I can tell.
It’s in the way he laughs, then says, “Are you sure [your fiance] knows what he’s getting into?”
It’s in the way he tells people I’m bossy.
It’s in the way he questions whether I can keep house. Whether I cook the kinds of food my fiance likes.
My grandma was never meant to be a housewife.
She was a poet. A scholar. A dancer. An artist.
In another life, I like to think she would have accepted her Fulbright and studied abroad instead of marrying my grandpa.
Sometimes, for her sake, I wish she had.
To this day, he laughs and mocks a meal she made for him, still in disbelief that she would consider a single soup to be enough for a single lunchtime meal. (I think what she made for him was a perfectly good meal, and I wish I could have tasted it)
I don’t want to be the kind of woman he would consider to be a good wife.
Yet, sometimes I wonder…
Does he see me as being less, somehow, for being a woman?
He is the kind of man who could never be faithful to a single woman his whole life.
He delights in art that exhibits the nude female form.
And truthfully, as a young woman, in his presence, I sometimes feel awkward.
Not in the sense that I feel like he is seeing me through an objectified sense, or that he would ever touch me inappropriately.
But sometimes, I feel scrutinized and seen in a different way than he sees my male cousins.
When my marriage gets brought up, I feel as though he is assessing my potential for housewife-liness.
And I feel that he sees my worth and valuation as being dependent on that.
In other words, I feel like he sees me more as another man’s future wife than as a person.
It’s a bit bizarre.
I guess I’m used to being perceived in such ways, after all, I am a woman.
It’s just strange coming from my own family.
From someone who used to buy me stuffed toys.
Someone who read books and poetry to me.
Someone who I used to think took me seriously.
Until I was a woman.
Thingified
I am Thing
I am other
I am Wife
I am mother
When I became a young woman.
When he sees how i Roar
I compel him to see
More
than just a
pretty face
pretty body
good little maid
his little wh*re
Leave a Reply