[“I was off to see Eric, my on-and-off boyfriend of three years. He was having friends ’round to celebrate moving out of his parents’ home and into his first apartment. Halfway through our ride there, my Nokia cell phone rang. Eric was on the other end. A string of panicked sentences made their way through the airwaves.
“I don’t know how to cook the chicken! I don’t know what to do! People are arriving in an hour! It was a stupid idea to have people over! I should never have done this! This was your dumb idea!”
Gray streets of Brussels flashed by. I quietly listened and took in the information. Gradually, a picture started to form in my head. Eric, a man who believed that meals were not real meals if they did not contain protein of a formerly alive kind, had bought chicken to make for dinner but did not know how to cook it. I had been a vegetarian since I was eight. Clearly, I didn’t know how to cook chicken, either. I was pretty sure this had been his initiative, not mine. But that’s not what I said.
“There is absolutely no need to worry. It’s all going to be completely fine. I can make the chicken when I arrive. Couldn’t be easier. What else do you have in the fridge? Have you prepared anything?” I asked.
Dessert, the answer came back, a little calmer this time. If I felt exasperation, I didn’t let the feeling live for more than a nanosecond. Patience, reassurance, and love were what I knew I should give, and that’s what I expressed.
“Amazing,” I chirpily said into the phone. “I love it when you make that. Okay. Don’t worry about the rest. I will figure something out to go with the chicken and make some sides when I arrive. I have pesto with me. We can do something with that. So delicious.”
His mood shifted: I could almost hear it lift. He was totally calm now. The panic had gone. His voice was slower; it had gone back to a cadence that suggested a more relaxed, happy state of mind.
“Are you good? Sorry you had that scare,” I continued, bringing my task to a secure conclusion. “I will be there very shortly.”
He muttered acquiescence, possibly thanks. “I can’t wait to see you,” I finished, and pressed the button to end the call.
I put the phone back in my lap, my shoulders dropped, and I breathed out, letting go of some of the anxiety I had been suppressing and feeling relief that I had contained the situation. In my head, I hadn’t even arrived at the part of how I was going to cook this dinner. I had absolutely no idea what to do with raw chicken, the very fleshy peachy vision of which was enough to make my stomach turn. But that wasn’t the point. The point was rather getting my boyfriend to feel good, calm, and collected again. What was important—I had known immediately upon picking up the phone—was conveying that the situation was under control to him, even if it wasn’t yet. The concrete cooking activity ahead was truly secondary.
I looked at my mother. She smiled. That’s when I remember her saying it: “You are an excellent man manager. You handled that brilliantly. I couldn’t be more impressed.”
Man manager, I repeated back to myself after she said it. I turned my body in the passenger seat toward her. I had never heard the term, and I had no conscious idea it was something I should be striving toward, let alone something I had been performing. But I felt the glow of the compliment, and some kind of a shift in her words, a complicity, perhaps even a new form of respect.
We moved on to discuss ways to cook chicken and what to do with the pesto. She told me about timing and oven temperatures, and even how I should handle the chicken to cut it. My mother incidentally also didn’t eat meat, for health reasons, but she had learned how to prepare it and cook it to make the stomachs of the people around her happy.
As unremarkable as it may sound, I never forgot the pesto chicken man manager exchange between my mother and me. Today, it’s clear to me that this is the first time I can pinpoint the emotional labor I performed, as a part of my gender and to the benefit of a man, explicitly being acknowledged and elevated.”]
rose hackman, from emotional labor: the invisible work shaping our lives and how to claim our power, 2023
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