How would you like your soup? (Or should I just throw it in your face?)

About once a month, we’d get a visit from my father’s parents. Grandpa and Mimi had a very unique relationship. He ignored her. And the more he did, the more she persisted with him, anxious for any – even negative – attention from him. Of course, the more she did this, the more he ignored her.
Before they arrived, Mom would brew up a delicious batch of clam chowder or sausage and peppers. Her soup made the house smell like a friendly pub and I took great joy in spicing it up with salt and pepper as I’d walk by to check on her progress. Frantically, we’d clean, the bitter taste of Windex mixing in the stale air, to make sure things were perfect for the visit. Leaving the kitchen floors for last, Mom would always be sure to cut up cheese and pepperoni or make shrimp cocktail for stow-away snacks for their impending tag-team Canasta games.
When Mimi, with her purple nose, would peak her head in the door, I always smiled and was glad to see her. But when Grandpa followed behind, my throat would get dry and something inside of me would grow very quiet and angry. I knew what Grandpa would do before he did it. He’d order me to get him a bowl of soup and poor him a drink. He would never ask any of my brothers, who may be closer by or not in the middle of something. No, he was insistent, my mother should relax and I, being the only other female hostess in the house, should dedicate the rest of my night to being at his becking call and serving him. I felt like someone should be giving this man a bell and letting me go chew on grass in the backyard while I waited for his next command. I wasn’t so fond of Grandpa.
Fortunately, Dad didn’t inherite all of this sexist thinking and genuinely liked my being his “little girl.” While he often used my mother as a translator to explain hormones or tears out of the blue, he generally tried to take an interest in me and my activities. But when he couldn’t, he found other things we could do together.
One such big project was installing a handmade stone water fountain in the pool area when I was about 12 years old. Being the only one long and skinny enough to scale under the pool to tighten pipes, Dad and I spent days with his strong hands on my ankles as I held my breath and finagled the piping for him. The pride on his face was apparent to a blind person and I was not above squinting to get an even better look. For months, he bragged my brothers about how a girl had done that. How a girl had been the one to fix the plumbing situation in the pool area. I was overjoyed. It was then that I became convinced I could do anything. It was a feeling I took with me into my adulthood. I’ve often wondered if Dad knows how he played a role in developing this part of me – both the negative and positives.
I know Dad is hardly even close to a feminist. He doesn’t have a left wing bone in his body and certainly does not have room for women who’d be suffrages by the likes of Alice Paul. I, however, admire these woman to the core and have made a concerted effort to fill my heart with their stories and histories. I minored in Women’s Studies at Keene State, enthralled by my first Woman’s Studies professor – a lesbian from the University of New Hampshire summer school program. I vowed to have a daughter one day, a strong daughter, and to teach her to have a mind of her own and to never serve soup on command! Likewise, I promised myself that if I ever had sons, I would not allow them to believe it was okay to treat a woman that way. I have found that the promises I seem to keep throughout my life are the ones I’ve made in reference to the boys. And this is a promise I’ve been able to keep quite easily.