I was raised by a women’s libber. That meant that I was not taught how to clean a house, nor how to cook a meal. Whenever a commercial came on the family TV showing a woman pampering the house or posing in the kitchen with a smile on her face, my mom would let out an exasperated noise and quickly turn sour. This happened about every fifteen minutes because most commercials at the time showed happy women keeping house. Heaven forbid the lady had an apron on; my mom would abruptly launch from the couch and say she couldn’t take it anymore.
When a new typing class was offered at school, my mom said that I should not take it under any circumstances. If a future employer knew I could type, I might not get any further than a secretarial position. When I told Mom I wanted to be an artist, she would respond, “You mean an architect? That would be great!”
What did I become? At first a successful art director, then a successful business owner. Now that that’s done, I’m becoming more of an artist. But that’s another story. Here I want to express what happens when a girl grows up with the clear communication from her dear mom that cooking and cleaning is a waste of time and should never be expected from a competent woman.
First there was the problem of what to do with the toilet. I avoided cleaning one all through my years at college, but as a single young lady living in Manhattan, I looked at it and wondered what to do. So I called Mom. Don’t ask me why. I could have called anyone else and would have been given something more helpful, but, you see, as much as Mom knew she was better than all that, she was, in truth, the one who did all the cleaning in our home.
“Mom, how do you clean a toilet?” I asked. Her reply, “It’s not rocket science, you know.” And that was that.
Still at a loss, I went to the bookstore and bought an excellent book on speed cleaning by the San Francisco Clean Team. It taught me how to clean a toilet from top to bottom in seven minutes. The top-to-bottom part is meant to be taken literally: it is very important to start at the top where the toilet is cleanest and work down to the bottom where the germs are festering so you don’t end up dragging the dreadful stuff up to the top and making more of a mess than you had at the beginning.
The Clean Team book was all I needed, but I have to say that I don’t adhere to all their rules: they stress the importance of wearing an apron while you clean; an apron with big pockets so you can stash cleaning supplies in one and put loose trash and knickknacks you pick up along the way in another. Out of respect for my mom, I just can’t flurry around the house in an apron.
Then came the cooking. When I first moved to New York City, my mother did some research and called me with glee in her voice: “Did you know that there are so many restaurants in Manhattan that you can eat out every meal for sixty years and never go to the same restaurant twice?” I thought this was great news too and kept few staples in my pantry because of it.
Once I moved to the suburbs, settled down, and became a mom myself, things took a drastic turn. I have poignant memories of putting my little Luke in his highchair, looking him in the face, and asking, “Now what do I feed you?” Food preparation just wasn’t my calling; it seemed so unimportant in the scheme of all the exciting, creative, and meaningful things to do in life.
But if I disliked cooking, I disliked processed food and partially hydrogenated soybean oil even more, so I had to get it together. This persuasion, again, brings up my mom who happened to be ahead of her time in regards to nutrition. No matter how much she would have preferred doing something else—anything else for that matter—she never failed to prepare healthy foods every night for dinner and wouldn’t be caught dead serving her children Spaghettios.
So I learned how to cook. Specifically speaking, I learned how to cook for kids, which, in hindsight, wasn’t that difficult. Meat balls and melon balls or chicken strips and carrot sticks made them very happy. But just as I came into my own in the kitchen, my kids became teenagers. What’s more, they started inviting their friends over—that would be other teenagers who are on the lookout for food. As I frantically try to adapt to their mind-blowing appetites, the grocery store is fast becoming an extension of my kitchen; I have to go there that much.
Today, I can’t say that I actually enjoy cooking, but I’m clearly over the resistance to domestic responsibility that my mom so dutifully to her cause tried to instill in me. Sometimes I use a crock pot so smells float through the house for hours. I Google for recipes. I derive some pleasure from making heart-shaped waffles on Valentine’s Day. This heart-shaped waffle-maker is symbolic of my growth. I received it as a wedding gift and thought it was ridiculously corny. When my kids were two and four, to their delight, I dug it out from the back of the cabinet. As I burned the first waffle, then burned my fingers, I cursed under my breath and my kids were confused as to what Valentine’s Day was all about. The next year, when the holiday of love came around, I used a packaged waffle mix and was much more pleasant as I slid heart-shaped waffles onto their plates. The year after that, we added strawberries and whip cream and had quite a celebration. From then on, every Valentine’s Day, we invite neighbors to join us, and our sweet breakfast is now part of the local color.
Recently, I taught my kids how to make a mean apple pie. My son was more excited than my daughter. Maybe, unconsciously, I am encouraging him more than her. But I try to be fair. I realize that a woman can be a competent person in the workforce, and still take pride in running a home. When I overheard my daughter’s friends saying that her mom was the best cook in town, I felt pretty good. They don’t care that I’m also an author, an artist, and an art director. They are just happy to be sitting around our weathered kitchen table eating food that has been prepared for them in ample proportions. Maybe in the scheme of things, this is what’s important. And you know what? I think my mom suspected the same, because no matter how she talked, there was always a hot meal on the table, and our toilets were always clean.
Footnote: My mom went back to school in her midlife years and had a twenty-year run with a great job. The career has come and gone, but her cooking skills remain.