As a little dreamer child and a budding snarky feminist, I had a strong sense of what the future married me would look like. “I will marry a man who cooks amazingly, and then all I’ll have to do will be to eat his delicious food,” I proclaimed to my family.
Even as a child, I knew that cooking was a gendered activity. At family gatherings, the mother would always emerge from the kitchen carrying a tray of drinks, play the role of a good hostess briefly and then disappear once again into the kitchen to bend breathlessly over the many curries simmering on the stove. At some point, the women would migrate into the kitchen or the dining hall to talk about womanly matters such as the recipe for “that amazing chicken fry,” or the “snack that my kids love,” while men spoke in serious tones in the living room about pressing matters of the world.
Even though I grew up in a home where my father frequently crossed the threshold of the kitchen to chop vegetables, to prepare rice and buttermilk curry, I learned that he was an exception to the rule, that other fathers kept their distance from this woman’s space because they believed that cooking would demean and emasculate them.
Perhaps, because I experienced the exceptional and the normal, I was firm in my conviction even as a child that I wouldn’t be trapped into a life of domesticity. I knew that I did not want to be the women who had gone before me.
When I told my family that I would never cook, even as a married woman, to my great surprise, the patriarchal uncles and aunts actually nodded their heads in agreement. This is when I realized that cooking was not only a gendered construct, but that it had a close relationship with my disability. “A blind girl cannot cook,” everyone in my world said emphatically. Even my parents, who told me I could do anything I wanted, did not try too hard to make me a culinary genius. I too began to entertain the thought that perhaps cooking, and the scary uncertain arena of the kitchen, weren’t for me. When it came to cooking, the adventurer in me, the girl who wanted to prove herself to the ableist world, decided to curl up under a comfortable blanket.
But last summer, that blanket was wrenched away when I realized that I would have to cook for myself during my internship in Indianapolis. I panicked. Suddenly cooking became a necessity, and unfortunately, the husband with the amazing culinary skills still belonged to a distant future.
When I went home in May, my mother gave me a crash course in cooking. I learned everything she taught me, but the insecurities did not go away. After years of telling myself that this was not for me, I struggled to convince myself that I could really prepare a meal without my mother’s protective supervision.
But then one day I stood alone at the kitchen counter in my Indianapolis apartment. Assuring myself that I did not have to eat anything that I cooked, and if worst came to worst, I could always DoorDash, I took up the knife and curled my hand around an onion. The sharpness of the knife cut through the thick layers of the onion and struck the chopping board with a triumphant thud. Later, my unscarred hands proudly cradled three bowls of cut vegetables.
Then I finally turned to the instapot, coated with a layer of oil. With a whispered prayer of, “Jesus, its just you and me now. Also, please don’t let the fire alarm go off!” I added the cut vegetables to the hot oil. An ominous sizzling filled my ears, and steam drifted towards my face. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t afford to. So I clutched the wooden handle of the spoon and stirred, a desperate prayer on my lips.
At some point, the stirring became mechanical, the sizzling became almost normal, the heat more bearable. As I added chili and masala powder, I breathed in the sharp notes of the spices, recognized its mellowing as it mixed well with the vegetables.
When the instapot finally turned off with a cheerful beep, I reached in and gathered a spoonful of my ginger garlic fried rice. Hesitantly, I lifted it to my lips. I winced at the heat, then I smiled in something like awe.
As I continued to return to the kitchen, to inhale the cent of familiar spices, as my ears accustomed themselves to the sizzling music of oil, the slightly scarier song of the pressure cooker, I wondered why no one had told me that cooking didn’t have much to do with the eyes. I began to experiment with flavors and sauces, make my own recipes. Cooking became something that my hands wanted to do, and the kitchen became mine, my space. I began to become my mom.
But I didn’t want to become my mom!
I could understand needing to cook because it was a necessity. But what did it mean that I, the modern feminist, was falling in love with cooking? Wasn’t I becoming everything the patriarchal grandfathers said a perfect domesticated woman should be? “Look, you do belong in the kitchen after all. Your woman’s hands were created to prepare food. You just needed some time to come to terms with this truth.” I could hear their smug, smoky voices whispering to me.
“I don’t want to confirm their beliefs about me.” I told my best friend and fellow feminist.
“But they are always going to believe what they want about you, Hannah. They will always wish to trap you into their narratives.”
For a moment, I allowed myself to remember all the disbelieving questions that people met me with, every time I, the blind woman, did something that they thought I couldn’t.
All my life, I had wanted to prove myself to the ableist world, to the patriarchal world. “But what’s the point?” I asked myself. “They are still going to believe what they want to believe, and I can’t really change that.”
“Hannah, just do what gives you joy,” my best friend told me. “That’s the best kind of rebellion.”
For a moment I allowed the dreamer in me to picture the kind of feminist I wanted to be. I pictured a mother, a wife, a therapist, a writer, a musician. I pictured a woman singing in the kitchen, a man beside her, a man too comfortable in his masculinity to fear emasculation at the hands of vegetables and spices.
I pictured this woman, so comfortable in all she was and all she wished to be. In that moment, I wished to be her. I believed that I would be her.
Hannah Alice Simon was born and raised in Kerala, India, and moved to the U.S. for college with the dream of thriving in an intellectual environment that celebrates people with disabilities. On campus, you will mostly see her taking the longest routes to classrooms with her loyal cane, Riptide, by her side. She studies psychology and English with minors in musical theatre and theology. You can contact Hannah at hsimon2@nd.edu.
