Dinner, a Semi-Complete List: Part Four
After Sarah Ruhl's essay "On Interruptions"
What if I list what it takes to get dinner on the table? Not simply the cooking. That’s where you find me again. (Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three.)
Sarah Ruhl’s book 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write is one of my favorites, especially the opening essay “On Interruptions.” I return to it when I need to remember this: “At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.”
Make buckwheat cereal for breakfast and have it steaming with maple syrup, saving some to eat after my penance.
Look up the definition of penance to check it against what I know in my body after a lifetime of Catholicism: “Voluntary self-punishment inflicted as an outward expression of repentance for having done wrong.”
Take stock of what I’ve done wrong with the attitude of an accountant tallying a budget. Too much, too little. Oh well, here I am. The morning’s self-punishment is self-remorse and self-attention. While my body and I are on friendly terms, I see where I lead her to depletion.
Can you tell I’m inching into my mid-thirties?
Make the chosen-penance shake: Protein, aminos, and creatine mixed in water. Earlier, a shot of aloe juice. Later, a half dropper of black cumin seed oil. Drink it all, knowing the purpose it serves, knowing that the rest of the day, I’ll eat what I want, letting my desires lead (hemmed in only by budget, time, and energy.)
Write, edit, clean, teach, stand outside in the sun.
***
Rinse the rainbow chard, thinking about softening garlic in olive oil and then raising the heat and throwing in the thinly sliced and still dripping leaves. Anticipate the pop and sizzle as I set on the lid. Desire eating it on bread schmeared with hummus, sprinkled with feta cheese.
But the chard stays in the colander. The baby needs to eat now now, and she falls asleep on me after nursing. Lunch pivots to kid-assembled sandwiches, made and consumed with the energy of a pack of puppies.
Read Animal Liberation and wince at the mother pig described as “a valuable piece of machinery” by a “leading corporate manager with Wall’s Meat Company.”
As I sit, with a slumbering, satiated baby on my chest, I remember a sentence earlier in the book, from the glowing report on a new mechanical sow: “So far, litters have always been limited by the capacity of the sow mammary system.”
I am limited by the capacity of my mammary system. I am a valuable piece of machinery at every turn hamstrung by what my culture expects of women and mothers. My humanity a liability to my production. Where’s the new mechanical Devin?
Lunch eaten, I rise, buckle the sleepy babe into the carseat, check seat belts, play the Boxcar Children audiobook, and venture out.
Sit at the coffee shop next to the tutoring center with my youngest two, drinking drip with soy milk, watching them share apple juice. They battle wills. They concede and demand.
***
Notice: there was a baked rigatoni for dinner last time. Lovingly cooked and described. Tonight I refuse. We eat a single quesadilla, yogurt with granola, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, leftover soup.
The domestic goddess must be able to refuse – to cook, to be considered as unearthly a thing as a goddess. I’m a person, a human being, a soul in a body. And sometimes dinner is too much. I can’t. I don’t.
Michael and the kids don’t care. They welcome a grazing dinner or Michael makes a square meal. I don’t perceive any emotional disturbance in them.
I refuse myself, not a demanding husband. I push against my inner workings that prescribe what a woman in a house with a family does.
***
Write this, clutching to my heart a literature of refusal starting with Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires. Protesting conditions by not cooking.
Look for the book (of which I own two copies) in vain. A stultifying rage simmers as I admit defeat, resisting the urge to ransack my bookshelves during precious writing time.
The needle in the haystack beckons: Abandon your work, look for me instead.
Re-read what I’ve written about Small Fires. From my newsletter: Rebecca references Silvia Federici who argued that "housework is not seen as work because it is considered an expression of love." Because of this entanglement with love, cooking is "non-work." From an interview, Rebecca writes: "The recipe is a siren-text, an 'I' that also speaks as 'we' and 'they' and 'you'. / It draws us in and makes room."
***
Sit alone in the kitchen during the night, while my family sleeps. Fill in the cracks of my hunger left by a whirlwind day till I’m satisfied. Cold sliced oranges, dark chocolate with almonds, tea and soy milk.
A recipe is knowing what to do when, and doing it.
Friday chat
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The Good Enough Weekly comes out on Fridays, alternating essays, interviews, and shorter updates on food, climate, and labor. Rooted in the Sonoran Desert.