Ethics of Care
the dishes over there / they fill me with despair.
Several years ago, we fulfilled a long-held dream and saw the phenomenal musician Josephine Foster play at a weird community library space in Bellingham. Opening for Foster was an old man, Michael Hurley. I was horrified by his lyrics, objectifying women in an insidious, non-sexual, domestic fashion – “I can see by the way you wash the clothes, your cookin’ must be fine.” I talked a lot of crap (to Kaden; no one else would have known or cared) about how dare he think he could still get away with that kind of garbage. Then, a year ago, NTS played an In Focus episode showcasing his work, and because I’m not exclusively a stubborn asshole, and because it was tagged Freak Folk, I gave Hurley another chance. Turns out, I love his recordings. In one call-and-response piece (“Slurf Song”), he outlines all the processes involved in cooking and eating – We fill up our guts, then we turn it into shit / Then we get rid of it, and the lyric that was most striking to me, Oh, I see the dishes over there / They fill me with despair. Because, like, that’s the one I love! The dishes fill Kaden with despair!
The title of my MFA thesis, and the working title for my linked short story collection (full draft almost finished I swear) is Ethics of Care. This is also the title of my short story about the queer femme admissions director of a massage school who tries not to fall in love with a much younger student, a pregnant trans dude (my story with the most lit mag rejections, currently 13). When I first gave myself permission to begin writing fiction as an adult, I identified my primary theme, in my head, as erotics of care. The sexiest thing I could think of was one person saying to another, let me take care of this for you.
Kaden and I don’t ever fight about money, we’re exactly the same about money, frugal af. Over the course of our relationship, what we’ve fought about most is the dishes. For a few years, we’d nailed down an arrangement where I made the menu and did the grocery shopping, Kaden cooked, and we both did dishes. Cooking felt like nothing more than a chore to me, whereas for Kaden it was a creative outlet, a job to do with his hands that could be measurably finished, unlike the (eventually award winning) dissertation he was working on. But it took me until I heard that Michael Hurley lyric to realize that the dishes really do fill him with despair! It’s a legitimate response.
In our current arrangement, I’m a writer and homemaker. My thoughts and feelings about it are all over the place, overstuffed, constantly processing. Wages for housework. Gendered labor. Being a “kept” spouse. A former coworker who was in a financially abusive relationship. A fabulous conversation about the anarchist potentialities of the trad wife trend from Radical Love Letters, which dovetailed with some of what was already on my mind for this post. The ways I justify it to myself: Our savings are shared. Kaden didn’t work for a year while he finished his dissertation, now it’s my turn. It’s not just that he’s supporting me financially while I write books. I’m supporting him domestically while he works far more than full time, getting his academic career off the ground. Sometimes I miss larger-scale problem-solving, and sometimes I miss physical labor, but there’s plenty of time for that in the future.
Last year, when I was living alone, I cooked for myself, the bare minimum, no one to impress. In September, when I began cooking for both of us, it took up a surprising amount of my creative energy. Space that was formerly used for plot lines, character development, and zingy details, was filled with meal planning. Not just what to cook, but the steps involved. I don’t use recipes, so there is no external holding device. Thank god, that didn’t last long. I got into the groove and it takes much less energy now. We almost never eat out (frugal af). I do almost all of the dishes. If the dishes also filled me with despair, this arrangement wouldn’t work as well as it does. Luckily, I don’t give a fuck.
Many nights, I’m stoned and cooking made-up vegetarian meals and thinking fuck, look at me living this awesome life, exactly the one I hoped I’d have. It’s all about the golden light in the kitchen and chopping vegetables and boiling black eyed peas and brown rice. The other night, Kaden was on the phone with his folks, saying, “Liina’s roasting eggplant and garbanzo beans…because we’re hippies.” Which is funny because in a lot of ways, Kaden’s parents were much more like hippies than mine, as far as participating in counterculture movements. But they never really did the back to the land thing my parents attempted. When I was 10 or 11, my dad told me “We were mothers…like earth mothers…like Mother Earth News,” as if I had any frame of reference. I don’t think Kaden and I can quite call ourselves hippies. We just prefer whole grains.
In Spokane, I learned that I love to host parties. I like the prep, laying out cheese and crackers and crudités, but I love the cleanup. I love to be coming down from my buzz, loading the dishwasher in the middle of the night, making it look like nothing happened. Toward the end of the penultimate party Kaden and I threw in Spokane, we found ourselves together on the landing at the top of the staircase, very stoned, with Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee playing downstairs, and we decided that that moment, between our two 41st birthdays, was the exact point of our mid-life.
At a large gathering last winter, a friend I was particularly close to had been cheerfully washing dishes, but got stuck at the sink alone. Entering the kitchen, I sensed an edge of despair and took over. Sent them out to smoke a cigarette.
I want to be the one taking care of this, for you.
Updates and clarifications:
In my last post, I wrote a sentence about depressed men being the worst, but I meant that in a really glib way relating ONLY to relationship dynamics in Adrian Tomine comics, I did NOT mean depressed men make bad partners.
In my last post, I wrote that the fictional band in my linked short story collection might sound like any of the bands on the I’m a Stranger Here Myself mixtape. After listening to it again I was like nah, they sound like if the Black Angels were from Olympia. Then I listened to Phosphene Dream and I was like no…that’s not it either…
Shoutout to my friend Tom F. who emailed me regarding my last post, and reminded me he’s a dude who takes me seriously!! It meant a lot to me!!