BLOGG # 79 A VERY PROFOUND HOME ECONOMICS LESSON

The other day my friend was commenting on the joys of cooking breakfasts while camping-especially whipping up baking powder biscuits. I was surprised and said I never make them as they are too difficult and always fail as I well remember from my hated home economics lessons in grade nine. My friend made his usual comment about “Academia complicating the most straightforward subjects” and that this was a typical example. This started me reminiscing on that hated course.

Mrs. G.-the home Ec teacher was pretty, refined with elegantly coiffured white hair and with piercing blue eyes which ruthlessly sharpened as she ripped out my basting over and over again on the ugly white apron that took me four months of sewing classes to finish . She represented to me the typical pretty mother that I did not have –my idol being the mother of Dick and Jane from the grade one book- a pretty curly haired woman in high heels, hat and gloves who was always going out shopping and a father who always wore a suit and tie and was forever coming and going in a nice car. My mother, on the other hand, was a sturdy woman in a house dress, a homemade voluminous apron, Lyle stockings and sensible shoes. She presented a dour face to the puzzling “English world, wore an uncompromising tight bun on the nape of her head and was even known to wear a peasant scarf on her head when she had a headache. My father wore flannel shirts, braces and  long underwear summer and winter.  We did not have roast beef for dinner but instead had “halupsti, kneuffel and cottage cheese kuchen” for dessert.

The chasm broadened as the home Ec class continued. It seemed that “keeping house” was a complicated and disciplined task. Monday was washing day, Tuesday was ironing day, Wednesday was baking day and so on.  We learned to set a many forked table and how to iron and correctly fold a white linen table cloth as big as a bed sheet. I was appalled at all this and decided then and there to never marry and concentrate on getting good marks and choose carefully a good career to sustain me in my future life.

The cultural chasm deepened and bottomed out when the teacher told us we had to invite our mothers to lunch. My consternation was great as I tried to picture my mother in the same room as this pink and white teacher. The dreaded day came and true to life, my mother came in her house dress and Lyle stockings and bun pulled severely back at the nape of her neck. She sat dourly and never uttered a word as my partner and I struggled with our meal-her mother of course being young and pretty.

We served undercooked baked potatoes, burnt pork chops and a runny desert called “lemon snow.” The ordeal finally ended and Mom and I walked home- my mother silent and I with a red face feeling shame because of my uncool mother.  At one point my mother stopped, turned to me broke her silence and said  “Do you mean to say  that this woman went to University and that is the best she could teach you?” The light bulb went on over my head! Of course  mother wasn’t uber-welmed with the teacher  she was underwhelmed. Mother was a very good cook who not only cooked well but everything she put on the table was raised, grown and slaughtered by her. Not only that but my snow white cotton underwear was sewn by her from bleached Robin Hood flour sacks! I understood at last the value of my mother, smiled and never was ashamed of her again.