The Trouble With Tasty

 Last night, after a couple of exploratory bites of his dinner, my Darling Husband paused and looked up to pay a compliment...a well-deserved one, naturally...and I tensed. Visibly. My DH pronounced the meal Good. And I relaxed...visibly. (Why do we ever bother thinking that our thoughts and feelings are our own secrets, when every one of our muscles is conspiring to proclaim them to whomever bothers to pay attention?) And I said, "We're lucky you didn't say the meal is Tasty!" If he had, with a straight face, there once would have been hell to pay.

At our house, we would rather gently discuss the eccentricities of the human brain and the idiosyncracies of our old, refined relationship than re-fight an old fight. Who wouldn't, given the choice? Knowing that the T-word was a detonator for a contest years ago, we handle it cautiously, if more safely, now. It's not a term we move past without pausing with it, though, as families must whenever a signal event is recalled. We're so grateful that the Tasty issue is no longer explosive, last night we were actually able to talk about it, eat, and pat ourselves on the back at the same time. A lively conversation.

Our minds, the product of our meat computers, are as impersonal and impassive as the climate or the weather: they change, but not when we would wish or as we would have them do. And, yet, we must eventually hold ourselves responsible for them as if they had been entirely under our control all along.

Tasty, as a description of food I've prepared, affects me like the metallic screech of train brakes. I bristle and arch and feel insulted, abused! And the why of it has kept my husband and me amazed and amused for years. He is, you see, a product of Midwest Fifties America and I am a product of Southern Fifties America via the Women's Liberation Movement. DH learned how to conduct himself at the dinner table, including pulling out his wife's chair and declaring the meal Tasty, by his father (who learned it from his own mother, his father, his culture, and his wife). My husband went from home to a nearly-all-male engineering school and from there to the Air Force.

I, on the other hand, with my  Flower Child sisters, went from living at home to reinventing the very ground rules of civility...and never very clearly or even to our own satisfaction. My generation of girls all sprang full grown, like Athena, from the forehead of Zeus, and we'll thank no one for teaching us our manners. Our educations were the Liberal Arts. We were adamant that the fifties housewife and her culture be damned, that everything about the way men treat women and the way women see themselves be altered forever. And we've all been confused ever since. We were not wrong, but we are no less confused for having been only partly right.

Tasty, in the convoluted workings of my balky, unconscious mind, is code for all that was wrong with the fifties.  My father-in-law also called his wife The Little Woman and My Bride. Oh, brother. Good grief. My poor husband tried My Bride a few times early in our marriage and drew back a nub. Despite my knowledge that we've all gained perspective since the bra-burning sixties, I can still bristle, involuntarily, like it's 1969, when I hear certain phrases. I've often been so busy defending our sex from belittling treatment, I failed to notice how fractious and silly I must seem, and how poorly I've represented the dignity of modern womanhood when I act that way. Insight is a bitch.

My husband has learned a bit about his own denied prejudices toward women. They're not nearly so powerful or intrusive as mine about men, but he's stared them down bravely during the Tasty talks of the past. We agree that boys brought up in the forties and fifties could no more have avoided a little narcissism than Tiger Woods. It was, in even the healthiest of homes, in the very air...perhaps hovering above the radiators or seeping out from the radio's vacuum tubes. Boys were the future, the young princelings.

Now, we graduate more women than men from our colleges...women who seem confused about whether they will be making home or making more money than their future husbands. And our men are still confused, too...not just our son's generation, but men my own age. Nothing has been clarified; the beat has just gone on. One male acquaintance, a senior citizen like me, confessed that, even now, forty years after the applecart tumbled, he still doesn't know whether to open a door for a female. He has to reinvent the entire protocol each time, at each door, based on a few sketchy bits of body language...and that's just when he's with his wife!

The paradox is that I revere those fifties kitchen women, those biscuit magicians, and all my good dreams include them. Each Western girl defines herself, in the beginning, by all the ways she is NOT like her mother. This is a cultural force that propels social change to keep up...even at a lag...with technological change. It's not personal. Did we benefit our daughters, then, by trying to teach them to have it all while looking like Barbie? And now we look at our grown girls and are mystified when they postpone children or have five, live committed without marriage or go with the high-end wedding, chase careers at all costs or become blogging homemakers. Truly, I would not know what to teach a daughter today.

Frankly, I did not really know what to teach my son about day-to-day chivalry in the eighties. I probably hoped he'd just pick it up.  From a real gentleman, like his father. And I've always liked to have my doors held, especially now that I have arthritis in my shoulders (as does the good man who holds my doors).

Note to self:  Thank lucky stars when DH thanks me for the tasty meal. Get over sixties/seventies self.