What you want
My mum, she hates cooking. It’s tiring, she says, and it requires creativity she doesn’t want to waste on something that will be gone in an hour and leaves a mess. This explains neatly why I love cooking so, and the only loss from this summer has been time spent on the bus that I would otherwise spend cooking and/or futzing around on the internet. The futzing I don’t miss so much, but the cooking, well, that’s the heart of my house: home is where I cook, and I’m getting tired of Kraft Dinner.
Why am I telling the internets about why my kitchen is a wreck? Because an old friend is fed up with Linda Hirshman—and I can’t blame her; who isn’t? I have to respectfully disagree with her, though. Hirshman is a self-centered asshole who can’t see over her priviledge, someone who doesn’t even bother pretending to publicly care about people outside her economic class, someone who apparently loooooves using her own life as a Platonic model. But none of that makes her arguments against homemaking wrong, and conversely none of it lends weight to it either. As best as I can tell, Hirshman pisses the spit out of my old friend because my friend believes all choices are valid, and (here’s where I think I may be wrong) should be supported and validated.
Which premise may be appropriate for all this working-parent/childcare-providing-parent crap, but is something I abandoned a long time ago, because I was making myself nuts trying to understand how some people could endorse this all-paths-are-valid viewpoint and be such utter little shits, or be so obviously wrong. I concluded that I’m not cut out for bodhisattvahood, and that some things are wrong, some questions are stupid, and that for many situations, some choices are more valid than others. People make choices I disagree with, and to an extent I feel required to support their freedom to do so, but that doesn’t mean I have to pretend to condone their choices or respect the flaws in their logic.
So really, it’s only the “equally valid” part of Lorelei’s objections that’s sticking in my craw, and this is why I’m blathering on about cooking: I love it, and it hurts when I can’t do it the way I want. My mum hates it, and nothing I say to her will change that. We have completely different local maxima, and if we stuck around to listen to all the arguments in favour of or against cooking, we would both be miserable and change the subject.
Dear fellow humans: if you love something or think it’s worthy, for fuck’s sake, don’t sit around waiting for other people to approve of it. And while you’re at it, quit kicking the back of my seat.