Mother taught me to fry an egg when I was fifteen.
She was, to be frank, a terrible cook, and in fact considered all forms of housework to be domestic burdens cast upon her by a society whose rules and conventions she did not respect.
She was also a working mother with four children and bore the brunt of the onslaught of agri-business, with its relentless marketing and standardization of packaged products, hyped-up advertizing and the beginnings of the fast food industry, its accelerating super-sizing perpetrating on humans what some object to doing to ducks and geese for the sake of foie gras.
She was right about that egg, though. It was the first of three lessons she ordained once she saw the full effects of pubescence on me. The second was to sew on a button. And the third I carry with me to this very moment, ten-finger typing.
“This way,” she opined, “when you end up with a woman it won’t be because you need her for anything other than herself”.
The worldly reader will have noticed she discretely omitted another need which enslaves many men to woman – but we can leave that aside.
Feminist avant la lettre, she was as right about the egg as the keyboard. But I admit to going without a fallen button until someone else attends to it.