Spaghetti Carbonara: A love story

You’ll have to forgive me for these incessant posts about Ben, I’m afraid my newly-wedded-self just can’t resist.

Since I am the newly-minted Mrs. Benjamin Craig Wilson, I have had an insatiable desire to become, quite simply, a domestic goddess. Not so much June Cleaver, more so Nigella Lawson – but domestic goddess all the same.

I’ve been doing pretty well to keep on top of a weekly menu and last week called for a Friday feast of Spaghetti Carbonara.

Everything started off very well. Too well, come to think of it. A pot of water was happily bubbling on the stove, the bacon was getting nice and crispy, and I had whisked a pair of eggs into humble submission. Then, the recipe got a bit complicated. Some dual-spoon stirring action was required and it turned out we didn’t have quite enough Parmesan cheese, but surely enough to suffice. I soon had a pot of noodles mixed with creamy sauce and the promise of deliciousness.

Ben and I dug into our spaghetti carbonara and were instantly met with shocking disappointment. It tasted positively awful. Okay, not awful, but totally bland. Blech. Boring. As only a mature woman would do, I burst into a pool of tears and started whimpering hopeless sentiments such as, “I just want to be a good wife!” and “I’ll never make anything that actually tastes good!” etc. etc. Ben reassured me a botched spaghetti carbonara recipe wasn’t the end of the world, I had a very hard time wrapping my mind around that fact. I begged Ben not to eat the bland puddle of noodles on his plate, but he did with the reasoning that sometimes we’ve just got to work through less than ideal situations.

Though I was mortified my husband would continue eating truly awful food I had prepared for him, he taught me a great deal about self-sacrificial love. And I don’t mean because he’s willing to throw himself on a grenade for my bad cooking. The truth is that as much as I try to be an amazing wife to my husband, I am going to fail. I’m not always going to hit the mark. I’ll cook crummy meals but, worse, sometimes I won’t love and respect him as I should. What happens in those moments? Grace. It hit me that Jesus loves me in the same way Ben does, which makes sense because marriage is a picture of Christ and His Church. Love that is whole and completely non-dependent on my performance to return love. Isn’t that amazing? Yes, it is, because that’s the Gospel.

In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
(1 John 4:10-12)

If it turns out that I am resigned to a live of non-domesticated glory, maybe I can try my hand at being super mom in a few years. But hopefully I’ll be able to crank out a few culinary delights before we cross that bridge.