rag ovenbird Just a single page into Angélique Lalonde’s novel Variations on A Dream I am already completely invested. I don’t always know I’m going to love a book by the end of the first page, but I’m quite sure I’m going to love this one. The first page goes like this: Once upon a time, Sarah fell asleep in a castle and woke up in Sarah’s kitchen. It was an age-old awakening. This was where Sarah lived. There was a man, Trevor, in their kitchen, talking. In her hands were a wet rag and a plate. In his hands were air and history. In her hands were water and invisibility and time. Sarah was a woman who lived in the kitchen and Trevor was a man who knew how to be in a kitchen talking to a woman. He ate what she ate. She ate what she made. Once a week he cooked and she did the dishes afterward. Most of the time she cooked and she did the dishes afterward. They had two children, though once there were none. Once it had been just the two of them and Trevor had liked that very much. He had liked it when Sarah was his alone. Their children would not eat beans, though the woman tried consistently, waiting for the moment this would change. He would eat anything; sometimes it made him sick, sometimes he appreciated it. He told her she was very good at holding a wet rag; he admired how efficient she was with it. It was so much faster for her to do the dishes. How someone packs the dynamics of an entire relationship, plus the toxicity of entrenched gender roles, into such a small space is mind blowing, and it made me think about my in-laws. My mother-in-law specifically, who has played the role of homemaker her entire life. Her husband was away frequently, doing geological field work in far flung countries where he traipsed around in the bush and had interesting cultural experiences. She stayed at home with three kids. When he was home he read the newspaper in the den and she cooked and cleaned and generally took care of everything. Once he retired he took over the vacuuming, but never learned to cook. Everyone enabled this. When she went away other people would bring him meals or invite him for dinner. I frequently wondered how a man with a PhD who managed to navigate the wilderness and rappel down mountains was not expected to make his way through a grocery store. Recently, when my mother-in-law was sick, he was forced to shop and cook. And it turns out that he WAS capable, but he (and those around him) spent decades reinforcing a sense of learned helplessness in which everyone assumed he just didn’t have the ability to cook. Had he been held as able he might have been pitching in years ago. There’s nothing specifically wrong with gendered division of labour, if the work is truly divided evenly, and everyone has agency in deciding how work is assigned, but I think we run into problems when we make assumptions about overall capability: Men are not GOOD at washing dishes, women are BETTER at soothing babies, men are more suited to yard work, women are more suited to cooking. Then suddenly you find yourself in the kitchen with a sponge that smells of mildew while someone insists they “don’t know how” to wash the dishes. Lalonde’s opening lines cut me open. Am I the woman with the rag? Yes. No. I’m not sure. Sometimes, maybe? There is, in fact, quite an egalitarian division of labour in my house. But what I know is that there are days when I’m standing in the kitchen again, making dinner again, serving food that the kids won’t eat again, loading the dishwasher again, and I wonder how I got here. I wonder how I woke up to this kitchen that I live in. 260513 what's it to you? who go blather from