#aaaaaarrrrrrrrrghhhhhh

[hylianengineer]

Recent family drama has me pissed off about gender roles, and for some reason I'm thinking about how that plays out through food. Almost none of the men on either side of my family cook unless it's on a grill. My dad does a little bit sometimes but it's nowhere near what my mom does. I know he knows how, he just doesn't.

When I became a vegetarian my uncle tried to demand I cook meat for him. I said I wouldn't, I'd cook what I wanted to eat and maybe share that with him but I wouldn't cook something I didn't want to eat. He tried to make me feel like the asshole in this conversation. He was never entitled to any of my cooking in the first place, it was a gift and people who are assholes about gifts don't deserve them. I still wonder how much of this conversation he thought was a joke - maybe all of it, but if it was it was in rather poor taste.

My (paternal) grandfather does not cook almost at all. He grills, he makes fudge every Christmas, and he makes spaghetti sauce out of the tomatoes he grows. When my grandma had knee surgery, she cooked a lot of extra food ahead of time to put in the freezer because god forbid he cook for himself and his wife who was recovering from surgery. God forbid he be an independent adult for once in his life.

My dad can cook. But again, he doesn't do it very often. He makes salads and he grills meat and he knows how to throw a roast in a crock pot. There's this one marinated cucumber dish that's his specialty. My mom does easily 75% of the cooking, and I guess she must be okay with that - she's not like my grandma (her mother-in-law), she doesn't put up with gender role bullshit. My mother is a female electrical engineer who grew up with an absent father and a mom who did everything. My dad raised two AFAB kids (both nonbinary, though he doesn't know it) to use power tools, fix cars, and not need a man to do anything for us.

Every holiday, my grandma calls the shots. She orders everyone around - women in the kitchen and men out of it. I remember a memorable incident last year when she was trying to get all the women (and my sibling who she's been told is a trans man although they're secretly enby - she still calls them 'she') to cook things and the men to move furniture and I (her as-far-as-she-knows cisgender granddaughter) said no actually I want to go move furniture. She didn't fight me on it but I'm kind of fuming about it to this day - the way she thinks labor is supposed to be divided.

It's funny - my parents think they have a daughter and a transgender son. They actually have two nonbinary children, but shh, we're in the closet about that part. What's funny is that I, the supposed daughter, am the one doing traditionally masc stuff. I'm the car person in this duo. I'm the scientist, they're the arts major. I'm the one who owns work boots. I'm the one who likes tools and wants to carry a pocket knife. My twin actually DID get a pocketknife as a gift a few years back, but the only use it sees is when I borrow it.

My twin is a better cook than me. They're better at sewing than me. They want to spend their life making art and I want to spend mine playing in the dirt. We're very much not putting up with the roles our family has tried to put us in. Neither of us cooks very much, but what cooking does occur in this household is NOT split along gender lines.