them and refilling Heinz Ketchup bottles and salt and pepper shakers should hardly be considered “work.”

Laura’s other definition of work was shaped between the ages of 23 to 33 when she worked in book publishing in New York. Work to Laura then meant having an office with a phone that never stopped ringing and an inbox she could never get to the bottom of and co-workers and meetings and deadlines and unfair bosses and waking up not knowing what to wear in the morning and always being a little bit late because of having to try everything on before settling on the usual black-on-black ensemble and then staying really late in order to prevent being fired and being found out to be a complete incompetent phony.

Given these two extreme work-ethic examples, you can understand why referring to herself as a stay at home mother who worked, sometimes, when she’s actually working on something–nothing more, nothing less — when her “commute” entails “going upstairs” with her coffee and her laptop while trying not to spill anything on her special “work” pajamas — would be critical to her sense of correctness. However, Job Status Defining Disorder (JSDD) notwithstanding, Laura is really looking forward to being part of the WorkingMother.com bloggers — as “Novelist Mom” — writing about what it’s like being a working mother who works at home, all the time, even when she’s not actually working on something.

Laura meant to post this last week when it went up, but Claire Zulkey recently interviewed Laura and posted it on her website. Claire asks some of the most interesting and humorous questions around — including how Laura feels being just ahead of Claire alphabetically — and Laura loves doing Claire’s questionnaires (she did one back in the fall when Claire was still working for mediabistro.com). Here’s the link to the latest interview on Zulkey.com:
http://zulkey.com/diary_archive_021607.html

Laura would like to know when cereal became $4.19 a box. She suddenly looked at the box of Honey Nut Cheerios she was holding today at her local supermarket and wants to know what the deal is.

The day before yesterday when Laura was at Whole Foods, she saw a sign in the green leafy vegetables section that read: “Adolescent Lettuce.” According to the preciously informative little Whole Foods “blurb,” adolescent lettuce is a bit more mature than baby lettuce. Laura would provide more information about this variety of lettuce but she got so annoyed she didn’t read the whole blurb.

Laura’s feeling a little at sixes and sevens (cliche #1) these days. She’s not really sure what that means but she thinks it means the way she’s feeling: neither here nor there (cliche #2); fish nor fowl (cliche #3); between a rock and a hard place (cliche #4). Obviously, this landslide of cliches is proof that Laura is feeling just a little bit lost these days.

Not that being lost is necessarily a bad thing. Laura’s not going to go so far as to say it’s a good thing, either (I mean, Let’s not get crazy), but certainly, if you take the Silver-Lining (cliche #5) approach then much can be learned while you’re lost — including but not limited to merely becoming un-lost and finding your way out (assuming, that is, that you do find your way out of wherever it is you have become lost). Managing anxiety (warding off existential What Will Become of Us? moods); thinking clearly in the face of questionable circumstances and outcomes (warding off existential What Will Become of Us? moods); allowing yourself to “go with it” (cliche #6) — the it being the annoyingly easier-said-than-done (cliche #7) fact that you have no fucking idea what is going to happen next while pretending to feel inspired by uncertainty (warding off existential What Will Become of Us? moods).

You can see her predicament, I’m sure.

Despite her recent lapse in communication — it was February vacation this week and both her husband and son went to Colorado to visit Laura’s lovely stepdaughter (Laura is still not travel-ready surgical-recovery-wise) — one thing that she really enjoys and that always elevates her mood is branting. Sometimes Laura wishes she could brant all day long — and do nothing else — absolutely nothing else, so much has she has come to love branting! — but unfortunately (for her, anyway), she has to earn a living (or try to, anyway). And so she retreats into her lost place, trying to figure out what to do first, what to do second, and what to do if what she does first and second leads her nowhere except to yet another circle of hell. It’s nice and quiet in her hidey hole — quiet and dark like one of those sound proof boothes on Law & Order with a big thick picture window right in the middle of it — and to be perfectly frank Laura kind of likes it in there where she can see out but no one can see in.

And so she brants from her hidey hole tonight, not because she has something important to say, or something funny to say, or something interesting that she has found on a quirky newsy website and spun into a few fluffy paragraphs of brantese. No, tonight she brants purely for the sake of branting.

Laura would like to introduce a new semi-regular feature to her brant: “What’s The Deal?” “What’s The Deal?” will deal with Laura’s sometimes answerable but mostly unanswerable questions about everyday things she sees and gets annoyed by. Feel free to post your own “What’s The Deal?” issues as comments or emails.

This past Saturday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote an oddly belated screed about the existence of Chick Lit, with it’s pink covers and disembodied legs on the jackets, and all of it’s offspring, including, she wrote, things like black chick Lit, assistant chick lit, Jewish chick lit, Bollywood chick lit, etc. (Laura wonders why she left out “Mommy Chick Lit” which is what some reviewer interestingly called Piece of Work.) Many authors and publishing-related bloggers referenced this piece and wrote their own commentary on both how late-to-the-Chick-Lit party Dowd was (she wrote her Op-Ed piece as if she literally had just discovered this genre) and how incredibly annoying and condescending it was when Dowd balked about the horror she felt when stupid shitty shallow inane banal worthless moronic idiotic pink-colored chick lit books touch other more worthwhile books (Laura didn’t know that certain books had cooties!!).

Galleycat.com, a terrific book-and-publishing related blog that is on mediabistro.com’s website and that’s written by a terrific guy named Ron Hogan who started his website Beatrice.com years and years before I anyone actually understood that the World Wide Web wasn’t some kind of actual netting, ran many reactions from female authors often “accused” of writing Chick-Lit. Jennifer Weiner, the reigning and undefeated queen of chick lit (Laura doesn’t mean this as an insult and assumes Jennifer Weiner wouldn’t interpret it as such since Jennifer Weiner is a big defender of chick lit) had something to say about it, although Laura couldn’t imagine what she could possiblly add to her defense of chick lit than what Weiner had said last year in response to Prep author Curtis Sittenfeld’s chick lit-labeling review of Melissa Banks’ (A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing) second novel, The Wonder Spot.

But Laura’s point is this: Ron Hogan from Galleycat.com included Laura in his email to gather reactions from female writers who may or may not write chick lit. And despite the fact that Laura was flattered to be included and desperate to get her brant linked to blog with a big big readership, Laura didn’t comment.

Laura is really shocked by this self-defeating behavior, and puzzled by it: Why would she pass up an opportunity to get her name out there in the fray of the public cat fight over what genre her books allegedly are in?

The only excuse answer she has for not offering a reaction is because, quite frankly, she is confused. Confused by the whole chick-lit non-chick-lit business. When Laura’s first book Animal Husbandry was published in 1998, it was never accused of being chick lit because chick lit didn’t exist yet. Even when Bridget Jones’ Diary was published six months later in the U.S. the term didn’t really exist. But later, when more and more single urban women began documenting their experiences about being single and urban — and often times, lonely — the term sprung up and took on it’s perjorative tone.

Then, as Laura’s Animal Husbandry disappeared, replaced by lots and lots of other more chick-litty books, Laura was only occasionally included in the chick-lit round ups. Laura never knew how to feel about this — that is, part of her was hurt that she wasn’t included when other lists of chick lit writers were named since she felt she was kind of at the forefront of the genre and felt left out. But another part of her was relieved that she wasn’t included because most of the articles about chick lit were very negative, so maybe the fact that she wasn’t mentioned was a good thing.

Confusing indeed.

So now, as the ridiculous debate rages on, Laura has nothing more to add to it than this belated non-reaction reaction.

Laura wanted to let her readers know that last night she cooked. She made French Onion Soup using a recipe from, who else, The Barefoot Contessa. And it was really good. Laura felt the need to tell people that she can cook when she puts her mind to it, and that she is actually a good cook when she does cook.

Laura knows this probably will sound strange, but she actually plans on trying to cook more. Really. She’s said this before — along with things like she’s going to lose weight, or she’s going to exercise every single day no matter what — and has never kept her promise, but this time she’s serious. Seriously. She wants to do better. She wants to aspire to some small degree of homemaker-ness. She wants her son to come home and smell food cooking that isn’t only being cooked by his father. She knows that might sound rather un-PC, but Laura believes that homemaking transcends gender. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you’re the husband or wife, mother or father, mother and mother, or father and father, you should try to make your house a home.

In fact, Laura’s feeling pretty conflicted about the whole topic. Which is why she felt the need to “confess” her cooking. She doesn’t want people to think she’s lying about her fear of cooking since it was pretty weird the way the minute she posted her “Fear of Cooking” post she cooked dinner. Maybe that’s why she cooked — she was filled with shame and guilt about her lack of cooking and felt the need to “cook” her way out of the black hole of self-condemnation she’d fallen in to.

Laura didn’t cook tonight — another apologetic confession — there was no school today because of the snow so both Benji and Brendan were home and Laura couldn’t exactly drive around in the snow and slush and sleet and rain — but she hopes to cook tomorrow. The minute she figures out what she’s going to make rest assured that she’ll confess to it.

Laura would like to provide the link to an interesting article in today’s New York Times called “He Cooks, She Stews, It’s Love” about how competitive spouses can get in the kitchen and how one spouse is always the alpha cook and the other the beta cook. Funny. And definitely an unspoken thread of Laura’s cooking phobia — how insecure she is about cooking since her husband is a better cook than she is — which Laura hopes to brant about soon.

One of the (many) domestic tasks Laura has never quite gotten the hang of (can’t do) – and which she recently passed on to (Warning! Shameless self-promotion alert!) Julia Einstein, the main character of her latest novel, Piece of Work ⎯ is cooking dinner on a regular basis (as in, every night, Monday through Friday). In Piece of Work, Julia Einstein is weeknight-cooking-challenged because of the fact that her mother was partial to a sort of frozen-and-canned-food style of meal preparation that Laura (whose mother was, well, sort of similar to Julia’s mother…) refers to as Early American Jew Style Cooking. (Laura also thinks there’s an Early American Jew Style of Home Decor which Laura hopes to discuss in a future brant.)

To continue, then, the main hallmarks of Early American Jew Style Cooking is a reliance on frozen and canned foods, bottled salad dressings, small non-absorbant paper napkins, generic store-brand soda and cereals, and a general over-arching “no-frills” approach to family meal preparation. Fresh vegetables (as opposed to canned), fresh hamburger meat or chicken (as opposed to deeply-frozen), and a generalized awareness of “meal aesthetics” let alone “food tastiness” are not present; Early American Jews (those of a certain generation who came of age during The Depression, for instance) quite simply are missing the “meal aesthetics” and “food tastiness” genes, and so, Laura believes, should be considered truly “food handicapped” — or, “food challenged” — and thus blameless for their deficits. *(N.B. — Laura has been made aware by friends of the fact that a similar style of no-frills food preparation — Early Irish American Catholic Style Cooking — exists though she won’t explore that phenomenon now.)

But back to Laura and her (particular) fear of cooking: to clarify, Laura’s not talking about the kind of cooking she can do for a dinner party — make some impressive show-offy entrees and desserts and then pass herself off as an excellent cook — she’s talking about the regular weeknight type of family cooking that requires forethought and planning and creativity as opposed to fancy skills and complicated recipes. But for some reason (op cit: being the child of an Early American Jew Style Cooking mother) she has never been able to successfully forethink and plan and create a week’s worth of meals. Ever.

Laura finds her deficit of family-meal-cooking-ability kind of embarrassing to admit since all the people she knows who do cook dinner on a regular basis (both of them) say it’s really not such a hard thing to do.

“It’s not such a hard thing to do. I mean, it’s not rocket-science,” they usually say (after rolling their eyes and laughing at her).

But for Laura cooking every night might just as well be rocket science (or basic long division, or using a PC instead of a Mac, or trying to get her printer to print photographs). She’s written five novels but she’s never made dinner five nights in a row (or even four nights in a row; or three, or two). Not to self-pathologize (she usually leaves this for the professionals), but it’s clear:

Something’s wrong (she’s a freak).

The first thing she always asks a Normal Person Who Cooks Dinner is: “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“How do you know what to make?”

“You use a recipe.”

“Wait. Slow down,” she’ll say, with a frantic wave of the hand. “What I mean is: How do you decide what to make?”

The eye rolling and giggling ⎯ oftentimes, both—resume.

“Well, you make a list.”

“A list of what?”

“A list of ingredients to buy at the supermarket.”

“But how do you know what to get at the supermarket?”

“Well, you make a list.”

“Another list? Another list of what?”

No more eye rolling or giggling now. Just overwhelming disbelief and concern for her obvious limitations (freakishness). Eventually they will get back to her last question and answer it (enunciating every syllable this time, as if they’re talking to someone with extreme cognitive difficulties.)

“A list of what you’re going to cook that week.”

“A list of what you’re going to cook that week!” She hits her head with her open hand as if she could have had a V8, but she’s actually just stalling for time. “And where do you get that list?”

“Well,” they will say (realllllllly reallllllly slowly), “you write down a list of all the things you cook that your husband likes and that your kids like, and that’s how you get the list of what you’re going to make.”

There’s only one problem:

Laura’s list would be a very short one.

Actually, Laura doesn’t even really have a list at all.

Frozen waffles, chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese, cereal and milk is about the extent of it. But, if “variations” on those “original recipes” count, there are a few more things she could add to the list: the “combination platter” of “buttermilk” and “home-style” Eggo waffles; the “combination platter” of dinosaur-shaped-all-white- breast-meat-whatever- that-really-means chicken nuggets and long finger-shaped chicken “tenders”; the “combination bowl” of leftover microwave-able Kraft “Easy Mac” and freshly-microwaved Annie’s “Micro Mac” Organic Pasta and White Cheddar Cheese (or, vice-versa); the “combination bowl” of Crispix and Rice Krispies, or Rice Krispies and Kix, or Kix and Honey Nut Cheerios, or Honey Nut Cheerios and Crispix.

At these moments, when she’s preparing her “recipe variations” and feeling a sense of culinary accomplishment (the same kind she felt as a child using her Easy-Bake Oven), Laura can almost understand what it would be like to feel at home in the kitchen (this is a lie: Laura can imagine feeling at home in the kitchen about as much as she can imagine what it would feel like to walk on the moon). But the minute breakfast is over (and cooking without a toaster looms), She’s back where she started:

Afraid to cook during the week.

Laura can’t help thinking that there should be a name for this – after all, there are names for every other possible fear in the world including some she’s not even sure actually exist (for example: have you ever actually known someone with such a debilitating fear of the number 13 that they warrant the clinical diagnosis of triskaidekaphobia?) -– and after several hours of Googling (instead of cooking, or preparing to cook, or thinking about cooking, or thinking about not cooking), she finds that there is indeed a name for the more general form of this disorder:

Mageirocophobia.

What follows is the information Laura found on somebody’s really interesting website — http://www.worldwidewords.org/– and which is very interesting (and which proves she’s not lying):

“Magiric” (Relating to cooking) — Nothing to do with magic, at least etymologically speaking, though as a non-cook I often feel the products of my wife’s kitchen must have been created by some such process. It’s from mageirikos, a classical Greek adjective referring to cooking, or describing somebody who is skilled in that art.The English word is so rare that I can find no example other than one from 1853 quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary; this is from Alexis Soyer’s The Pantropheon: or History of Food and its Preparation in which he says “The magiric science, therefore, began in the year of the world 1656”, an assertion that may be thought contentious. Derived from it are mageirics, a usefully obscure term for the art of cooking, and mageirocophobia, fear of cooking, a common affliction.

What amazes Laura most (besides the fact that this phobia actually exists) is the fact that this “fear of cooking” is said to be “a common affliction.” She finds this very hard to believe (let’s be frank: it’s ridiculous) and wonders if there’s a way to find out how many people are (allegedly) afflicted by this (completely made-up) condition.

And so Laura continues to Google (and thereby avoid cooking), looking for signs of a larger sociological or emotional condition that can be conflated into a “syndrome” and then discussed on “Dr. Phil” or “trend” (even one person) pertaining to the fear of cooking on weeknights (this particular facet of domestic laziness).

Nothing (big surprise).

She tries to find organizations — “The National Organization of Non-Cooks” — associations — “The International Association for Reassessing the Importance of Cooking Dinner from Scratch” — or support groups “I Don’t Cook Either,” “I Can’t Cook Either,” and “I Hate Cooking Period” – that would surely have sprouted up to address the needs (fake and made-up as they may be) of this specialty sub-group of people. Certainly there would be a non-profit website – mageirocophobia.org or commercially-minded website mageirocophobes.com, not to mention numerous blogs and actual magazines (Cooks Unillustrated; Food and Whine).

But again, nothing (duh).

And so, Laura is left to wonder:

Is she alone in her phobia?

And if so, is there a name for the fear of being the only one with a particular phobia?

Probably.

Maybe if she weren’t so hungry (and just cooked something already), she could find it.