Right now, as we speak (aka as I type and probably not as you read, unless you read within the next hour) I am cooking a chicken. Not some chicken. A whole one. A little one, but a whole one.
And about twenty minutes ago I had my hand inside the chest cavity of said chicken and was removing the "giblets," which look far more like actual internal organs than you'd probably hope of you were going to be groping around in a dead animal's chest cavity to locate them. Or if you weren't willing to swear you'd gotten them all.
After molesting dinner and tearing out what appeared to be a tiny set of lungs, I was standing over my prey and seasoning it with my various spices from a list my mom emailed me (with an apology that she didn't have any amount recommendations, because it's not a proper recipe - p.s. why don't we have marjoram when we have SO MUCH chili powder? WHY!?!?) I began to think that moments like this help to explain why we never liked my step mom.
Which is to say that whole birds remind me of Thanksgiving which reminds me of food and family which reminds me of how my stepmom was (presumably still is) an awful cook, and how this would have likely disposed us (me) against her, even if she hadn't broken up my parents marriage (which she did).
Other strikes against her:
Her cats were unfriendly
She was obsessively neat
She wore spandex (after it was cool and before it became cool again)
She dyed her hair
Her mom was weird
And, finally, that no one in our extended family seemed to like her (ex: I just realized that she may have been banned from Thursday night dinners with my grandmother. Or she refused to come, which is probably equally damning).
So, all evil step mother myths aside. This one was probably doomed from the start.
