Women's Work: A Spiritual Experience

While I was working at a non-profit organisation, cooking meals for anywhere between ten and twenty-something students a few times a week, I started developing a renewed relationship with food.  What I'd once seen as simply something to consume, I began to realise was much, much more.

Every Monday evening, I made grilled cheese and tomato soup.  Without fail.  It was great, a version of the Moosewood Spicy Tomato Soup.  No one ever got tired of it, and, if they did, they did not tell me.

Although it was nice to repeat the same meal week by week, instead of constantly trying to think up new and exciting experiments to test on my poor unsuspecting diners, I had more than one reason for doing so.  By the end of my time working for the non-profit, I could make Spicy Tomato Soup with my eyes closed.  The familiarity created space in which I could more freely engage with the guests who were my dinner help. 

My coworkers and I assigned tasks, including dinner help.  One Monday, just for fun, we decided to reverse stereotypical gender roles.  We sent all the women outside to tend the gardens, mow the lawn, chop firewood, et cetera.  We kept the men inside doing laundry, cleaning, and cooking.

My dinner help was (we shall call him) Mendelssohn Rupertstein.  Mendelssohn Rupertstein was not happy to be working in the kitchen with me.  It was a glorious day outside, and he'd been enjoying working on a construction project with 'the guys.'  Half of me wanted to roll my eyes.  The other half felt for him.  Who would want to be stuck indoors on a day like today?  Plus, I've come to the realisation, in my more mature years, that not everyone enjoys my company as much as I do.

But we buckled down to work.  We started at 2:15, but I had to leave at 3:30 for a brief meeting.  Since we'd all take a break for tea at 4:00, I had to give Mendelssohn instructions on how to prepare the tea in my absence.  As I explained the process for boiling water, I tried to ignore the look of utter confusion and panic I noticed in his eyes.  Upon his request, I repeated the instructions again -- and again. Poor Mendelssohn.  

At 3:30, I sighed inwardly and looked around at the kitchen.  'I'll be back just before four,' I assured him, eyeing the mess of bread and cheese on the table, where he was assembling sandwiches.  He nodded brusquely, and I left.

Just before 4:00, as I'd promised, I returned -- only to find him absolutely on top of things in the kitchen.  Reluctant victim of a playful gendered-work-swap no longer, he had suddenly become a fully engaged, enthusiastic worker.  The transformation was complete.  Mwah ha.

I'm not really sure what happened.  I've come up with a few ideas, though.  I think, perhaps, he simply flourished when given the chance to wield true responsibility --  to participate in meaningful work, that is, leading to the direct benefit of the community.  Seeing as he was already getting this, though, from having been working around the house and on the construction project, I also think that this opportunity to experience what was regarded as typically feminine work (always undervalued, whatever it consists in) forced him to own up to the reality and the value of said work.  But I'd also like to attribute this win at least partially to food itself, just because I love food.

There's something about touching your own food with your own two hands, about communing directly and bodily with the substances of life.  I don't think that it's only in the eating that we receive life from food.  Rather, the entire process of food -- which we miss out on when our food shows up pre-processed -- gives us life.  We need that cool feeling of garden dirt on skin, and we even need dirt under our nails.  We need the sense of accomplishment that comes from baking bread from scratch.  These sorts of things propel us into feeling connected with the earth and with our communities.  Food is spiritual.  Spiritual things are not invisible.  They are all around you.  Strawberries are spiritual.  Nitrogen is spiritual.  The body is spiritual.  Sh*t is spiritual (if you do not believe me, make yourself a flaxseed smoothie).  

So we could say that our dear Mendelssohn had what is known as a spiritual experience.  Bodily things are spiritual things, and his bodily-spiritual experience opened him up to new possibilities which his gendered preconceptions of work hadn't heretofore allowed him to conceive.

Now if only there were some way to create a bodily-spiritual experience allowing the other half to see how much fun it can be to go back to work a couple of months after pushing a human being out your vagina.