Now, though, I do want to know these women — these goddesses. I want to learn how to do things differently at home, to create a home through food — perhaps I’m finally nesting in my mid-thirties. But I still don’t want to fall prey to what my mother warned me about, the ease with which the domestic becomes drudgery, the naturalness with which a woman partnered with a man can fall into easy gendered traps, and so I’m seeking guidance in navigating a space I was warned to avoid at all costs. I’ve long had the cooking part down, but can I be a domestic goddess?The poet Diane Di Prima, in her memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman , writes of women needing to learn to bear more pain than men, not just because of having periods and giving birth, but because of the oil that spatters while we cook. “I would, she assured me, get used to it,” Di Prima writes. “My fingers would get calloused, and pots and fire wouldn’t hurt as they did now. I looked forward to this armor as a good thing; she described it as a blessing.” Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1934 — two years younger than my maternal grandmother, who grew up in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood —Di Prima was taught differently by her mother than I was, during a time when the domestic wasn’t a choice but an obligation. It was dutiful, and it came with scars.In her 1975 book Wages Against Housework , Silvia Federici calls these duties “unwaged work,” and that’s how the sphere of the domestic has functioned for most women in the world, despite what we might like to believe about the gains of feminism. The gains meant that my mom went to work, and also came home and did everything that needed to be done there. The only way I could actually make some move toward equality would be to reject the domestic as duty, to act as a man and take domestic activities on piecemeal as hobbies.