The Feminist Cookie Baker

Watching Makers on PBS really got things turning in my head for awhile. It brought up a lot of issues I thought I had resolved. Well they are resolved, just as resolved as they will ever be. Which is to say that they will never be fully resolved. Why? Because I am a feminist cookie baker. I am! And I like it damnit. I don't want to be president. I don't want to wear pantyhose every day and blouses and go to work. I don't want a powerful, important job and have nannies raise my children and then send them off to private school. Honestly, what I want most of all is to run off to some perfect, imaginary island with my family and raise goats. Or something... What my hearts true desire, in all honesty is to do as little as possible. They don't call my generation the slacker generation for nothing. Hey, I'm hip to this world of power players. I don't want any part of it. All I've ever wanted was to have a nice family and to DO AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE. Seriously. I am however a feminist. I was raised by a feminist housewife. She went to college to get her MRS degree. It worked. She worked various part-time jobs over the years, never really embracing her role as mother. I didn't decide that it was of utmost importance to me to stay home with my babies because my mother shipped me off to some kind of horrible Lord of the Flies daycare. Truth be told my feelings about my mother are mixed at best. I just knew that I didn't want to raise my kids that way. It just wasn't for me. In my mind I saw myself doing some kind of part time kid juggle with my partner. In my fantasies we were broke but in a totally crunchy, romantic kind of way. We made a lot of lentil soup in my fantasies. Like Neil from the Young Ones. We made it work. In reality I'm not a trustafarian and I'm not accustomed to living in trailers. So I needed a real income. After screwing around in my twenties after college and working crap jobs, I decided to go get a master's degree, so I might actually make a salary I could live off of. I being the key word here. Unlike my future spouse I did not think about some day supporting a family of five. Or even supporting two. I just thought about supporting myself. Now I find myself in a somewhat comical situation of my own choosing. I am a feminist stay-at-home mom cookie baker. I.e. a 50's housewife. Housefrau. What ever you want to call it. My job is to stay home with young children, do laundry, do dishes, pack lunches, go grocery shopping, make meals, take kids to doctor's appointments, and generally cart them around. And for the most part I like it. Sure there's times when the monotony makes me want to empty the bank accounts and run off to Bermuda and pretend like I never had children... but those moments are usually only temporary. My husband is a bit burned out from his corporate whorish mid-level management job and I can't step up and say, "honey, you just pack those lunches and let me run off and bring home the bacon". Which, honestly, makes me feel like a big, fat failure as a feminist. Who do I blame for this? Do I blame Gloria Steinem? Is it Hilary Clinton's Do I blame that gosh-darn Free To Be You and Me special? It told me I could be any thing... any thing. I just had NO idea what I wanted to be. I also did not choose very wisely. Because in all honesty I couldn't be anything. I had no legacy and no outstanding intelligence, grades or bank account, so no, I could not go to some high faluting ivy league school. I went to community college and then state college. And then another state's university for my Master's degree. I have no great ambition to go out and make the world a wonderful place. If I did have any of that having babies wiped that right out of me. I want what the majority of the world wants, what the normal people want. The plebs. The un-extraordinary people. I want a house in a nice neighborhood with good schools. A decent paying, interesting part-time job. A spouse who also doesn't have to work very hard and comes home happy and ready to lend a hand making dinner and double checking homework. I want healthy, happy children. I want to watch them grow up in a world free of gun violence, poverty and rape. I want to some day, in the far, far decent future have grandchildren... and I want those same things for them. I want my girls to be able to choose what they want to do with their lives. But I want them to realize that if they some day plan on having a family. And let's face it, most of us do eventually come to this conclusion even if we were staunchly against it in our twenties. I want them to realize that it's not enough to "follow your dreams" and "follow your bliss" because they, like me, will not have a trust fund to fall back on. They will need to make enough money to have a nice house, in a nice neighborhood with good schools. And they shouldn't count on someone else making this happen for them. This will be my feminist stay-at-home mom cookie baking message to my daughters.