The kitchen is the heart of the home.
I just typed those words because I wanted to talk about my kitchen but the minute I saw those words my brain exploded. What a crazy, patriarchal, sexist phrase that is. I mean, we hear those words and we agree. We're in our kitchen a lot. We have happy memories of baking cookies with Mom, teaching our daughters how to knead bread, holidays with the women all buzzing around and talking while preparing food.
What does this all have in common? Women in the kitchen. Women doing the physical labor of providing for their family. Women doing for the family and teaching their daughters to carry on the tradition.
So we romanticize the kitchen. It's the heart of the home. The heart of the home is the dungeon where we make our grocery lists, put food away, plan meals that everyone will eat and have to answer the the most dreaded three words in the world: What's For Dinner?
It's where you're supposed to find the woman of the house. It's where day after day women who are tired, brain fried, just wanting a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine before bed but the husband expects a three course gourmet dinner (saw this on a dating show btw: he asked what's for dinner and she said she doesn't make dinner, she eats popcorn cause she doesn't have the band width to cook after a day at work and he was pissed about it and complained a few times but interestingly, he never got his ass in the kitchen to cook)
Holy shit. This is a floodgate of thoughts. My Mom hated cooking and she was no good at it. We laugh about it now but how miserable she must have been to deal with that consistently. And my sister in law Myrna who is an excellent cook but now that it's just her and my brother alone in the house has sandwich dinners and frozen pizza because she's done.
And we still try to hustle women into the kitchen: it's the heart of the home after all and the woman's responsibility to keep that heart still beating.
There's a lot to unpack there. We're going to talk about this more. Wow.
Love y'all. Stay safe.
There's so much about this--so much.
ReplyDeleteAnd a lot about how it's okay if women spend disproportionately larger parts of their lives in the kitchen because "everyone gravitates towards the kitchen anyway"--which maybe, but not everyone present physically is doing the same amount (or kind) of labor, so it's still all fucked up.
(I have a complicated relationship with cooking myself because I didn't learn as a child--long story--but learned after I married and was forever found wanting--longer unhappy story--so I mostly heat up things rather than cooling things, and even then, if I could afford it, I would just get take out)
My sister in law, when I lived with them, expected me to cook and then would doctor all the dishes without even tasting them and tell me how I should have made them. According to her it wasn't criticism, it was teaching. Years later I saw a video where someone said Unsolicited advice is criticism and I felt so much validation then.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I love cooking sometimes and I don't want to bother a lot of the times and I'm simply sick of how the patriarchy/society has made it a woman's chore and so many men get to play the weaponized incompetence game in the kitchen. Although if you have a man who makes 1 meal once every six months to a year, it's a mind bending experience and one of the best things you've ever eaten and we validate the crap out of men for their annual visit to the stove.
Men generally fail upwards just by being there, for sure.
ReplyDeleteWhen i write, I talk about the kitchen being the hub, the place most people gravitate to, the heart of the home...guess I'll have to rethink that.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of cooking but have no talent for it, which is probably why i love the cooking shows. I guess the love is wearing off though, especially when you have people over, spend all day cooking, only for them to eat and leave, a kitchen full of dishes to attend to. The men are big on this.
My Dad jokes about dishes and cooking being a woman's job (Yes, he's that old lol) but he does make Mum a cuppa in bed every morning. Small step but it's still a step. At least both of my brothers are very hands on in the kitchen (one has no choice) but I know a lot of their mates aren't like that and will occasionally take the piss.
And Lori, that part about your SIL - I hate that. People want you to do stuff and then critisize it or pick faults. A teaching moment? What a joke...