The Women And The Men A Very Long Blog For The New Year

I grew up in a home with four sisters, two live-in women servants, two or more who came to work daily, and a widowed mother who directed all the house activities.  Because she grew lonely eating alone, she had us six siblings join her for meals.  Thus it was from the age of six on I was immersed utterly in a woman's world (my brother, seven years older, avoided the family life as much as he could with his persistent pursuit of athletic success at school).  Being crippled kept from the masculine playing field, and home reading books.  In my home I saw a powerful woman running a complicated show, who, however, only when necessary actually involved herself in the day to day details.  Apart from shopping. I often accompanied her to the various small shops which preceded the invention of the supermarket where we bought the different ingredients that made up our daily meals.  She alone knew the right cut of standing rib roast, the perfect ripeness of the pears and peaches; it poured down from her as a mystical aura.  Choosing food was sacred, something I took over when I lived with my four children in Rome years later, and shopped daily with my string bag.  Mother was my model of an adult human being--in command, respected (she was the president of the school board, a much socially invited faculty widow), although I knew that she thought males like my father and my uncles were what made the world go around, and that my brother would be a surgeon like his father, and I would be, well . . .the decision was out on that considering what a poufta I was clearly turning into (concern registered through brows knitted together in consternation, nothing said).  My first wife was truly brilliant, an unusual thinker, taken to makeup and glamor, and dropping out of college once she got a husband who would support her.  She had never thought of career, she'd thought of everything else, in what she read, looked at, walked through.  She was an original, a provocation, only like my mother in the sense you couldn't mistake her in the room.  She was happy to leave the idea of working for a living to men, thought it their problem, not hers. I was going to become the professor; she would sit home reading novels once I was settled into a job with my PhD.  Her death left an immediate and huge vacuum in my spiritual life, and indeed, economically, since she ironically had been supporting me through graduate school.  My second wife was a determined student architect when I met her, and I gloried in everything she told me about the field, and the efforts and career projections to which she introduced me.  Our ignorance of birth control and our constant sexual intercourse found us with four of the most adorable boys and girls one could want who have never  been less than wonderful and perfect even as they approach the grand age of sixty.  But they were not expected--there were no pills back then, condoms disdained, and diaphragms ineptly applied.  Four babies and one miscarriage in five years.  Changed abruptly our thoughts on life.  The first ten years we struggled with changing diapers, feeding babies, lugging home groceries, cleaning the house, washing the clothes, preparing classes, teaching classes, researching and writing a PhD dissertation.  Nothing in our parental homes prepared us for this dramatic change and inversion, indeed perversion of our lives, but we stuck it out.  Luckily our children were robust little darlings and always precious and fun even when tiresome burdens.  And when you are still in your twenties despite the constant pressures and distractions you can usually find some moment in the day for a quick shag, even if, when finally horizontal and the lights turned off in nightime's quiet, the tired brain says sleep often before the orgasms came to release the woes of the day.  But things righted themselves.  I took over a lot of housekeeping after the first ten years, the live in student helper was replaced by a mature cleaning lady who came by afternoons, my bride got out her pencils, and the professional clothes and went back to work.  It was pretty much my house now, with an assist from the mom.  It's a trajectory that is possible for any male/female couple, just first finding the right job situations.  The point of this long winded blog is that if a male will start out with a firm understanding that it takes two people to run a household then as circumstances change, he is prepared to take over more and more of the housekeeping and subtly managing his outside employment to fit these home needs.  I grant you that a machinist on the assembly line does not have the luxury of home working conditions that I had.  But I think for more men than can be imagined adjustments can be made; some might opt for the cleaning and dusting rather than my forte, the shopping and cooking.  The dialogue with the employer must be started day one, the idea must be planted in graduate school even before. It must be seen as normal that any male is fully capable of being a homemaker.  And the great thing is, and I felt  it at my granddaughter's wedding this summer as I looked at my middle aged kids, how close we were daddy and kiddies, the bonds of the experiences we had together, the hours we spent in the kitchen together, traveling in europe together, crying on each other's shoulder.  I am very very lucky.