The source of my tears these days

I’ve been chopping a lot of onions recently. I’m not alone in this. In the books I’m reading these days, the protagonists are also chopping onions.

“Lately I’ve gotten plenty of practice chopping onions,” Michael Pollan says in Cooked.

“La cebolla tiene que estas finamenta picada,” instructs the narrator in Laura Esquivel’s Como Agua Para Chocolate.

It’s not easy. Every time I chop onions I take care to sharpen my knife so I don’t crush too many sulfurous cell walls and I try not to get too close to the root end. Laura suggests putting some chopped onion on the crown of the head to prevent crying. It’s all to no avail. I cry anyway, and then I have to leave the kitchen to dry my tears.

“When chopping onions, just chop onions,” Michael says. Just give into the onion chopping and don’t complain.

I’ve had a lot of time to chop onions recently. I haven’t been complaining too much. Unlike cleaning, I do it willingly. Cooking feeds me and my husband.

I have a small group of friends here in Evanston. We’ve bonded over being partnered to stressed out PhD students, and being in a new city with limited employment prospects. For a group of people with so much free time, so very little housework gets done.

For us it’s a strange identity shift, going from being strong willed career minded women to stay at home wives. In the confines of the Northwestern University bubble, we are defined by our marriage to our spouses, who possess their own identities as students. I realise I’ve subconsciously adopted this change by going around and introducing myself as my husband’s wife to people who are utterly unconcerned by the university bubble.

We made this choice willingly. We could have stayed in our home countries, continued our own individual high powered careers and been happy in a completely different way.

A fortnight ago, Customs and Immigration sent me my Employment Authorisation Document. I’ve started applying to jobs around Chicago (and getting rejected boo hoo). It’s a somewhat sad moment, as my holiday from career responsibility has come to an end. It’s also a jarring moment, much like when a bungee jumper reaches the end of her rope and gets jerked back upwards. What company out there would want to hire the wife of a doctorate student? They’ll want to hire me for what I am, not for who I’m married to.

I’m getting back into thinking about my own aspirations these days. It’s easier to ignore it all and devote myself to my crafting hobbies and feeding my husband. Analysing and describing my skills also means enumerating all my deficiencies and insecurities. It irritates me, but I do it willingly. Working feeds my soul.

“Lo malo de lloras cuando uno pica cebolla no es el simple hecho de lloras, sino que a veces uno empieza, como quien dice, se pica, y ya no puerde parar.”

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I’ve taken it upon myself to learn Spanish since I’m in a country where there is a large population of Spanish speakers. Here are my inaccurate translations:

1. The onion has to be finely chopped.

2. Like Water for Chocolate

3. The problem with crying when one chops onions is not as simple as the fact of crying, but sometimes one starts, as they say, one chops, and then one cannot stop.