Being the enlightened and emancipated couple that we are (well, and strapped for money as well), Billy and I decided this year to take turns cooking.
Before that, I made most of the food for two simple and related reasons:
1. I'm better at it
2. I genuinely enjoy cooking
(As in, I admire vegetables at the farmer's market like some people admire sculptures in a museum, and there are few things I enjoy more than hosting a feast of a dinner party for friends)
So for as long as I had time to do it, I gladly reigned over the kitchen.
The time condition changed radically when I started my doctoral program. Being the enlightened and emancipated couple that we are, we both thought it was not fair for just one of us to do all the cooking when we both work about the same. So we decided to take turns - he cooks for a week, I cook for a week, and that way we can shop for whatever ingredients we need for the whole week. By the end of the first month, I began to feel like the bones of patriarchalism that I thought I'd buried a long time ago were sticking out of their shallow graves right and left.
It was not Billy who dug them up, either. As soon as his schedule got a little busier and preparing meals became an extra stretch, I was overcome by a sense of guilt and responsibility. Whenever it appeared like cooking was causing him any stress, I jumped right in to rescue him and say that it was ok, I could just do it, don't worry about it. Somewhere deep down, I had it ingrained in me that even though it's great that he's "HELPING", it is ultimately MY job to feed the household. I kept doing this even though it left me tired and at times bitter that "I do more of the work around here". It took a few long conversations to make me realize that my constant rescuing did not help either one of us - it actually made Billy feel terrible about not doing his part in our house.
All this made me think again about the meaning and relative novelty of domestic equality. My deep-seated sense of responsibility is probably a thousand years old. It took birth in a cave or shack, at a time when the roles of men and women were defined by their physical attributes and how those translated into their ability to survive in a hostile world. Over time, these differences were translated into timeless roles sanctioned by deities of all sorts and shapes. At one point in the past, this role division allowed our species to survive, so it became entrenched as the ultimate norm.
It reminds me of something I noticed about my grandparents a while ago. To survive the war and the hard times that followed, they went into a kind of survival mode - a total focus on the basic necessities of life that cut out marginalities like emotions for the sake of overcoming external threats. That strategy probably saved their lives, but when the war was over, they were so used to functioning this way that they went on in the same way, bringing about alienation and lack of intimacy. In survival mode, there is often only one right way to go, unanimous action is crucial, and dissent can be fatal. This is how you function in crisis - but if it becomes the long term operating procedure for a marriage, for raising children and sustaining a family, the same thing that once saved your life becomes deadly. I can't help but think it's the same with patriarchalism - it's a strategy that once worked very well for us, but in a changed reality it threatens to erode the well-being we've fought so hard to achieve. That is what happens, for instance, when a woman is expected to still take care of the home and raise children even though she works equally to the man outside the home.
I've found that the adaptation of operating procedures to new realities can be especially difficult for people with strong religious beliefs. As people of faith, we believe the Divine Being revealed Him/Her-Self to humanity, and if He/She did, isn't it reasonable to assume that the Revelation was singular, unchanging, and once-and-for-all? If so, both men and women working equally outside the home a shift to a post-industrial economy don't mean a thing, because gender roles have been defined once and for all by God.
Within my own religious tradition, I find two strands that delightfully subvert this gateway to fundamentalism. First is the underestimated and underinterpreted biblical Wisdom literature, where we often see two contradictory statements right next to each other. Which one is right? Which is the divine will? It depends! Wisdom is not a once-and-for-all formula, but rather the ability to choose the right formula for the right situation, God's redemptive gift for fundamentalizing humans. The second is the Incarnation itself - the ultimate act of Revelation was not a holy rule book or codex, but a Person - thoughtful in solitude at dawn in the Galilean hills, tongue-in-cheek at a wedding in Cana, mad as a hatter at the cleansing of the Temple. Proclaiming a message that notoriously throws our expectations upside down - last being first, poor being rich, humble exalted, the Kingdom all unlike what we're used to.
This incarnate wisdom of God (incidentally or not quite so incidentally personified as a woman - Sophia - in biblical wisdom literature) is ultimately why I continue to practice taking it easy on the couch while Billy cooks, and telling myself it's ok. It's not as hard as it first looked.
