If You Can't Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury

by Geraldine DeRuiter

It had not yet occurred to me that the awful things said to us by our parents were awful things that were once said to them.

Defiance kicked in again, and when every source was telling me to count calories and worry about getting fat, I blithely ignored all of it and ate. I always ate. I tried to be healthy, and I tried to eat vegetables, because they’re good for you and they aid in pooping, but I never counted a carb or denied myself dessert.

The best rebellion I could ever come up with was endeavoring to love myself and hurling every piece of dietary advice out the window with the zeal of someone tossing out a cheating lover’s belongings.

After such a stretch of time, you learn to read your partner’s expressions and the secrets hidden in their sighs. You also learn to ignore any casual fine-dining-related screaming. The latter is an important component in the success of any marriage.

children are pack animals who know to weed out and destroy the weak and the slow and any creature that is too solitary or strange. They are not above cannibalism.

At this time in my life, it does not yet occur to me that the things I have always longed for are things I can make myself. That if I want cheesy garlic biscuits, I can bake them. That if I wish to have a loving family, I can create one. I still believe that these things are preordained and inaccessible to me, destined to happen only to the girls with shiny hair and perfect blue tags at the backs of their shoes. I still somehow think that if someone treats you badly, even if you are a child, it is because you deserve it. This is, apparently, easier to wrap my head around than the alternative.

what use is an escape when you no longer have anything to escape from?

It’s a bittersweet thing, to look back at your childhood dreams and know that you’ve exceeded them, that you were so desperately longing for not that much.

I didn’t yet know that being alone is far better than being with someone who relegates you to being their dirty secret, their sidepiece for uncomfortable, sweaty teenage hookups.

There’s an expectation that women need to be up for anything, lest we be labeled frigid or a prude (the same high-maintenance and difficult argument but translated to sexual willingness). But the second you are up for anything, you’re a slut.

The Virgin-Whore Complex isn’t new, but no one told us we had to be both at once. The narrative has been baked in—so early and so deep—that you can’t ask for too much, or be too much, or want too much, or make too much of a fuss. Even when someone treats you like garbage. Even long after you’ve learned that you deserve better.

It’s a hard thing to learn: that we can ask things of other people, that we can order food how we want it. That our bodies deserve to be nourished and loved and fed the way we want them to be.

I reminded myself that we can ask this of the world and of ourselves. To be fed, and to be loved, and not made to feel unhinged or overly emotional. This request is not too grand.

That’s the thing about voicing your needs: The world tells you how bad you’ll look if you do it. But no one tells you how great you’ll feel.

Central Florida didn’t let me see much of the world beyond itself. The entire state is flat, and that skews your perception of things. It becomes difficult to see very far. And even when you can, it’s just more Florida.

religion was a deeply personal thing, and only one part of who you were. And also, if you did convert, you were no less entitled to your identity than someone who was born into it. On the contrary, she told me. People who converted had worked very hard for it.

to practice a religion half-assed is the privilege afforded to those who are born into something, to those who have never had their faith second-guessed. To convert meant to deal with constantly being under fire by people who had nothing better to do than question someone else’s faith. It meant to commit wholeheartedly, to believe it not passively but as a willing adult. It was a choice that required deliberation, not something that I could dismiss as familial tradition I’d simply fallen into.

This is what it means to love someone. You cook for them. You help them carry the weight of their own memories.

I am in my forties, and I do not have children. This is by design, though occasionally I let people think that it is perhaps due to factors that are beyond my control. This deliberate obfuscation of the truth feels like a betrayal of some feminist doctrine I thought I believed in, and yet the indisputable fact is this: People are a lot kinder about me not having children when they think it wasn’t something I chose.

I am hesitant to say those words: that I don’t want to be a mother. It sounds like a cold and calculated thing, something a comic supervillain would say before she starts up her penis-shrinking laser.

No children, no opinion. Which would make sense if we thought the world actually listened to women who do have children.

I never thought about being a mom, one way or the other. I figured the urge would come, that adulthood would cause some sort of seismic shift inside me that would draw me to things I presently had no interest in, like having children and eating blue cheese and paying taxes.

The idea of holding a small person who was mine. I was curious about it. But I didn’t need it, the way I needed air, or water, or lemon pound cake with icing. I was happy with the life I had. When I thought about what it truly meant to have a child, I was indifferent. And I don’t know if parents should be that. I think a prerequisite to being a parent is that you should want to be one. And there’s a long diatribe here that I could go on about, but simply: Parenthood should always be a choice.

You’ll change your mind. It’s a deeply condescending thing, to be told that you don’t know yourself. To assume that I haven’t gone over this question a thousand times, and nonstop for the week surrounding Mother’s Day every year. That I haven’t pulled my hair out and questioned whether I’m cold and dead inside (and maybe I am, but that’s because I refused to cry during E.T., and not because of this). Sometimes I clench my teeth until they hurt, because my husband doesn’t get lectured about needing to give me children, but I’ve been pulled aside and told I’m depriving him of something.

I do the things that people without children are supposed to do. I sleep in every day so that it is no longer sleeping in but me merely rising of my own accord nine hours after I went to sleep in a giant bed next to my husband. He and I travel together—more than thirty countries, on every continent except Antarctica. I regularly make cake at 9:00 p.m., and eat it by 9:30 p.m., knowing that I don’t need to set a good example for anyone. If it sounds as if I were trying to justify my life decisions, of course I am. That’s all anyone is ever doing. Why do you think so many people want me to have children? Part of it is certainly schadenfreude, because I have laughed at too many diaper blowouts. And part of it is because they want to be assured that they haven’t made the wrong choice.

I know people who had children before they were married, or were pregnant on their wedding day, because they knew they were “running out of time,” or simply had kids and decided to figure out the rest later. To be a woman who wants children means you are racing against a countdown timer. This is especially true if you want biological children.

Mothers who are too young get judged. Mothers who are too old get judged. You need to be roughly thirty-three, but you have to look twenty-seven. Anything older and you are geriatric, you are infirm, you are past your expiration date. Anything younger and you’ve wasted your best years.

“Why did you let him buy you dinner?” felt on par with “Why did you go up to his hotel room?” I am acutely aware of how messed up this all is! This is Victim Blaming 101. The rape culture was coming from inside the house, or in this case, my own head.

“The rule about who pays on a first date is comparatively easy,” Petrow writes. “You invite; you pay.”

Maybe it’s more that people don’t want women thinking about money, because if we do, we might start burning shit to the ground, and nothing kills the fine dining atmosphere like a gallon of gasoline, a match, and a feminist agenda.

Even if someone wins the lottery or has a baby, they are not going to call you twenty-seven times to let you know. People only try to get ahold of you that desperately if the news is extremely bad and they want company.

Sometimes everything is so overwhelming that you want to shake the heck out of that Etch A Sketch to clear it. And then throw the Etch A Sketch out the window of a moving car. And move to Des Moines.

The fear of any parent is that they will outlive their children. The fear of any anxious child is that they will outlive their parents.

There are days when I wish she’d loved us better, and then I realize that what I really want—what I’ve always wanted—was for her to have loved herself a little bit better.

GENDER ROLES AND CINNAMON ROLLS

Comfort food is too often dismissed. The unfussy dishes we ate in the halcyon days of youth. The foods we cooked for ourselves when what we ate had virtually no consequence: melting cheese onto whatever we could find; microwave meals that were a feat of physics, as hot as the sun on the edges but still icy in the center; the buckets of take-out fried chicken; a cannery worth of salty soups. The dishes that our parents or grandparents made for us, tethers to places that our families left behind. The endless parade of casseroles that march through when a baby is born or someone has died.

I’d gotten confused—assumed that these things that I’d stored away in the event of an emergency would somehow stop the emergency from happening in the first place. That when disaster did strike, I could somehow protect everyone I loved behind a barrier of instant ramen and peanut-butter-stuffed pretzels.

I was ignoring the first precious word in the phrase “comfort food”—that in order to comfort, the grief and pain have already arrived.

It didn’t occur to us, as we were trying to survive the mundanity of the every day, that this is what life is. This is what we get. A collection of moments, of paying bills and going to work and trying not to stay up too late and walking into a room and forgetting why you went in there in the first place. Of waking up one day no longer twenty, and then no longer thirty, of everything constantly shifting like the floor in that Jamiroquai video.

Maybe this is what we speak of when we talk about nostalgia. A longing not for a thing or a place but for a version of ourselves that is now gone, something that slipped through our fingers, piece by piece, day after day after day, without our realizing it.

She had an unwavering sense of what she believed to be right and just. She didn’t back down from a fight. She was fearless and unapologetic and never questioned herself. I didn’t realize the corollary of this. Someone who was staunchly unapologetic would, ultimately, never apologize. If someone always saw themselves as just and right, they would struggle to see where other people were coming from. If they never second-guessed themselves, they would never acknowledge that they’d made a single mistake. It seems obvious now, an old cliché playing out: that the best things about her were also the worst things.

I had very distinct dietary goals. I wanted to outlive all of these assholes and be healthy enough to dance on their graves.