Is being a good cook an essential part of being a woman/mother/wife?
I am not a great cook and certainly not an enthusiastic one. I do what I have to. But when my children were small, I made cakes and snacks and whatever, depending on their tastes that changed with their ages. And, probably, the only thing that mattered was the love that went into it. Otherwise, I always preferred other house chores. If there were extended family celebrations/get-togethers, I was the first to volunteer to look after all the young children around, so their mums could do other stuff around the house. I was always a willing child-minder. But for cooking, I always had to pour some serious iron into my will! To this day, the only times I don't mind cooking is if one of my family is sitting around in the kitchen and talking to me, or if I have some youngster helping me cook, like in the recent past, when my grandson helped me bake a cake.

I had gone to spend  last weekend in Chennai as it was my granddaughter's first birthday during the week.  I had just got back Monday and planned on blogging about my pleasant weekend.  But then on Tuesday morning I heard that my youngest maternal uncle, the last surviving member of my mother's family, had passed away and that the funeral was on Wednesday, in Bangalore.  So it was that my husband & I drove to Bangalore staying overnight on the way there and back and got back just this evening.
My uncle was the youngest of eight and a sweet person, a loving husband, a good father and a great grandfather, as one of his grandsons said in a speech about him.  My best memories of him are when he came visiting my mother, just about a month before she died. He will be missed, but I do think that he was quite ready to go.  May he rest in peace.

Looks like my last post either had very few readers or I have surprised/shocked/offended some readers and or blog friends! (Or I'm being incredibly self-absorbed to think that what I say is actually important to any one.)