Home at last

Derek came home from college about 1 am, and of course I stayed up, not able to sleep because it's winter, we've had unusually cold weather, and the streets are icy, not to mention that he was traveling over a mountain pass. I'm a mom, and my job is to worry. He came with two college friends also on their way home, and we let them "crash" overnight. It would have been ridiculous to have them keep driving on frozen streets in the dead of night, after they'd been travelling for over 5 hours already.

Got up the next morning, and I thought I should make some breakfast for the boys, so cooked up some pancakes, bacon, and eggs, plus some coffee.

And it felt pretty good.

I rather like being a mom, and not only did I have my son to nurture this morning, but I had two other guys his age to feed, and there was something very satisfying about that. Which sounds very retro and Betty Crockerish and so stereotypically un-feminist.

I've been out in the corporate world, held well-paying traditionally male jobs as well as traditionally female jobs, and I don't have any problem doing all that, and am pretty good at both, too. But there's a certain authority in cooking up a good meal and serving it out, especially when I know I do a good job of it. In that time, I'm the source of their continued survival, the source of plenty and abundance. I have in that time the ability to help them thrive and in that way spread a bit of good will.

Which is a powerful thing, really. It's said that the universe is going toward entropy, a state in which everything becomes more or less an indistiguishable soup of disorganized whatever. It takes energy--power--to put things in order; in other words, it's easier to destroy than to create, easier to make things disorderly than orderly. Easier to kill, than to support life. A maker of icons has to use up more energy than an iconoclast. :-)

I remember when I decided to be a mom, work from home when I could. I got a few raised brows about that--wasn't I betraying the femnist cause? Wasn't I chosing enslavement--and by the way, wasn't it a sign that I was still under the thumb of the patriarchy?

Nahh. The whole thing from the beginning of the feminist movement was about choice. About going where your talents lie, whether it's being the CEO of a company or an engineer, artist, or writer, whatever you're called to do.

And I figure, you're called to do and be more than one thing in your life. One calling of mine is to be a mom, another is to be a writer. Those are things that call to my heart, and I won't be hamstrung by any ideology that says I must do something other than my calling for some "cause," especially when that ideology sprang up because women were being forced to do something other than their calling in the first place. I'm an old-school feminist precisely because I like having a lot of choices.

I'm pretty sure I'll find other callings as my life progresses. I think I have a good head for entrepreneurial ideas, for example. And, I'm getting a hankering to do more with homeless teens. Hey, maybe I'll go down to the homeless teen shelter and start making breakfasts. That might be a fun thing to do, and I have to wonder how many of those homeless teens have moms who make them breakfast? Maybe not all that many.

I was almost going to say that I wish I were the type of person who loves climbing the corporate ladder....but nahh. I'm good with being what I am, and I've seen that ladder. I know I could probably climb it if I wanted to, but--eh. I am so not interested. :-)

Fact is, I'm a homebody, and like creating meals and dishes in the kitchen, like writing books and stories, like spinning on my spinning wheel, and knitting. I'll paint watercolors every once in a while, maybe do some other creative thing.

Oh, and by the way, I did spin up the Paris-Hilton-in-camo-gear merino wool roving at the Puyallup Fair, and this is what it looks like:

It's not bad, if say so myself. Spun it up into a three-ply yarn, Navaho-style, so it ended up being very soft and elastic. I also knitted up a swatch in stockinette stitch, and I think the color changes look interesting as well:


I ended up calling it Briar Rose when I put it up for auction on eBay (turns out my mom didn't want it after all!!!). No, I didn't save it for myself to knit. I have more spinning fiber right now than Rumplestiltskin can shake a stick at, and I need to finish spinning it up, because right now I don't want to give up my firstborn to have it spun up for me. It felt too good cooking up breakfast for him and his friends this morning for that. :-D


--Karen H.