My wife is an atheist. Has been. Will be.
I don’t ask her to join in. Sometimes, she makes requests on the low, but not for herself.
When you enter into a school you’re looking to work through, as closely as you can in this modern age and a several thousand year old school, you can usually resolve conflicts a bit easier when you have an established practice. The routine of it needs altered, but so long as the god/desses are appeased, basically all good.
I’ve been doing the Maoshan studies for, well, over six months. Been doing the Immortal Fox stuff for over a YEAR at this point (literally just realized this!).
Today is the day where the beef question comes up. Beef that my son doesn’t care for. Beef that my wife doesn’t care for. Beef I normally eat via pepperoni on pizza’s one a week. Once a week is the (requested) limit.
And this was never an issue. There are (absolutely less tasty) turkey versions. I tried fake meat decades ago in earnest and don’t care to now. Pork IS FINE. As is chicken and turkey. Leaves a whole table full of possibilities.
Tonight, it’s a problem. But, I’m eating a non-beef pizza on Friday, so it really isn’t. Cooked more meals than the rest of the house combined this week.
So, what’s the problem?
The pretend restriction. SHE DOESN’T CARE FOR BEEF. It’s the easy outlet with for stress from the week which has been carried over partly from last. I get it. I offered to fix myself some other protein so she could enjoy it, but that wasn’t as appreciated as it would’ve been if that was the issue.
Love her to death, but she can’t cook. Beef is more plentiful here than chicken. She doesn’t like turkey or pork (I offered the other day to fix a turkey for the meat to use in place of chicken). She doesn’t like beef, either.
For the record, the Maoshan don’t eat beef more than one a week because of reverence for Guanyin. I first bought a few dollar bronze version from China and have a much larger one from Goodwill that I was drawn to, featured in the New Years ritual.
So, what do I do? It’s ironic. I crave burgers and steaks. I miss them, honestly. I offered to eat it once, since I wouldn’t be in any form this week.
The inconvenience is the issue and I’ve put in the skills to be able to cook to some degree, whereas she has not. What is there for me to do? The Tao would suggest that there is give and take – which I’ve done. And after having done so, she sulked off.
The real issue is that I learned to cook because I needed to. For work, frankly, so long ago. I worked in labs and learned to follow recipes and my chemistry courses helped me understand a little of why something was being done in a recipe. Then I applied my desire to be decent when I try to do something.
But I wouldn’t make her beef.
She and I have been together for almost 20 years. I know how it goes. She’s run out of anything remotely healthy to fix and I won’t spend several hours in front of the stove without cause when I have for several Holiday meals lately.
It would’ve been easy to snap about how I’ve supportive and not getting that. Where would that have gotten me? ” Tywin Lanister once said, “Any man who says ‘I am the King’ is no true king”. Indeed.
So, where did it end up? I mentioned I could have beef one night with my pizza not having pepperoni and it was grumbled about and dropped.
I’m the one with only a few hours of sleep last night, too. Winning without fighting. Sometimes it does work.
