Monday, April 10, 2006

Cooking

At cake this afternoon a colleague was telling me this long involved story about his family, which ended with his six year old son telling his mother she was a hero and giving her three cheers for cooking tacos. So my colleague ended by telling me that all I had to do to get my boys to cheer me was to cook tacos.

He was a bit non-plussed when I told him that I never did any of the cooking in our house. To the extent that I backtracked and mentioned cooking pasta occasionally (true, but only the assembly kind). None of my colleagues are deliberately sexist, but he clearly had a "mother = cooking" mindset for home life, even though, like him, I am the work outside the home parent in my household.

Not sure what the point of this story is (I'm procrastinating from the work I brought home this evening) but it is nice to subvert the dominant paradigm occasionally, even if in a subtle way.

3 Comments:

At 10:06 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Oh Jennifer! You're such a feminist. :-)

I like the use of the phrase 'at cake'. That makes it pretty specific.

 
At 4:28 pm, Blogger Jennifer (ponderosa) said...

What does it mean, "at cake"?

 
At 7:56 pm, Blogger Jennifer said...

We don't have afternoon tea in our office, but when it's someone's birthday, we gather around the birthday cake, and have a chat and a piece of cake for 15 minutes. No speeches or other celebratory acknowledgement!

 

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