When I was single, I was not one of those women who made dinner for the men I was wooing. I was one of those women who bought them a beer. I always felt humiliated for the women I heard about who cooked for their dates—or, worse, cooked for first dates. (Maybe these women don’t really exist. I’ve never met one. I learned of their existence from men, who were, I hope, making them up.) It seemed so exposed and domestic and yearning. So very “I wish my life were like The Flintstones.” Pathetic.
But I married. And I gave birth. So now I must cook. Suddenly my life is ruled by dinner. It has become my full-time job. Some days my shift starts right after breakfast. Other days it can be put off until after lunch. But by three o’clock I must punch in, and the tension becomes positively palpable as evening draws inexorably closer and I must confront the eternal question: What the hell am I going to make for dinner?
I personally don’t know one woman who looks forward to cooking the evening meal. Not even those who are good cooks, who have the time, whose kids will eat anything. I’m totally convinced that everyone, whether or not they admit it, is oppressed by the slavery of first having to think of what to make, then shop for it, then cook it, and then clean up after it.
In my new circle of stay-at-home parents, wherever we gather with our children—in the park, at the after-school class, at the café or the bar with a popcorn machine—I casually ask, “So ... what are you going to make tonight?” hoping one of them will reveal a delicious, nonfattening, inexpensive, no-mess, easy meal. The beautiful grad-student mother of two confesses that she finally broke down and bought a Crock-Pot. She makes some stew thing with garbanzo beans right out of the cookbook the Crock-Pot came with. I am not going there. (Though not because I feel superior; I have made “Impossibly Easy Cheeseburger Pie” off the back of the Bisquick box.) My neighbor, on the other hand, not fearing breakfast as she does dinner, merely makes breakfast all over again. She fries sausages and scrambles eggs for her kids—but only on those occasional nights when she is deliberately ignoring the issue of what to feed her husband.
Speaking of husbands, there may well be men out there for whom making dinner every night is also a huge drag. But I know only two guys who are in charge of their family’s evening meal. One seems completely unperturbed by the responsibility, laughing when I put The Question to him and explaining that he “makes” pasta with bottled red sauce. The other is my own father, and he gets a kick out of making dinner the way weekend cooks do. Sometimes he resents cooking, but mostly he hops around the kitchen boiling broths, fermenting hot sauces, and chopping onions into tiny bits for a meal he has been ruminating about since the groceries were delivered on the weekend. For him, working from a home office, dinner is an honorable procrastination.
For both these men, the yoke of domesticity is novel. It is not the feared and disdained status quo. It is not the oppressed history of their gender. On really bad days, I consider cooking dinner not just drudgery but a dismal addition to that old adage “barefoot and pregnant.” One year, for my birthday, my college boyfriend bought me a copy of the Joy of Cooking. He scrawled “I love you” hugely on the front page, but the writing was, in fact, on the wall. I lost that cookbook, and that boyfriend, though not before I had caved in and made us a lasagne that he was so excited about, he photographed it. For me, cooking was the slippery slope to all sexual stereotypes. And I didn’t want to be his serving wench; I wanted to be his soul mate.
I have also lost contact with my college roommate, though it was from her that I learned one of the few things I still remember from college: a recipe for spaghetti carbonara. She made it for me and for the poor, hungry students who would hang around our apartment. Fred and Wilma were nowhere in sight.
Indeed, I recall no Flintstones episode in which Wilma makes Betty a nice meal. But preparing food for a friend or for a party, or while my husband takes care of the kids—when dinner is a gift, not a requirement—these are the exceptions to dinner tyranny. Meanwhile, as an at-home mother, my feelings of feminist outrage perhaps rendered a bit fuzzy by baby-induced sleep deprivation, I feel like I am living the famous “Wilma, I’m home!” line Fred shouts with that what-have-you-got-for-me/gimme-something-good gusto every time he enters their little slab house.
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