Cooking on a Snowy Sunday Afternoon

It has been snowing most of the morning. I am chopping meat and vegetables to throw in one of my crockpots to make a stew for dinner...

Listening to Echo and The Bunnymen's "Lips like Sugar"...which gives way to "Killing Moon"...then to TinTin's "Kiss Me..."

and I am reminded of when I taught myself to cook years ago, in my chronic fatigue years...when I was very grunge...

I would be dressed in cutoffs and black tights and motorcycle boots...a metal band t-shirt over a thermal shirt...I didn't look anything like a young woman who might be able to make a beef stew, or decorated gingerbread cookies, or anything like that. I looked like a freespririt who didn't posess any sort of domestic abilities.

But those have always been the projections of others--the narrow minds that belive women who do certain things should look a certain way. That if one is a homebody type, she should be very plain in appearance and very controlled in all her appetites.

I have always wanted to be just myself, dressed in any way I've wanted to, enjoying cooking and sex and life and all of it.

Unfortunately, I have always found myself crushed by the projections and expectations of others. Why is it that I have been so marginalized, and so incongruous to so many people?

I've always suffered because I don't fit the preconceived notions of others and, subsequently, have always worn a mask and been uncomfortable in my own skin.

So much so that I have dared, at times, to expose a great deal of myself so that I could get some sort of congruency...So that I didn't have to be so much of a shock and surprise to people.

So that I could be accepted totally for every part of who I am. Unconditionally. Every part of me. No more disguises.

It's as easy as that.

I told Lucky Bastard that some of the journeys I've been on were like mythic journies thru various underworlds. And I think how much I am like a Persephone character--living a half-life in the world of light and another half-life somewhere in hell.

I'm tired of the journey between both places and I'm restless when I live totally in either world.

Neither is my complete experience. The complete experience lies somewhere between the self-righteous delusions of the world of light and the theatrical masks of the world of darkness.

I told Lucky Bastard that because of the pressures to conform to certain ways of being, women sometimes lose the freedom-to-be that they had before being yoked by marriage and childbearing.

But I understand that men often lose that freedom too. It's not exclusive to women, that's for sure. I think I just see it more in women because I am a woman and the majority of my friends are women.

Some people, then, are very happy in those socially-approved roles--they negotiate them well because the roles are congruent to who they are. Adulthood has its struggles, but, for many, there isn't this profound feeling like there's a terrible sacrifice or loss...or maybe they are happy to give up certain ways of being in exchange for what the responsibilities of adulthood afford them.

Or they just got comfortable in their younger years with wearing masks...so the roles taken to be socially acceptable weren't so difficult to wear.

And there is indeed something to be said for the stability of home and family. At whatever the cost.

I've always wanted that stability but didn't want to have to compromise that freedom-to-be either.

I never wanted to pay the piper.

"You're too wild," my mother would tell me.

You're not marriagable was what she meant.

So, maybe it's the snow...that cold white and greyness seeping into me that changes my mood...or the shorter days that remind me of other metaphorical days growing shorter....or maybe it's cooking solitary in my apartment that reminds me of what I could share with someone who, like me, might want to form an oasis between the worlds of light and dark...

I don't know...

the stew simmers slowly...

and I turn on the music, again...