Women in my life

Since a young age, one of my mottos has been:
Food is the path to a woman’s heart.

I don’t remember if I was taught this, or if I arrived at it myself. In any case, it has put me in good standing with my mother-in-law.

So this morning, when my eldest (M1) asked my wife, “What’s this called in English?”, I was listening.

“Congee,” she replied.

“I don’t like this one,” M1 said.

“This time I put brown rice in it. Even if you don’t like it, you still need to finish it. We don’t want to waste food.”

Go, son, I thought.

You see, my motto means I never complain about my wife’s cooking. Besides, I genuinely appreciate her food. I often tell her, “Your first attempt is usually the best.”

Naturally I like some cooking more than others. Experimentation has variance. But whatever comment I have, I keep to myself.

So when M1 fearlessly braved the critique, I was silently cheering him on. Because I too found the congee different from usual.

It’s actually a pattern. Unprompted, M1 reliably becomes my voice on matters of taste. My ground, and my motto, remains morally clean.

Because I don’t know how to cook.

That’s why when I first came to Australia to study alone, I had no way to survive. I could have learned to cook, I suppose. But somehow I found a different mechanism.

The university fellowship I attended always had warm-hearted senior sisters who loved to cook. By evoking the “helpless man” image, I reliably activated the “loving motherly” response. One way or another, I survived the years where I might otherwise have perished—or learned to cook.

To be clear, the exchange was fair. I was good at writing and research. In a university context, this was an asset.

My elder sister was unimpressed with this trajectory.

“You need to be responsible and do your part. This isn’t the past generation. Mum has spoiled you.”

“But she always said my role is to study,” I objected.

This is something my mum seems to regret. I once heard her say to my wife, “We spoiled him,” as she watched me.

Well, I managed to dodge this for quite a while. Until my wife had our third son (M3).

When M3 became imminent, I had to admit the current configuration at home was not scalable. Physics and economics only tolerate so much interpretive flexibility before theory starts to look thin.

So just before M3 was due to arrive, I took six weeks off to reconfigure the house.

“If I can keep the codebase of 30 developers clean, surely I can keep my own house tidy,” I thought.

Over the month, I bought tools, upgraded appliances, and built systems around them. Being Asian, we had never used the dishwasher. I became the household vanguard in understanding it. To our mutual delight, dishwashers are genuinely life-changing. We received a robovac as a gift from my wife’s colleagues—another life-changer. Soon there were two more robovacs.

Eighteen months in, I am now an integral and productive part of the household infrastructure, especially in the kitchen. My wife is fairly pleased, and so is my mum.

Our home is tidier than when we had two children. It turns out the third child was our tipping point by getting me to act.

As for me, I realised the missing piece was not effort, but the correct frame. When I treated tasks as isolated tasks, I struggled. When I treated the problem as a matter of systems architecture, I found myself in my element.

I was thinking about all of this while clearing breakfast and loading the dishwasher, trying to start it before we headed out, when I was interrupted.

“Where’s that bowl of congee?” my wife asked.

“The one on the bench? I thought it was M1’s leftover—he said he didn’t like it—so I tipped it out.”

She paused.

“I was still eating it. It had a salted egg.”