Posted on 06/18/2016 11:57:16 AM PDT by nickcarraway
We four women are well into our second drink at the bar when the war on men begins.
“ … So he walks in ten minutes before the guests are supposed to arrive, still in his gym clothes, and asks if there’s anything he can do,” says my friend, a Long Island stay-at-home mother of three. “The table’s already set, the kids are already in bed, so I just tell him to get ready. And where do I find him five minutes later? Munching on the apps!”
“Oh my God, at least he asked to help,” sniffs another mom. “My husband wouldn’t notice we’d moved unless I told him.”
I chime in: “I know! I’m sure the baby will still be up when I get home. ‘She was playing,’” I say sarcastically, as if imitating my husband.
The joke — that my husband is a wuss and an imbecile who can’t be counted on to put our daughter to bed — kills just like I know it will. Never mind that it’s based on a largely false picture of my marriage, a picture I regularly dine out on among my friends in what is admittedly a betrayal (however innocent) of my husband. If it is, in fact, sometimes true that my 10-month-old daughter is up late when I get home, it’s not because my husband is an idiot but because he favors a gentle approach to bedtime (playing guitar to lull her to sleep). Whereas I, usually tired and impatient at the end of the day, often allow her to cry it out. Expedient? Yes. But I’m no shoo-in for Parent of the Year.
And yet I still throw my partner under the bus. To my friends. To mothers in day care. In secret mom groups on social media, which are ostensibly devoted to parenting tips but often devolve into complaint sessions about Dear Hubby (or DH, one of the various, sometimes snarky, acronyms peppering parenting boards, which also include DS, DD, and, occasionally, DW).
Here’s a representative example from a fellow mom:
“DH decided to take the baby for a walk this morning and I came home to find my one-month-old slumped over in her carriage. Poor kid probably hit her head on every bump. Then I discover he’s got her wearing two different socks….” An especially poetic entry:
Husband - * promises to do dishes* * watches TV* *falls asleep” *gets up to pee* *tells me not to remind him because he knows* […repeats 1-4] “I’m just really dizzy, I feel like I should go to bed…” Me—“Oh totally fine. You can do the dishes tomorrow.” [picture of tony but messy kitchen, sink filled with detritus]
Fun visual:
The specifics of the complaints may differ, but the discontent is the same: My (pick one) lazy/inept/thoughtless husband is a real idiot/jerk/asshole who doesn’t have a clue about taking care of our kids/house/life, while I, the martyred wife and mother, have to do everything.
Husband-bashing is such an integral part of the mommy boards that the posts require no introduction, much less grammar or spelling:
“When your kitchen is a complete mess because your hubby cooked your bday dinner. I just want flowers. [sneering emoticon]” “When you’re almost 41 weeks and your SO still asks you what’s for dinner every night. And I just finished baking cookies for his mom for her birthday then cleaned the kitchen. But he needs to lie down because he threw his back out. And when I say leftovers he’s like [sardonic face emoticon]. “My husband has never cleaned the bathroom(s) the entire time we have been together. I’ve asked and he said he would then I’ve caught him trying to clean the toilet with toiletpaper –yea that ended quickly.” It goes on and on. I won’t mention the names of the bulletin boards lest I find myself banned. But for fans of the genre, there’s also a nifty a Facebook page.
It’s true that on average women still do more housework than men, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, a situation that has remained more or less unchanged for the last 15 years.
But even women who are lucky enough to be in equitable partnerships sometimes find themselves trashing our partners.
“I try not to do this,” said Katherine Stanley Obando, a mother of a 3-year-old who lives in Costa Rica. But when she realized en route to school that her husband forgot to pack the diapers in the preschool bag, she slipped. “When I dropped her off, a whole group of moms was chatting right at the entrance with the teacher in charge. I announced to her — and therefore the group — that I had no diapers with me for the day, and it was because my husband had packed the bag. This was true, but I instantly thought, If we are a team, was that really necessary? Why did I have to say that? Of course, all the moms clucked understandingly.”
When Jeannine Walls’s two kids were little, she thought she’d automatically have a million mom friends. But she found it difficult to bond with her peers, she recalls, because she actually thought her husband was okay. “Going to the playgrounds around the neighborhood, I’d always run into other moms who would sit around the sandbox and complain about their spouse,” she says. “I remember the circle coming around to me, and I kind of started and said, ‘No real complaints here!’ and the other moms looked at me like I was a freak of nature.”
No doubt there are some awful husbands out there. But there’s also a lot of exaggeration. The question is why.
“When moms get together and complain, it’s almost like group therapy,” says Lisa Barr, author and editor of the popular suburban parenting blog Girlilla Warfare.
“It’s part of the sisterhood. A woman feels angry and alone and shares her pain because she needs to,” says Shelley, a U.K.-born journalist living in Tel Aviv. “… So you try to make her feel that she isn’t married to the only schmuck in town — and most times you’d prefer to share how your guy is a million times better than hers, but where will she go with that?”
Where, indeed? Imagine if, when I was at the bar with my girlfriends, I’d said, “Oh, my husband’s at home with the baby— ” be careful to never, ever apply the sexist term “babysitting” to dad, since no one ever says it about mom “ —and he’ll probably clean the house and cook me dinner, too!”
That’s the truth, but expressing it would have stopped the conversation dead in its tracks, not to mention gotten me barred from the next gathering, where the conversation would presumably turn to me and what a condescending showoff I am.
To be honest, I’m just insecure about my own failings. Thanks to his army training, my husband can clean the house and organize it far better than I can, even though I’m the primary caregiver. (We are both freelancers, but since his marketing career is more lucrative than my writing, I’m with the baby most of the day.)
I’m not the only one cloaking my lack of confidence by slagging my partner. “In the beginning of our marriage, he was a better, more skilled cook and had patience to calm children in the middle of the night,” my friend Amy Wolfe, a mother of four from Brooklyn, admits of her husband. “Once we were staying at friends’ for the weekend, and the wife commented how amazing it was that my kids called for my husband before me. I immediately searched for some domestic fault he had and pointed it out.”
Still, we appear to be in the minority. Most moms are quite certain they do a far better job than their hapless husbands — guys who are competent in their careers but are useless around the house purportedly unable to fulfill a simple “honey-do.”
“Women tell their husbands, ‘I’d like you to do this, this, and this,’” Barr says, noting that they often treat their husbands like the babysitter or nanny, but they’re pissed when he doesn’t follow the exact instructions — bath, book, bed.
Are men actually idiots? Are these guys who manage to run their own businesses or show up to someone else’s workplace and competently carry their careers suddenly unable to slap a PB&J sandwich together just because they got married and had kids? Or are we just taking our cues from pop culture?
“In recent years, the image of the manly man hero, breadwinner and outdoorsman have been displaced by images of men as bumbling husbands and dumb dads,” Thomas Bivins writes in a chapter titled “Stereotypes in Advertising” in the book Persuasion Ethics Today (Routledge 2015). “The usually humorous portrayals of men, particularly in home settings, show them as confused and incompetent and in need of rescue by a calm and reasonable mom.”
Yes, they’re all Ray Romanos, Al Bundys, and Homer Simpsons, and we’re the frustrated wives, rolling our eyes at their ineptitude, excoriating them behind their backs.
“Dear Husband: You’re Not Dying, You Have a Cold,” read a recent article on yourtango.com, just one in a series of “Dear Husband” pieces deploying the stinging sarcasm that is typical of the husband-bashing genre.
On one board, a woman whose spouse was sick for a week texts his wife to let her know he finally slept through the night. As she writes:
“Wow that’s awesome, I haven’t slept though the night in over 2 years!!!!! So yea, tell me one more time that you slept through the night and how amazing it was [[angry emoticon]]” Here’s the problem. I “liked” that post. And I related to it. Sometimes I too want to kill my husband because he can sleep through the night rather than having to wake up to nurse. But I shouldn’t complain. If what everyone else says and writes about their husbands is true, mine is a prince.
And yet: He doesn’t actually know what food to pack in the baby’s bag. He puts her diaper on so loosely, she poops all over the crib. He leaves the precious breast-milk bottle out to spoil after putting her to bed. Etc. And so I complain. Because I’m tired. And while I love being a mom, and I know my husband’s a terrific partner, parenting can be hard. I need to take all this frustration out on someone. And it cannot be the kid.
Then again, I can’t take it out on my husband either. Not to his face. Not if I want to stay married. So I go out for a drink and lambaste him to my mommy cohort — never mind that he could probably say far worse about me.
Then again, what are DWs for?
You must hang with the most boring, whipped guys on earth. You might want to do a DNA check, because they sound like disgusting wimps.
And frankly, none of the guys I know would want some twinky dork like you for a friend.
By the way, there's a difference between complaining about your spouse and "slagging off" your partner. If you want to live some make-believe life where your wife is perfect, go for it. I -- and my friends -- live in the real world.
I think she was disappointed that the kids were fine, the abode was clean, the dishes were washed, etc.
She was really worried how my daughter would react when she went back for the final 3 weeks. As we watched the plane taxi on to the runway, she asked me, "is that mama's plane?" I replied that it was, and she responded with,
"WELL THERE SHE GOES!!!" My FIL was with us, and we both busted out laughing. I didn't say much about it when my wife called, just told her I promised her a trip to McDonalds.
I can't imagine the daily struggles of a single parent, it takes a mom and a dad to raise a kid. As I see it though, it seems that men marry their wives for who they are, and women get married to change her man for the better, whether they need it or not.
Discouraging poaching to ‘female friends’ isn’t the same thing as treating him like dirt.
Easy solution to this problem is simply not having any female friends.
I’m hoping to go first. :)
Today’s current crop of mother’s is perhaps the most self absorbed, self centered group of women ever. They bring most of their problems on themselves. No sympathy for them.
Lousy wife, lousy mother but she makes good money writing about it
so she’s got that going for her.
Men have a whole different list of what they judge their wives. But good wives should demean their husbands to others.
Frankly, it’s not so bad...until they work in the office with you.
...or, I suppose, begin to believe it.
When the men try to help, they are often brow-beaten about the substandard way the first attempt was done until the mother, in exasperation, just takes over and does it herself.
Message sent to the husband: You’ll never do this to my expectations so why bother trying? The husband quickly learns if he does a crappy job, she won’t call on him the next time.
Self-fulfilling prophecies all around.
She then gets the ego boost that she’s a better parent than he is and must truly be the better person.
Here’s an idea. Go to HIS job one day and be asked out of the blue to do part of his job with very little instruction and no patience then get lectured on every little thing that wasn’t done the way everyone else wants it done but you weren’t told and see how stupid and clueless you look.
That’s what mothers often do to fathers and then they can go off and tell the other mothers how inept or useless hubby is. All because she set him up for failure.
If you really want Daddy to do a better job around the house, praise and reward his work. Give small, incremental correction if he’s not doing it right and thank him for any extra effort shown above the last time.
Or you can just continue the martyr act.
As a young girl, I saw this very thing happen to our next door neighbor. Nice lady, two kids, husband that was so talented and likable, wonderful father, etc.
The wife was friends with the single mother up the street.
One day, the husband announces he wants a divorce. Left them and married the woman up the street.
His children NEVER forgave him, and NEVER spoke to him again for the rest of his life.
It was sad, though, because in his later years, he became a beautiful Christian, but brought to his grave the heartache of what he had done to his wife and children.
Women: If they didn’t have < expletive deleted > there’d be a bounty on them.
We learned long ago, that people who talk about other people, are talking about you the minute before you arrive, and the damn minute your are gone.
Each others' backs ? We got 'em
That’s the way to do it!
Agreed.
The worst thing that I can think of to say about my beautiful wife is that I wish she’d pick up after herself better. And.... Truth be told, she’d almost certainly say the same about me.
Otherwise, I love her more than the day we met, and am thankful for the time I have with her.
If these husband bashing harpies are so unhappy, they should spend more time improving their relationship and less time working to destroy it.
I think that these mom’s specifically, but also many other folks, have spent too much time reading what today’s “writers” are putting out. Journalists, screenwriters, column writers and bloggers have all seemingly traded witty humor for snark, sarcasm and the ninja-like insult.
When I find myself reading something and my reaction is “Did they REALLY just say that??”, I know that I should just put that crap down and walk away. There is entirely too much snark in the world without my eating it up and passing it on.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Funny, just this week I was told my wife and her workmates were trying to one-up each other on the great things their husbands do. I was “fortunate” that this week I noticed that the entire right side of the upper kitchen cabinet was leaning forwards. Luckily, the unit was attached to the smaller unit over the stove, because I discovered that of the four screws supposedly holding up the right unit, two (one at the top and one at the bottom) were screwed into gypsum wallboard. The one into the stud at the top was completely broken off, so the entire unit was being held to the wall by one screw. All of our daily dishes (apart from glasses) were vulnerable because some schmuck — before we bought the house 13 years ago — had done a completely incompetent renovation.
Once we cleared the dishes out, I lifted the cabinet back into position with a car jack, drilled pilot holes into the stud, screwed in half a dozen new screws, and cleaned up the mess — all within an hour.
And I don’t think my wife even won the competition. Some other husband installed a ceiling fan at two in the morning because the family was preparing a guest room for the arrival of a disabled elderly relative.
Sometimes guys are actually useful to have around.
It’s a good thing that you noticed what was happening. Someone could have been badly injured.
Every married man knows that his wife is there to bust his chops, that is what keeps him walking the line.
There's a great old Canadian TV comedy series called "The Red Green Show" that always featured a segment where Red would engage in some funny,outrageous project to solve some simple problem around the house...DIY-style.The project would always fail but Red would always believe it succeeded.At the end of the segment he'd always say,with a self-satisfied smile on his face,"remember,if the women don't find ya handsome at least they can find ya handy".
Many episodes are on youtube...funny stuff.
This insanity is based on a key falsehood:
“Homemaking is a non-skilled job, not a career opportunity and any idiot could do it.”
I reared and supported 3 children alone because my ex-husband was neither able nor willing to provide for us. The few years I was a full-time homemaker were the best of my life and I never belittled him to my friends. When they complained about their husbands, they always acknowledged that my husband was not like that and never expected me to belittle him.
Homemaking and child-rearing was the most important, challenging and rewarding job I ever had. It just didn’t generate cash flow for the government to tax.
Providing for a family requires very different skills and a very different mindset. I know because I’ve done that too. Trust me, my homemaking went down the toilet when I had to be a full-time provider.
It takes a very strong and narrow focus to maintain a well-paying career whether you’re a plumber, mechanic, doctor, computer programmer or executive.
How many of the women who belittle their husbands could do their husbands’ jobs? Why do they expect their husbands to be able to do theirs?
Because they think their job is a job for idiots and they are desperate to look down on someone else. It actually starts with women’s contempt for themselves.
The whole feminist movement is predicated on the principle that homemaking is an inferior position. That great lie that has nearly destroyed our culture.
If homemaking were so inferior, trust me, the government would not want that job, and the lust for power starts with the lust to control children and their upbringing.
My deepest sympathies for the useful idiots who betray their husbands, their children and themselves.
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