How Kitchens are Like Penises and Why Women’s Feet Keep Getting Bigger

I have kitchen envy. I am guessing it is something like guys experience with penis envy. Only it isn’t that my kitchen is too small and I wish I had a bigger one, but rather that my kitchen is actually too big for me. And not too big in the sense that I have so much space that I am pirouetting around the island while I chop onions, but, too big in the sense that I can’t reach anything. Let’s back up a minute.

When I was 14 years old, I grew to be five feet tall. Then I stopped. Of course, in my Italian family where most of the women are excited to say they are five feet, three inches tall (which is at least four inches taller than my grandmother), it seemed pretty normal that I never grew past 60 inches. My feet never got any bigger, either.

Consequently, my whole life I have heard, “You are so short!” and “Oh my gosh! You have the tiniest feet! I bet you find great deals on shoes.” That last statement comes from women who wear the average shoe size of 8 ½ or 9, which according to a recent study, says women’s feet are getting bigger because we eat too much junk food.

Now I am wondering: if women’s feet are getting bigger as a result of all the junk food we are consuming, wouldn’t that mean that men’s feet are also getting bigger? And, you know what they say about the size of a man’s foot.

Size. This brings me back to my kitchen. All the cabinets are really deep and up really high, relative to me anyway, because my kitchen was built for an average size adult. And, all five feet of me, except maybe my boobs, which I also inherited from the short, but voluptuous Italian women in my family, is anything but average size. So last night, as I was emptying the dishwasher and trying to shove all the mixing bowls into a deep corner cabinet above my head, I started to freak out. Then I flashed back to the other day in my friend Cathi’s kitchen.

Cathi has an AMAZING kitchen. As she gave me the tour on my first visit to her new home, I was in awe of her kitchen. “Look!” Cathi said excitedly, as she opened a drawer, “Everything has a place. All my pots and pans are so organized!”

Indeed they were. Her new home has a custom-built kitchen with all these soft close, or soft touch drawers – whatever you call them. There are all these dividers in the cabinets with racks and spaces for everything, and they don’t slam shut when you let go of the door. You just gently push with one finger and, ahhh, the drawer quietly closes itself. Like an automatic hatchback on a fancy car.

In addition to making noise when I slam them, my cabinets are so cavernous, that sometimes things just disappear in the back of them and in the middle of July, when I am standing on a ladder looking for my favorite margarita glasses, it never fails that instead of a margarita glass, I pull out a decorative Christmas candy dish that I haven’t seen since I opened wedding gifts 13 years ago.

I envy that Cathi can find her margarita glasses instantly. I covet her soft touch drawers and organized cabinets with all their specially made compartments. Perhaps to console me a bit, Cathi did mention that she really wishes she had a bit more counter space. Blah, blah, blah. 

When it comes to kitchens and penises, it’s not always size that counts. Maybe, just as I am fortunate enough to get cute shoes on sale because nobody else wears size 5 ½ or 6, I should also savor my abundant counter space and forget about the inaccessibility of the cabinets. After all, isn’t how you can best use the kitchen you were given really the key to any woman’s happiness?