My Husband Is the Family Chef … With Terrible Food-Safety Habits

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband loves to cook. He finds it relaxing, enjoys trying new recipes, and uses food as a way to express love to our family. All of this is amazing, especially because I admittedly am not great at cooking and I find it tedious. The problem is that my husband is not exactly detail-oriented when it comes to food safety.

“Washing” his hands consists of briefly flicking them with water under a tap, he doesn’t seem to believe that fruits and vegetables need to be washed well, and he sometimes even uses expired ingredients without noticing. I’ve seen him use a dirty dishcloth to wipe down clean dishes or dry his hands. Worst of all, he will leave cooked food out for hours longer than recommended. I’ve got a sensitive stomach and have been sick a few times after meals, and we have young children! I want him to feel appreciated, but when I approach him about these things, he gets very defensive and upset and thinks I’m overreacting. How can I get him to take these concerns for our family’s safety seriously?

—Losing My Appetite

Dear Losing,

In my experience, trying to persuade someone to see things the way we do is rarely successful. He thinks what he’s doing in the kitchen is just fine (he’s wrong, of course, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to convince him of that). And honestly, even if you succeed in getting him to, say, use a clean cloth to dry clean dishes, he’s likely to do this only when you’re watching.

I get that you find cooking tedious, but what if you helped out in the kitchen? You wash the fruit and vegetables (or you could just wash them on the day they’re bought and put them into the fridge clean). You put away the food instead of leaving it to him to do. (And since he’s doing the cooking, why aren’t you the one doing the dishes? That’s only fair anyway.) The one thing it’s worth bugging him about and making nonnegotiable—because you can’t take over this task for him, and because it’s terribly important for all of your sakes—is washing his hands. Insist that he read this, on why hand-washing is so crucial.

If you make too many things nonnegotiable, though, you may lose your in-house cook. That would be a pity for everyone. So, take over as many of the food-related tasks as you can, including all of the food safety, and be sure to tell him often how much you love his meals and how appreciative you are. Anyone who does all the cooking wants to hear that. I know I do.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

Last month, my husband and I had the exact same fight we’ve been having for 10 years: How much Christmas can we celebrate? My husband was raised Reform Jewish. Before we were married, he asked if I would convert. I did. We went to conversion classes together, and there was even one class dedicated to whether or not you should still celebrate Christmas, and the rabbi said it was fine. Most of the other students in the class were going to do just that. This was the one class my husband missed!

I’d like to put an end to this decadelong fight. I wasn’t raised religious, but we did celebrate Christmas, which was always one of my favorite times of year. Now we have two children, whom we are raising Jewish for the most part, though neither one of us would consider ourselves religious. We go to the temple on the High Holidays, light the candles on Hanukkah, and do a half-assed Seder on Passover. That’s the extent of our Jewishness, which seems fine with my husband. He actually complains every time we go to temple. However, when Christmas comes around, he won’t let us have a tree. (He’ll allow a fake eucalyptus tree that lights up and that we decorate with a dreidel and Star of David ornaments.) We are not allowed to have stockings over the fireplace or pretend there is a Santa Claus.

Every year, we get together with my family on Christmas Eve, then my father comes to spend the night, and we open Christmas presents in the morning with the kids. My husband doesn’t love this, but he relented years ago, and I was happy he did so. This year, my father suggested he bring a ham over to make on Christmas Day. I said sure, not really thinking anything of it. My husband is in no way observant and eats his fair share of pig without thinking twice. But when I mentioned the Christmas ham, he said it made him “very uncomfortable.” This just beyond pissed me off. I’m not sure he even realizes how he sounds, but could you imagine if the tables were turned and we were going to my father’s for Hanukkah and said we were bringing over latkes and my father said that made him “very uncomfortable”? I don’t understand his hatred for Christmas, and I’m pretty much fed up with tiptoeing around him every December. I’m sure this has a lot to do with his parents, who probably weren’t happy that he married a shiksa. He doesn’t have a great relationship with them to begin with and has always been made to feel second-best to his brother, who is the golden child (and married a Jewish woman). My feeling on the subject is that we should celebrate and lean into these holidays equally. I go all out for Hanukkah and would like to do the same for Christmas as well. I have many friends who do that, and it always makes me jealous and resentful. Wondering if you have any advice to solve this issue.

—Jew for Christmas

Dear Christmas,

But he didn’t marry a shiksa. He married a Jew. If you didn’t want to convert to Judaism, you shouldn’t have. Reform Judaism has a considerably more liberal approach to conversion than Conservative Judaism does, but even so, the expectation is that one is sincere in their convictions.* It is certainly true that many Jews in interfaith marriages, in which neither spouse is particularly (or at all) religious, find a way to celebrate Christmas. In my house, we indeed celebrated all holidays—Hanukkah (with a menorah my daughter and I lit each of the eight nights), Christmas (with a tree, a festive meal, and presents), Passover (with a non-half-assed Seder), and Easter (with my husband and daughter dyeing eggs, our hiding them in the backyard, and her searching for them—plus a basketful of goodies); my Southern Baptist husband even built a Sukkot every autumn of our daughter’s childhood. I recently read a charming essay by the novelist Leigh McMullan Abramson about navigating the holidays when one parent is Jewish and the other isn’t, published right around the time you and your husband started fighting over Christmas.

Your situation is different. And I’m puzzled by what you report your rabbi said, because I’ve never heard of a rabbi saying that it was “fine” for a Jewish family to celebrate Christmas. I have to assume that you’re misremembering—or that you misheard or misunderstood—what was said. Some reform rabbis, it’s true, have given their blessings to interfaith families celebrating Christmas. Perhaps this was what the rabbi teaching your conversion classes was talking about.

But more to the point: This is something you and your husband should have talked about before you married and had children. Since you didn’t, I’ll take a moment to educate you now:

We Jews, who grew up surrounded by—bombarded with—a holiday that wasn’t, isn’t, our own, can be very sensitive to having Christmas (to having Christianity itself) forced on us. That some of us who are not religious, who think of ourselves as cultural and ethnic Jews, marry non-Jews and come to embrace multiple cultures and traditions doesn’t mean that all of us do. The fact that your husband asked you to convert (something it never occurred to me to ask my husband to do—nor did it cross his mind to ask me to renounce Judaism and convert to Christianity) should have told you how he felt. My guess is that you’re still fighting over Christmas trees and Santa because you weren’t straightforward and clear with each other from the start. You might as well have it out now. You’ll have to come clean: You converted without understanding what it meant, and he assumed you fully understood what he meant when he asked you to, and didn’t take the time to tell you. Perhaps he didn’t even know, before children entered the picture. Perhaps you didn’t know, until you had kids, how much you’d miss Christmas. Now he feels betrayed, and you feel he’s depriving you and your kids of something important.

I’m not sure you can resolve this on your own—or if it can be resolved at all. But I recommend counseling. This is a problem that is bigger than a Christmas Day ham.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

How do you find the balance between supporting an anxious spouse and not enabling the anxiety? My husband always had mild anxiety around a few specific situations, but it became more generalized and intense after we had a kid. (So much to worry about, so much to protect our child from!) He has gone to therapy, which I sometimes attended with him, but isn’t in therapy at the moment. I’m encouraging him to get back in, but there is a lengthy waitlist and a limited number of providers in our area. In an early session I attended with him, we agreed that my role when he was spiraling with anxiety would be to counter it and bring him back to reality with the common sense his anxiety wasn’t allowing him to see. I was to acknowledge that he was feeling anxious, tell him I understood why he could be feeling that way, but then bring up points against the worst-case scenario he was imagining and try to pull him back. At the time, he said he would find this helpful.

But I’ve come to feel like he is taking this response as unsupportive and lacking empathy. Lately, he’s been talking to his family more often than to me when he’s feeling anxious, which would be fine if his mother and sister didn’t have even more severe (and untreated) anxiety than he does! By the end of a conversation with them, his anxiety over whatever has been troubling him has been amplified 100 times. I understand that for him it must feel better (and easier) to have someone validate and agree with his feelings than to have me telling him all the reasons his feelings are “wrong.” I don’t want to lose him (physically or mentally), but I fear that’s what’s happening.

—Anxious Over Anxiety

Dear Anxious,

I don’t love the advice your husband’s former therapist gave you. (All therapists are not created equal, I’m afraid.) As an anxious person myself, I can assure you that when someone’s feeling seriously anxious, logic doesn’t help one bit. I think your instincts about what’s happening now (his feeling misunderstood, his turning to his family to “validate” his anxiety) are all exactly right. I’ll suggest a number of things. It would be most effective if all of them could be put into place at the same time.

First, see if you can persuade your husband to see a psychiatrist, or—if he recoils at this suggestion—his primary care physician, to discuss his worsening anxiety. He might benefit enormously from a low dose of anti-anxiety medication, which only a physician can prescribe. I realize that your bringing this up may be tricky if he’s already feeling that you don’t “get it.” (He may take offense; he may insist there’s nothing wrong with him; he may tell you you’re trying to pathologize his concern and worry.) Try to couch the idea in terms of your recognition of his suffering. Tell him you love him, you’re worried about him, you only want what’s good for him. Second, since he seems to be willing to see a therapist, expand the search for one. If he can’t see someone in person, it’s worth looking into therapy conducted by video chat (there’s some research that suggests that cognitive behavioral therapy is more effective when conducted in this way). Third, your role: Step away from the “affirm feelings, then hit him with reasoning” approach you’ve been using. Give him a hug instead, or sit beside him and hold his hand. Remind yourself that he is in pain, that you can’t take that pain away from him (you certainly can’t talk him out of it), but that you can be loving, sympathetic, and kind. That is really all you can do. When it comes to his family, stay out of it. Don’t comment on his frequent turning to them; don’t comment on their mental health issues. In the long run, it will help both of you to think of what he’s experiencing as a disorder that can be successfully treated; in the short run, it will help you to keep this in mind even if he can’t (yet). Once he begins to get better, he’ll stop calling his family of enablers so often.

Dear Care and Feeding,

How do I respond to my in-laws when they use their grief to justify negative behaviors? My husband passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly four months ago. If I didn’t have three young kids to take care of, I know I would still be drowning in grief right now, but they need me, so I have to be functional. Since his death, my in-laws have been expressing their grief in ways that make things harder for me. They stop by unannounced (at least once a week), though we schedule visits with them regularly because they “miss everyone so much [they] just had to” see us right now. They call and wake me up in the middle of the night to share memories. When they’re with us, they’ll make the kids stop playing to sit with them and “think about Daddy” (which involves a lot of crying by the adults).

I know they’ve lost their son, and I can’t imagine how that loss feels, but I hate that they’re using my children and me (but mostly my children) to try to work through their grief. The kids and I are grieving too! The last time they interrupted the kids, wanting them to sit and cry with them, when they were actually having a rare completely carefree moment, I sternly asked my in-laws to come help me in the kitchen, where I told them that the kids were having enough trouble dealing with the loss of their father—they don’t need their grandparents making it harder on them. Within two days, I was contacted by three different extended family members telling me that the way I treated my in-laws was cruel and that I obviously “don’t understand how huge a loss they’ve experienced.” I’m at the point where I don’t even want to see them anymore, but I know that will make me the bad guy for “taking away” their grandkids when they need them most. It’s clear that I can’t hold them accountable for their actions, even when they do us harm.

The kids see a counselor through the school district in a mix of group and individual sessions, and I sometimes join them. I’m on a waitlist for counseling as well. We talk about their father anytime they want to, bringing up happy memories and being sad that he’s gone. I’m doing the best I can, and I don’t think we should be on the hook for so much of my in-laws’ grief while also trying to process our own. Am I a monster for feeling this way?

—Hurting Multiple Ways

Dear Hurting,

Of course you’re not a monster. And neither are your husband’s parents, although they are unable right now to recognize that what is helping them is doing harm to you and their grandchildren. They’re not “using their grief to justify” what they’re doing. They’re doing whatever they can to ease their grief. I know it’s hard, but try not to take any of this as an attack on you and your kids. Think of it this way if you can: They are out of their minds with grief. (You say you can’t imagine how they must be feeling. Try.)

But empathizing with them doesn’t mean you have to put up with their behavior toward you and your kids. Tell them you understand what they’re going through (you might even say that you wish you could help them), but that you’re struggling too, and that some of their efforts to assuage their grief are making things harder for their grandchildren. (“I know you don’t mean to be doing this, but that’s what’s happening.”) Tell them you need to establish ground rules for the sake of your kids. And then lay out those rules. No more unannounced visits, no more middle-of-the-night phone calls, no demanding that the kids stop playing to come comfort them, and absolutely no enforced grieving for the children, ever. If this makes you the “bad guy,” so be it. And if you’ve spelled this all out for them and they ignore it, it is time to take a break from them. Don’t threaten to do this: Just be clear about what’s acceptable to you and what’s not, and if they can’t control themselves, then regretfully inform them that for the time being, you’re declaring a moratorium on visits—you have no choice, as their grandchildren’s well being is your first priority. You will almost certainly be the “bad guy” as far as your husband’s side of the family is concerned. It’s not the end of the world. Do get support elsewhere, wherever you can.

The fact is that people who are profoundly grieving the loss of someone they love may be in the worst possible position to help one another through it. You, your children, and your in-laws are all suffering different kinds of terrible, huge losses, even though you are all grieving for the same person.

—Michelle

My question is extremely embarrassing to me, but here goes: I am a stay-at-home dad to a pair of 14-month-old twin girls. Most of their first year of life was happening during the pandemic quarantine, so my wife was working from home. This made my life easier since she was around to ask to watch our daughters whenever nature called. Now she is starting to go to the office a couple of times a week, since restrictions in our area are lifting. She asked me after her first day at the office how I handled bathroom breaks.