Mac n' Cheese Mondays

I need a goal.  Something to keep me motivated.

I present to you: Mac 'n Cheese Mondays.  My quest for the perfect homemade macaroni and cheese recipe.

Don't judge.  It's cold up here. We already have several centimetres of snow on the ground and it's several degrees below zero too.  The one thing I consistently crave during the hibernation months is hot meals with cheese and carbs.

Today's competitor: Sonoma Mac and Cheese, from Williams-Sonoma.  It's got a lot of cheese in it, but the Cheddar/Gruyere/Parmesan blend is pretty mild so it doesn't go over the top.  The onion in the sauce is strong but sweet but there aren't many other competing flavours - although nutmeg is a nice touch. I hate boiling milk so that part of the recipe was frustrating and time consuming.  Final verdict: pretty good, but I'd like a sharper flavour and more kick.

Happily domesticated?

I come from a family of women who wear the pants.  The women in my family are strong: strong-willed, strong-bodied and strong in spirit.  I feel privileged to have been raised in a house where judgments on my abilities were based on my actions, not my gender.  When I went to university, I soon identified as a feminist because -duh- that's how I grew up.  While my family is by no means a perfect example of gender equality, I remember both my parents doing household chores based on their skill set.  My Dad stayed at home as primary caregiver for a while.  My Mom did most of the dry-walling during renovations because she's better at it.  Any one of my siblings could be called upon to help with preparing meals, shoveling the driveway, cleaning house or taking out the trash - most often based on who was closest and didn't have a good excuse to avoid it!  My grandmother tried to instill in me that the best career for me was a doctor, a lawyer or an architect - traditionally male-dominated jobs.  I have never been under any pressure to date or marry.  I have been encouraged to get a good job, save and buy my own house.

After all that freedom of choice, I still ended up becoming a teacher.  Then, I became not only a teacher but an early primary teacher - a job that is still almost exclusively female.  (I still think my grandmother was disappointed when she found out I had lost interest in becoming a university professor.)  With all the things I could do in my spare time, I keep a clean house, I enjoy cooking and baking, I read books (mostly novels), I ride horses and, after a long hiatus, I write.  I want to learn how to knit.  I look forward to having children one day and caring for them. After waves and waves of feminism, I have freely chosen options that would have been perfectly respectable fifty years ago.

How does one negotiate a strong and active identification as a feminist with a life that doesn't challenge any hegemony?  I've always relied on my belief that gender equality starts with allowing every person to define their personhood through their actions without the constraints of gender norms, which means my choices reflect my personhood...and then I try to ignore the uncomfortable feeling that the feminists are judging my domesticity.

While it's been a while since anyone criticized me directly, I do have friends who scoff at little when I talk about my desire to enter my ginger-pear jam into a baking contest (seriously folks, this jam is amazing and I'm never going to win a blue ribbon in sports!).  In university, I had uncomfortable conversations about (purely theoretical) children and how I fully expect my career will take a blow that it may never recover from.  Most recently, I've had colleagues tell me that stepping away from my job for a while to support J's transfer was a major misstep.  While I've had the support of my administration for that choice, my principal continues to warn me of the potential consequences.

So what's a pants-wearing gal to do?  Do I have any obligation to my political leanings to live a life a little further outside the lines?  Or does having a sense of obligation to perform a certain way completely negate the whole gendered argument?  I've never met anyone who has outright told me I need to be more butch but there is still a quiet pressure that clouds my plans to find the perfect recipe for homemade mac n' cheese.

The closest I come to peace on this issue was inspired by an article by a woman I used to know but now just admire.  While it's about a kind of life I don't fully understand yet, it did help me understand that you can't let your personal choices be dictated by what other people who don't know you very well might think.  If you know me, you know that I fight to make sure my voice and power is never diminished by my gender and that I actually do read up on gender pretty frequently.  That should be enough.

And if it isn't, feel free to come around.  I'll serve you tea and cookies before I tell you where to stuff it.  Politely, of course.

Bad Haiku

I've got some knitting to finish. 
Bake cookies. Yoga. 
I am very domestic.

I am still in my pjs
I am considering
Making some pumpkin muffins

Need ingredients
Need to go grocery shopping
I'll have to get dressed.

When you make life plans, you never plan for nothing.  I've had plans for my future ever since I realized I could make plans - I'm that kind of gal.  In March, I decided to throw those plans out the window (more on that later), but now I find myself living in Timmins, underemployed, with some serious time on my hands. So what do I do?  Yesterday was day one, and I even found myself making plans for nothing.  (Control issues?)  After tidying an apartment that was already clean (thanks J!), changing my addresses everywhere, checking all the used furniture stores in town (singularly depressing), reading for an hour and making dinner (don't burn the roux!) I still had time on my hands.  Today, I'm trying a quieter approach, which is really not working out for me.  I'm writing bad haiku, making oatmeal cookies, reading some more, starting a blog, reading my old blog (I really love reading what I wrote in my twenties) and searching Kijiji for used furniture.  Still planning away the minutes.

The biggest change I noticed up here didn't become apparent until I spent some time in the GTA after visiting for a week.  Everything there felt so rushed.  Traffic, line ups, conversations, meals - everything happened faster.  After spending a couple weeks at my parents' farm and then coming up here, I realized that life is a little less hectic here.  If I could stop planning and just be for a while, I might enjoy it.

We'll see how that goes.