love and relationships

Cutesy Feminism


Sandra Tsing Loh annoys me even more than Caitlin Flangan.

I wrote a post about her over the summer or maybe it was earlier fall. She is the writer who got tired of her marriage but instead of working on her issues, she had an affair which precipitated her divorce. She has a live in relationship now – and I won’t go into why I think those types of set-ups are usually doomed from the onset – and she finds herself, again, the breadwinner.

Her recent piece in The New York Times (read it while you can, they are putting the pay wall back up soon) is on needing a wife. Because every good feminist needs a wife to offset the uselessness of her husband, the stuck in the 1950’s Reagan-era nostalgic Neanderthal caricature  sperm donor her biological clock blinded her into breeding with.

I get tired of hearing this worn out bit of nonsense.

Oh, it’s not nonsense that while women have gained full-time employment outside their homes in near parity numbers with men over the last three decades, men have not picked up the home-making or child care slack at the same rates. In fact it’s not even a decent comparison when one looks at the numbers.

What is tiresome is the whining.

I hate to quote Dr. Phil here, but the man made a valid point when he said. and repeatedly,

“You teach people how to treat you.”

If your mate is not shopping, cooking, cleaning or caring for offspring in a share and share alike way, say something about it. Tell him/her what you expect. Why you expect it. Work out a compromise that is agreeable to you both.

But men can’t be reasoned with, women argue. And they should just see that work that needs doing and that I can’t do it all. What is wrong with them?

Nothing. Just as there is nothing wrong with women who don’t seem able to get their minds around the fact that men, despite evolution, still can’t read our minds or make the correlation between housework and foreplay.

I was the breadwinner in my first marriage and my late husband did the cooking. In fact, he insisted that grocery shopping be a bonding experience for us – something that made me crazy because he had to go up and down every single aisle in the store whether we needed to or not. Shopping took less time when I was a single mother wrangling a toddler who refused to sit in the cart than it did with her father.

He would have done the laundry too but his indifference to sorting my colors and materials would have totaled my wardrobe.

He got mad at me when I did yard work. I had summers off, being a teacher, and time to do it that he lacked. But he found yard work soothing and exercised his gender veto.

Our motto from the beginning was that nothing be stewed over. If someone had an issue, discussions needed to happen.

“I can’t read minds,” he told me.

Now I stay home. It’s just the way things worked out. Rob would be just as happy – happier really – if I was bringing home the bread instead of shopping for it.

If the majority of the cooking, baking, cleaning, shopping etc. falls on me, it’s because I have the time. Rob willingly chips in, and even more often, simply does things without my having to mention it at all. Laundry, cleaning (he does the bathrooms because my allergies don’t mix with harsh cleaning products).

And mind-reading is off limits, though we are so alike that sometimes I bet we could do it if we just practiced a bit.

You trained your husbands well, women will marvel. But truthfully I did nothing aside from open my mouth and express my thoughts on how a marriage should work. I did it more often with Will than I do with Rob, but I was Will’s first wife and Rob had 27 years of partnering tucked away in his resumé when I met him.

There are no abbreviations. Like children, spouses assess the lay of the land and act accordingly. Men and women. Dr.Phil’s hackneyed home spun advice is valid.

The whole “needing a wife” thing is cliché. What women need is to speak up, and probably screen men a bit more in the beginning to ward off that buyer’s remorse some many end up with.

Ghosts of Our Lives Past


Wednesday morning I was waked by a finger poke to my side. It wasn’t painful but meant to get attention. I was startled but thought it was Dee, even though she wouldn’t come into our bedroom at such an early hour. We trained her long ago to treat our bedroom as off-limits. I had an open bedroom policy for her when she was little and it was just her and I, but once Rob and I coupled, I decided it was time to go old school like my folks. We kids weren’t allowed in their bedroom under pain of pain. I can remember standing at the door in the middle of the night, sick as a dog and still not daring to put so much as my big toe in their room without permission.

Dee knocks, a very soft rapping, or if she is unwell, she calls from her room.

I half sat up and found no one.

They’re back, I thought.

The house has been quiet and empty of spirits for a while. That feeling of being watched had disappeared after the cat incident on Rob’s birthday. But that poke in the side woke more than just me.

I didn’t mention it to Rob. It was just a poke. There was nothing behind it other than a call to attention, and I figured I would know what I was supposed to be paying attention to so enough. Ghosts, I have come to discover, are resourceful.

The next morning was 6AM Ashtanga. Yeah, I get up at five and drag my sleepy self out into the cold, drive into town and pretzelize myself with a vigorous yoga workout for an hour. Rob, sweetheart that he is, sets his alarm to wake me because my alarm is alarming and lost since May when we ripped up the hardwood in the bedrooms to prepare for new, smoothly delicious looking hardware (which is down now and gorgeous in case your mind was inquiring).

Shortly before five, I hear the soft knocking on the door that I associate with Dee. I am instantly awake and waiting for her voice, but I hear nothing. I sat up and looked toward the door, thinking that I would see light. The doors are back up but the trim isn’t and if Dee’s light is on, I can see it.

It was dark.

I laid back, thinking that the alarm should be going off soon and pondering when I heard the stairs creak. Our stairs are in needing of a good screwing down and make quite a distinctive sound when anyone comes up or goes down. This time, the creaks were descending and as Rob’s alarm went off, I found I was not in a hurry to follow.

Now I have never seen a spirit/ghost/whatever your preferred pc term is in the time I have been living here. Heard a voice. Being shoved and poked and watched, but haven’t seen anything.

“What is that overhead?” Rob asked.

I looked straight up and there was a white light twirling just about our pillows. It reminded me of  similar experience Rob had in the early morning hours last year when we were in the midst of dying fathers through the fall and end of the year. The light swirled like dust caught in a sunbeam.

“I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t tell him about the knock on the door. Mostly because I didn’t think the sign was for him at the time.

Reluctantly I crawled out of bed and headed downstairs. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d seen someone in the living room or office at that point but saw nothing but dark. I put on my yoga togs, had some tea and toast and headed into town with a bit of trepidation because the early morning traffic that races by our hamlet on the way to the plants is careless and will someday kill someone. I crawled through the intersection and drove in no great hurry to town.

The street where the yoga studio is located is deserted at just before six in the morning. The building is right next to a bar/flophouse where the clientage run mostly to people who flirt with homelessness on a monthly basis. I have been heckled and ogled and generally creeped out by the inhabitants to the point that I avoid walking directly past it, so I park right in front of the studio.

Yoga passed and I did not fall over from exhaustion but I was tired. I’d lost a lot of sleep with Dee’s being ill. She had been up in the night and I was running on not quite six hours. In days of yore, I could do 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night for weeks on end but these days my body will not stand for the abuse. It literally punishes me with all manner of threat of collapse.

After yoga, I climbed into the truck, wondering still about what I was supposed to be paying attention to. The radio was set to the XM 70’s station and the song that came up first was Cheap Trick’s I Want You to Want Me. I first heard that song the summer before high school. The next door neighbor’s had a grand-daughter visiting from California who was my age. She attached herself to me without my permission and I was forced to entertain her for the month she was there. She was vapid, willfully illiterate and thought poking sticks at the local in crowd was a fun pastime. Her only redeeming quality was a collection of the latest hits on cassette tape. She had a Cheap Trick cassette that she let me borrow and copy which is where I first heard this song. Decades later, I marry Rob and come to discover that this same song was “their song”. That love song that all couples have. The one that played when they first met or danced or kissed or had sex or simply dogged them through their first weeks/months together.

Now I am confused. Why would I get a song sign from my husband’s late wife?

Later in the morning during one of the several phone conversations Rob and I have during the day (we used to email back and forth all day when I was in Iowa and he was here – now we call each other), I told him about the poke and the knock on the door. He had no explanation, but later called me back to say that perhaps our house was s conduit for recently departed spirits. An older gentleman down the alley had died recently and maybe it was him.

Loathing that idea very much, I told Rob about the Cheap Trick song.

“Well, that shoots my theory to hell, ” he said.

Which was fine with me because I do not want to live in a conduit for the recently deceased.

That evening as he was going through his blog reader, he happened upon the posting of The Zoo for the day and what was their song video du jour? Yeah, Cheap Trick.

There has been nothing since. I don’t know if we were just getting Christmas greetings or if it was a heads up. And you might wonder why Shelley would contact me first instead of Rob but it’s not much different from Rob getting dream visits from my late husband as opposed to Will showing up in my dreams. Our passed on spouses appear to be quite comfortable with our choices in second mates.

It’s all very fitting for the season I suppose. Very Dickens. We haven’t neglected Christmas here this year but it has been rather lackadaisical and low-key in terms of preparation. I believe this is an outgrowth of our discomfort with the materialism though.

If I should discover deep meaning in the visitations and signs, however, I will let you know.

Birthday Goodness


So today is my birthday and I am forty-six – in case you wondered. I didn’t awake feeling old, but I did have a headache. It’s all the Ashtanga this week. Yoga is not usually an intensely warming activity but Ashtanga employs a breathing method designed to make a person sweat. Two days in a row and I am dry as toast.

By 8 AM this morning, I’d been bathed in birthday goodness though. Two cards. One from Rob that brought tears to my eyes because it was so sweet and romantic and just all around awesome. The other from Dee which she added her own sentiments too in her own words. She is much prouder of what she writes than what is in the card to begin with.

Before Dee caught her bus, she and Rob gave me my first gift – well, only gift as nothing else had arrived in the post yet (Rob shops online).

They led me into the living room where a huge box was draped with a blanket.

“I told Dee that this was something you really wanted,” Rob said.

Dee looked dubious and when I pulled off the blanket, I knew why. It was a mixer. Not a seven-year old’s idea of a great present.

But it sure was mine!

A Cuisinart 7 quart, stainless steel, nearly industrial strength mixer. It even has a cover to keep the flour from coating the rest of the kitchen, which is an issue when baking scones and for an asthmatic like myself.

“Now, I can entertain my wild ideas about selling baked goods at the farmer’s market next summer,” I said.

“You are becoming quite the bohemian,” Rob said.

Yeah, dreaming of a yoga studio and selling edibles made from scratch with an emphasis on nutrition that is sadly lacking in commercial bakeries these days. Pretty soon I’ll be wearing flip-flops year-round and studying Wicca and working on a degree in natural healing. Okay, I wouldn’t be wearing flip-flops. It’s the toe thing. I don’t know how people stand that thing between their toes. But I am a leap closer to my goal of shunning cultural norms as they are written in concrete and paved over by asphalt.

“You can have your office up above my studio and I will sell baked goods and tea in between classes,” I said.

“And I will be this fat bastard who has to roll around on his industrial strength chair because of all your baking,” he only half-joked because he has sweet teeth.

Oh, and today is my first payday at Care2. They’ve published 7 of my articles. Five this week. It’s not a lot of money. In fact, it’s barely any money at all after Uncle Sam snatches back his war surtax, but it’s still sweet.

And, my birthdays isn’t even over yet. Rob took off a half-day to have lunch and spend the afternoon together. We have a sitter for the evening. Birthday goodness abounds.

AND,

there is still Christmas coming round the corner as my husband understands the importance of keeping my birthday goodness separate from my Christmas goodness. Not a lot of people understand the significance of this to those of us born in the neighborhood of Jesus Christ. I spent years – decades – putting up with the combo presents from friends and even some family. Being born within three-ish weeks on either side means a life time of people rationalizing their cheapness at your expense.

But, today is sunshine and showers of love and a brand new – totally awesome beyond my ability to truly convey – mixer. And it’s only 9:22 AM.