Should You Help Your Man’s Mom In The Kitchen?

Gettyimages.com/Mother and daughter cooking together in kitchen

Leave it up to social media to take everyday occurrences and conflate them into a hot topic or turn it into a discussion where people are forced to choose sides. Honestly, these conversations wouldn’t be worth writing about if they didn’t speak so clearly to the issues we’re facing in society, particularly as Black women.

In this particular one, a man seeks to make a character or marriageability assessment about a woman based on another arbitrary behavior.

When I first read the tweet, I rolled my eyes but also thought yeah it would be a good idea to help mom’s in the kitchen…though it’s not something I’ve ever done. I don’t help my own mama in the kitchen. And if I offered my services to his mother— it wouldn’t be to impress him, it would be alleviate the pressure of cooking for multiple people.

But then a woman suggested this perspective.

https://twitter.com/phlygerl/status/1031005986532872194

Bow. The idea that you would watch your mother struggle or lounge on the couch as she prepares food for you and your girlfriend or wife is more indicative of your integrity as a son and a future partner than it is as a woman who likely doesn’t know her man’s mother all that well.

Not to mention, there are more than a few Black women who don’t want family…let alone strangers in their kitchen, getting in their way. It’s a very intimate space. And if you haven’t proven yourself yet, haven’t been invited to come into that space, then it’s best not to intrude.

Thankfully, someone told this wayward man this.

https://twitter.com/trillmagnolia/status/1031002711599267841

https://twitter.com/trillmagnolia/status/1031004050421108737

https://twitter.com/trillmagnolia/status/1031219142030852096

Amen. So many of us go out of our way to prove ourselves as worthy partners that we’re not collecting the information we need to determine this man’s relationship with the first woman he ever loved.

Not to mention other woman shared an instance where she went into a mother’s kitchen and it didn’t end so well for the mother or the relationship.

Honestly, these are just games and don’t speak to the value of a partner. What do you think about this topic? Should you help his mom cook or should you stay out of her kitchen?