The best part about coming up north when it starts to get cold is the fireplace. My father keeps a fire going every night, and our basement gets warm and toasty, in comparison to the chilly upstairs and the frigid outside.
When I was little, my dad always built the fire. If he was out of town or at a meeting for an evening, the state of the fire was doubtful. Sometimes my mother would attempt to make a fire (I think she loves the fireplace more than I do), but we all knew that building a fire challenged Mom more than Dad. Sometimes, when he was gone, the fire was an utter fail.
At the end of high school, I found a creative solution to the problem of the difficulty of a fire with the absence of my dad : a boyfriend. To make a sweeping generalization, high school guys, especially those still in Scouts, love fire. So on snow days and school holidays, he would come over and make us fire. Around the same period, my brother went off to college, and he decided during his semester break that he wanted to keep the fire going 24-7. Father, brother, boyfriend = can make fire. Anyone seeing a pattern here?
Finally, one winter, finding my brother and father away from the house, and myself boyfriendless, I decided to employ the skills I had learned during a summer as a camp counselor and a summer living at Yosemite National Park. If I could build fire in a fire circle, why couldn't I build one in a fireplace?
I had a remarkable I am Woman; hear me roar moment that repeats itself, just a little, every time I bring a cold fireplace or a tiny red ember into warm, crackling flames. Which struck me as hilarious yesterday compared to the last strong gender-roles-awareness moment I had.
One of my friends got married recently in a beautiful Catholic ceremony that blended US Catholicism, Mexican Catholicism, and traditional Latin chants. Afterward, a mariachi band heralded their arrival at the reception, playing Latin tunes that got my feet tapping. So I responded eagerly when asked to dance.
All my life I have known that I can't dance. It's a fact of life, similar to the fact that I have an excellent sense of direction and can't keep track of time. In recent months, however, I have begun to realize that although I can get myself unlost and I am inevitably late, my dancing skills are not as hopeless as I like to pretend. Given the condition that I have a strong lead. Preferably a strong lead who dances more to have fun than to dance correctly, because I still have no clue what I am doing. Just when someone else is guiding me, I can dance in spite of having no clue what I am doing. However, it breaks my feminist heart to say, "I can dance, but only if I have a strong lead." So much for defying stereotypes.
My approach to feminism has to incorporate both of these parts of being a woman : making fire and liking to dance with a strong lead. Because I am a woman, I both dance and light fires as a woman. That is my first understanding of femininity : it is an integral part of my identity. Everything I do, I do as a woman.
It means that I do not lay aside my femininity when I am self-sufficient enough to light a fire. It means I do not lay aside my feminism when I dance. It means I am constantly navigating the conundrum of letting men be men while being my own strong woman. From what I've heard, courtesy of the men in my life, that can be equally as challenging. Men complain that women try to lead. Women complain that men don't know how to dance. The omnipresent "they" make remote control fireplaces so that no one needs to light a fire anymore. It's all very symbolic and very confusing.
Do I have the solutions and the answers? Of course not. But I'm working on it, one day, one fire, one dance at a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment