While I was driving home from work yesterday I flipped through my Radio stations, which I don’t normally do,  and heard Mary J. Blige’s “Kitchen.”  Now… I’ve loved MJB for years (we’re talking back to the “What’s the 411″ days) but this song actually made me laugh.

In her classic way, Mary is telling us to never let another woman cook in our kitchen because she’ll also try to take your man.  Ummmm WHAT???  I’m Mozambican by birth and my fiance is Jamaican; and if I lived by that philosophy we’d be missing out on the beauty that is our respective cultures.  Not to mention I’d get my butt cussed out with a quickness for not helping because when family and friends gather, even casually, it’s quite a few mouths to feed.

I grew up with women coming over the house and bonding and communing in the kitchen.  All the ladies would be helping while laughing and swapping stories but at the end of it all a wonderful meal was prepared and we’d all sit together and enjoy it.  Sometimes they would bring their husbands or significant others and all the men would hang together, but that wasn’t always the case.  There were days when only one or two ladies would come over just to visit my mom for a Saturday afternoon or evening; and again, most of their time was spent in the kitchen.

I’ve incorporated that communal act of bonding in the kitchen into my own life.  Girlfriends have come to and cooked at my house and I’ve cooked in theirs.  The simplicity of it all is that my relationship is secure.  If you have a friend that is eyeballing your man every time you turn your back then keeping her out of the kitchen won’t matter one way or another.

The song really made me curious and I was wondering to myself how many women out there believe Mary’s philosophy on this?  To me, if you have to keep your friends away from your man in order to keep him then:

A.) You need a new man

B.) You need new friend(s)

or

C.) You need to drop them both.

Original post written by Candi on Cister Speak