My students have been reminding me that I haven’t been adding to the blog recently. Recently is an understatement. One of my students told me on January 12, “Miss Hall, tomorrow you will not have added anything on your blog for a year.” While it is meant as a reproof, it’s rather a compliment, I think – that she would actually be checking up on my blog a year after my last publication date and notice when I last posted.
It’s now January 27, and the blog has come up again in class. I guess it’s time I wrote something.
Easier said than done. Sometimes putting thoughts into words is hard, even for an English teacher. In fact, it was a topic of discussion just yesterday, this process of putting thoughts into words.
As an English teacher, I have had a lot of opportunity to think about why students have so much aversion to writing. Having loved writing from a very young age, I could not for a long time understand why some people found it so difficult. More recently, I myself have come to realize that loving to write does not necessary mean you always can write. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” so to speak.
This has become particularly true when I attempt to express my feelings on certain political and social matters – issues I’ve talked about briefly on this blog, even. For example – why does the phrase, “Dishes are for women,” (see blog post below) bother me so much?
I can tell you one thing – it is certainly NOT because I believe women need more rights, or because I think women should have more careers outside the home, or because I think men and women should split the housework 50/50. I don’t think any of those statements come close to touching the real reason about why I take offense at people who say, “Dishes are for women.”
After a year of thinking over the issue (I began thinking of it way back when my seniors said it at Thanksgiving 2019), I believe I can finally write it down.
In saying things like, “Dishes are for women,” or, “Women belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen,” or “Woman, make me a sandwich,” people are demeaning extremely important and extremely valuable services that women provide and in some cases (as in being pregnant in the kitchen) ONLY women can provide.
It makes me angry when someone would demean someone else for voluntarily serving them.
I don’t know about other women, but when I prepare food, be it a sandwich or dinner with a main dish and three sides, I put care and thought into it and try my very best to make it an appetizing, tasty meal. That requires skill (yes, there’s skill in making a sandwich), creativity, and care – and if it’s care for your husband or children, that is love. Why would we make fun of someone’s skill, creativity, and love? We show more respect to the four year old child who comes up to us with a scribbled on piece of paper. Only rude, self-centered jerks say to the child’s face, “That literally looks like nothing, and I think it’s rubbish.” I have never, ever met a person who will say that to a kid he or she loves – not even the rudest person I know. This particularly rude individual accepts the drawings, gives the child praise, and then as the kid walks off, he’ll turn to me and say, “It’s really no good at all, but it’s funny that she’s so proud of it,” but he will never say that to the girl’s face.
Yet the women in many people’s life don’t get even that amount of praise for their work. Their cooking and cleaning exhibits actual skill and creativity as well as love, and it’s taken for granted. It’s only noticed when it’s not done or when you ask a man to help out.
I am not married, but I think that if my husband ever makes a banal statement like, “Dishes are for women,” I will not wash dishes for a week, and the wayward fellow will see exactly what kind of favor I’ve been doing for him since our wedding, and he will learn that unless I am gracious enough to do the dishes daily, the dishes are for exactly whomever wishes to eat on clean plates using clean utensils. As a result of the dishes not being done, he won’t get suppers made, either, because I don’t cook with dirty pots and pans.
Speaking of cooking, if he ever says, “Wife, go make me a sandwich,” in an overbearing, domineering way – the way that says, you have to make my sandwich because you’re a woman and my wife, and that’s what women and wives do – I will do one of two things. Either I will outright say, “Make your own [blank] sandwich; I’m your wife, not your servant,” or I’ll make him a sandwich exactly the way he doesn’t like it.
I don’t mind doing the dishes or making food. The fact is, I love to show my respect and care for someone by doing those things, and when someone devalues those actions and turns it into something that 50% of the population does because the other 50% is too good for it, it devalues what I do. If you don’t value me and what I do, you won’t get the benefit of it.
I feel similarly about kids who complain about my cooking, but that is for another blog post.
No comments:
Post a Comment