Raw Drip

At #4 on my list of 5 things I’ve learned since becoming a parent is what I like to sum-up as “The Superdad Double Standard”.  Allow me to explain…

Society scrutinizes women’s mothering skills through a high-powered microscope but dad’s are viewed through rose-colored, Vaseline-coated designer lenses

In a sandwich shop with Dick and the children several months ago two 60-something ladies approached as we were clearing our table and all but embraced my husband for being such an involved, caring father to his children. 

“Your children are SO lucky to have a father like you. You’re just wonderful with those kids!”, they gushed, eyes filled with adoration.  Meanwhile, as Dick was being given his father of the year award, I was trying to keep Adam from throwing ceramic plates into the trash, making sure Tabitha didn’t cook her head in the microwave, and wiping baked potato soup off the hood of my coat – all while keeping a calm, cool demeanor.

Having been someone who was raised without a father, I know that good ones are few and far between.  And I’m the first person to say that I feel very, very fortunate to have Dick as the father of my children.  He is fantastic.  I love him so much, couldn’t ask for a better partner and I hope to God he never leaves me.  BUT, if I have to hear one more time how lucky I am to have Dick be involved in CARING FOR HIS OWN CHILDREN – I may scream.  Seriously, I may just stop wherever I am and let out an ear-deafening, glass-shattering scream. 

Why is it that men are congratulated for doing the same crap women are expected to do everyday?  Why is the bar set so low that a man gets rave reviews just for showing up but a woman barely garners fleeting recognition for her accomplishments unless she’s gorgeous, thin, chic, sexy, healthy, smart, savvy, involved, energetic, loving, even-tempered, fastidious, diplomatic, organized, and sexually enthusiastic?  Why the double-standard?  And, why are fellow women the one’s always pointing out to us how lucky we are? 

The familiar 70’s era Enjoli perfume commercial jingle just keeps ringing through my head…

For years women have been bringing home the bacon, frying it up in a pan, and never letting their man forget he’s a man.  But what this now-quaint ad only touches upon is how the Enjoli woman, in addition to earning bacon, cooking it and making it with her man, was also doing all the laundry, caring for the children, doing all the household planning, tending to the housekeeping, paying bills, acting as a personal chauffeur, growing a career, and taking care of a million other things – all at the same time.  On top of all that, from a cultural perspective, the Enjoli woman actually had to fight for the privilege of shouldering these burdens all by herself – man optional. Sure, that woman “had it all” alright, but I bet you she would’ve liked to unload some of it from time to time. Surely no woman of any generation is flawlessly capable without the help of a good partner – or at least a good supply of uppers.

Therefore, I’ve come to believe that the constant reminders I get from the baby-boomer generation of women about how fortunate I am to have a partner in raising my children is more of a reflection on where we came from as a culture.  Undoubtedly, my female predeccessors were expected to be everything to everyone all the time and at great cost to themselves.  So perhaps some of them look upon my partnership with Dick and instead of praising the fact that we are stronger, more involved parents because we’re both committed to raising the best kids we possibly can, instead they see only a man who’s not ashamed to show some PDA with his kids, wipe snotty noses, or sing the ABCs in public and they feel compelled to congratulate him for getting it right. And, part of me is down with that line of thinking. The other part of me thinks that they should recognize that their own fight for equality wasn’t as much about liberating women from traditional gender roles as it was about demonstrating to the establishment that interdependence gets more accomplished with less pain and sacrifice for both genders.

So all you Enjoli women out there, please do me a favor. Start praising BOTH parents and stop singling out daddy for all the attention. Just because you can finally see him doing his part doesn’t mean that it still isn’t just 1/3 of what his partner is doing.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a list-oriented entry and with an impending cross-country move I need to keep things, shall we say, concise for the next few weeks.  So, I’ve decided to write about my top 5 mommy truths - life-lessons big and small that the experience of parenting has taught me, thus far.  To start off this week, counting down from #5…

Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t fall head-over-heels in love with your new baby.

Like many expectant women out there I spent endless hours watching Tivo’d episodes of “A Baby Story” on TLC.  This show follows a real-life couple as they bring a new baby into the world.  Each show climaxes with the joyous birth of the baby and is wrapped neatly by a follow-up visit with the new family at home where we learn that things are lovely and amazing.  Frequently, teary-eyed parents will look into the camera, holding baby in their arms, and attest to the instantaneous, deeply meaningful bond or spiritual love connection they established with baby from day one.

So during my ninth month of pregnancy with Adam, this was my dream, wish and expectation.  I’m going to be so in love with this baby… 

For me the love affair didn’t take hold with a sudden surge of maternal instinct or a feeling of heart-bursting happiness.  When Adam was born, I’d been waiting for him all my life but when he suddenly arrived it was a total shock to my system.  I actually resented him for the first few months.  I didn’t like someone needing me so completely. It scared me to death.  What if I screwed up?  Caring for a baby is a biggie.  I mean, my husband’s going to be p-i-s-s-e-d if I accidentally hurt or kill his kid.  Almost worse than being scared of the baby, I hated that everyone expected me to be thrilled and happy to sacrifice my life so completely to this unreasonable, demanding stranger.   

I’m not a mental health professional so I don’t know if what I went through was normal or typical.  I do know that I never wanted to harm Adam and I didn’t think about killing myself so it wasn’t post-partum depression in a child-drowning Texas mom or Brooke Sheilds celebrity-tell-all sort of way.  I just spent a few months being disappointed in myself for not being the mom that I thought everyone (including myself) always expected me to be.  I felt tremendously guilty for not being flooded with feelings of love for my baby; all I felt for him was obligation. 

Thankfully, our relationship did change and eventually we bonded with one another in a deep, flooded-with-feelings-of-love way.  In fact, the bonding continues each day.  And when Adam, now a kid, throws his arms around my neck and says “I wuv you mommy” as he kisses my cheek, there’s nothing, NOTHING, better in this world; it is the highest high you can acheive minus a good class 3 narcotic.  But getting here with Adam wasn’t easy. The person I needed to work with most was me.  Letting go of some guilt, making peace with the inevitable mistakes I’m going to make and most importantly, giving myself permission to stop worrying about absolutely everything was a hard bargain to strike with my perfectionist self.  This is the path no one ever told me I might have to take and it was really hard and it was really lonely and it was, surprisingly, worthwhile. 

But I will never, ever lie to a new mom and tell her that her mothering instincts will immediately kick in and that she’ll be flooded with all-consuming love for her new baby.  It’s great when love comes that easily, but maybe for some of us it’s a little more about the journey and little less about the destination.

Absent-minded, apathetic, distracted, diverted, heedless, oblivious, preoccupied, removed, scatterbrained, and unconscious.  These are just a few of the synonyms I find for “unobservant”.  Sadly, many of these synonyms describe my husband who is, quite possibly, the world’s most unobservant man. 

If I walked into a room stark naked wearing a rainbow clown ‘fro he MIGHT notice something different about me; probably not.  More than likely he’d be too distracted by my nakedness to consider the ‘fro.  Then again, after 20 years together, maybe I give myself (and my nakedness) too much credit.

I guess I just don’t get Dick’s unobservant behavior.  It seems obvious to me that having the ability to observe and react to changes in one’s environment should speak to a man’s primal need to be the protector of his family.  Shouldn’t his instincts guide him to be a keen observer of his surroundings?  Wouldn’t this ability help him to understand the scope of potential dangers and formulate preventative measures?  And yet Dick, like so many other men I know, seems to completely lack peripheral vision when it comes to his household.  He moves through life with a singular focus on food, sex, sleep and some other stuff that occasionally drifts into his field of vision.  Things like cleanliness and order go unnoticed and unacknowledged.  Could this ignorance be a side-effect of our modern world?  Could all the controls and conveniences of our surroundings – air conditioning, heating, appliances, and security devices – have stripped the modern man of sensitivity to his environment?

Every day life provides Dick with abundant opportunities to demonstrate his keen observation skills but he stubbornly adheres to his tradition of not noticing.  For me, a pile of molding, filthy dishes in the sink triggers the thought, “Gee. That looks gross.  I think I should wash those before spontaneous generation occurs.” The thought then triggers my brain to perform the required steps to mitigate the disgusting, sci-fi movie consequences of inaction.  Not so with Dick. Molding dishes in the sink may register in his brain as disgusting, but they don’t fire the synapses that generate movement out of his chair and over to the sink.

When I observe an over-flowing trash receptacle in the kitchen, I think to myself, “Yuck. That’s going to smell up the kitchen if I don’t get it outside…” followed promptly by action.  When I point out to Dick that the trash can is over-flowing and needs to be emptied, my observation is often met with surprise, ”Is it, really?  I’ll take care of it in about 20 minutes…”

Now, before you start thinking that he’s just lazy (and there’s certainly an element of that), I’d like to point out that the man really CANNOT find anything.  Most days I’m just pleased when he’s able to locate me and the children in the adjoining rooms of our home.  Statements like, “We must be out of ______ “, or “I can’t find ______, anywhere” are a daily occurrence in our household.  And God forbid he need to look for things in refrigerators, boxes, or cabinets! These storage mechanisms leave him completely befuddled.  After years of Dick telling me with certainty that an item we had a mere 24 hours ago no longer exists, I’ve had to ‘fess up to all those little storage secrets we women try to conceal from men.  Like the fact that most cabinets are 3 dimensional and it’s that tricky 3^rd dimension, depth, that allows for items to be stacked behind one another.   Rather than admit to his ignorance, Dick accuses me of trying to hide things from him.

I’m no psychologist, but I do know that turning Dick into an observant man is probably a lost cause by now.  At 36, he’s mastered the art of not noticing and I doubt a rainbow ‘fro, a swift kick, or a vigorous mental workout of “Where’s Waldo?” is going to retrieve him from his blissfully ignorant state. 

I’ve decided to shift my efforts to Adam.  I don’t care if it kills me, that boy is going to now how to find things by himself.  So as soon as he starts NOT noticing every little change in his environment (I’m guessing age 5, maybe?) I’ll start hiding his stuff from him.  My conspiracy to confuse will sharpen his mental faculties and keep him on his toes.  It’ll be good for him.  One day, he may even thank me for it – assuming he notices.