I Hate It Because I Love It
FreiFem2011I pick out my produce carefully: Fresh organic lettuce. Tomatoes ripened on the vine. A bag of sweetened dried cranberries. I go through my basket, checking, double-checking, that I have everything I need.
At home, I pull out the chopping board and empty the fridge. First, a potato washed of loose dirt, stabbed and microwaved soft. The lettuce I rip with my fingers. The cat comes mewing as soon as I reach for the salmon. “Patience, silly,” I tell him. Quickly, I squeeze a lemon onto the orange flesh, add salt and pepper and tuck the fish in the oven. The cat is not so good with patience if a dead animal is within smelling distance.
I know how to cook six things: salad, salmon, potatoes, toast, boiled eggs and microwave popcorn. That’s five things more than my father can, and fifty five million less than my mother.
My mother cooked everything. And she did it effortlessly, quietly: trays of hot rolls and steaming chocolate cakes appeared on the countertops, while the cooktop sprung pots and pans of chicken soup, oatmeal, meatballs and spaghetti. She served us hot breakfast, hot lunch, and hot dinner. And later, in the evening, when my father came home, she would serve him a separate dinner, always exactly the same: a piece of chicken and a cup of coke with ice. There must have been more to the dinners she served him, but I can’t remember. I just remember the nightly chicken and the coke, and the silverware set around his place before the kitchen doors were closed and the children were banned from the room so he could eat in peace.
Here I am, cooking dinner for my husband.
Just like my mother cooked for hers.
And I hate it because I love it.
I love the act of shopping for the foods that I know he likes. I love the rituals of preparing a meal. I love setting the table for him, I love it when I ask: “Is the fish good?” and he says, “It’s really good”. I get a domestic pleasure from the whole process and I hate that. I am a feminist! I am an educated woman! I have my own career! I feel like I am betraying myself, in some way, with this enjoyment. The journey to leave the imprint of my mother, to break free from her mold, was so painful, so arduous, so lengthy –and yet, in a moment, I can feel like I have snapped back into her place. That I am, at least to some degree, a doting, obedient wife.
The truth is, women like me, my peers in our community, and women from other backgrounds who are first-generation feminists, we all have to craft our own balance of past and present. We all have to develop our own level of comfort with the pieces we want to leave behind and those we want to take with us into our futures.
For me, I compromise by only cooking rarely. And I am reassured by the fact that every time I cook, my husband, no matter how tired and worn out he is, always volunteers to do the dishes.
I don’t think my father ever washed a dish in his life.
3 Responses
> I get a domestic pleasure from the whole process and I hate that. I am a feminist! I am an educated woman! I have my own career!
I think you might have a very outdated notion of what being a feminist means. The ultimate ideal of feminism is freedom, freedom to whatever you want, whatever you enjoy. It’s not about any specific role or achievement. If you get satisfaction from being domestic, there’s nothing to be ashamed of (unless you’re trying to live up to someone else’s ideals). You can have your career, love being a mother, and enjoy doting on your husband, and none of that need be a contradiction to feminist ideals. (At least, healthy feminist ideals.)
In fact, I’d suggest that if you feel compelled to so something, anything, regardless of how impressive an accomplishment it might be, if you’re doing it because you feel pressured to do it – whether by society, or by your own guilt, or by your family, or whatever – that achievement is less of an expression of feminism than is staying at home and doing something simple that you enjoy, like baking cookies.
Hedyot, I’m not sure it’s so black and white. There are things we find pleasurable but only in a grudging sense. A woman might feel pleasure in domesticity but she may also resent it if she feels forced into that role. A man might enjoy his work, but might resent the fact that he is forced to bear the bulk of his family’s financial burden.
My sense is that FreiFem enjoys preparing meals for her husband, but on some level she feels it her duty (even if self-imposed), and she’s not sure she’s comfortable with that.
To say her notion of feminism is outdated is to pretend that feminism actually addresses all the complex societal and familial expectations of day-to-day life.
For what it’s worth, I found this post poignant and beautifully written.
“In fact, I’d suggest that if you feel compelled to do something… that achievement is less of an expression of feminism than is staying at home and doing something simple that you enjoy, like baking cookies”
Wait, let’s understand. Being a feminist is all about freedom, of course. Freedom to do whatever you feel like doing, even bake cookies. But that somehow excludes the liberty to express the natural torment that comes with enjoying activities that are traditionally associated with oppression? Is writing about the inner conflict that arises from playing roles that are ingrained in us as demeaning and as our sole ability not permitted to feminists? Should she not feel the cultural baggage of housewifery because she’s a committed “feminist”?
Your catch 22 doesn’t respect the intelligence and honesty of progressive women, women who reject one extreme, but instead of prescribing to the other extreme they grapple with finding a balance.
Perhaps you go wrong when thinking that feminism is a thoughtless, light, unconscious freedom from sexism. It’s not oblivious freedom, it’s the process of freeing yourself.
Hedyot, when you feel strongly about something, passionately, convinced about something, you will always be “compelled to do something”. Your own writing often reflects that same dilemma and you too seem to make a conscious effort to balance the passion with objectivity, just like FreiFrum.