what i really need is a personal assistant. a free one. unfortunately, i’m not a man, and can’t con some poor woman into keeping my appointments and paying my bills for me by pretending she’s my muse. so i bumble through myself. occassionally i get lucky and make a good friend sympathetic enough to hold my hand for a little while, but it certainly gets old. and try as i might (and i may be out of line here) but i cannot possibly imagine any male significant other who would be willing to wipe his ladyfriend’s ass for her the way i see the reverse situation operating. not that that’s any slight against men, or women, or whomever, it just seems to be the way things often (not always, maybe not even often) work.
it’s the berenstain bears model of marriage and familyhood, a model which was very comforting to me in my childhood because it exactly replicated what i saw going on while growing up. organized, disciplinarian mom, hapless, permissive, dad. mom is just going to finish the laundry and pick you up from school on the way home from work and make you go over your homework assignments and get in screaming, crying fights with you until the second she leaves for the weekend on business and dad buys a huge bag of mint pastels that you then hide behind the toaster oven when mom gets home until you find them melted into a amorphous brown brick three months later.
oh, f*ck.
i won’t go into how this all turned out, but suffice it to say that i honestly don’t know if reversed roles would really work much better (as anyone who’s ever seen crumb knows, growing up with a hard-ass father doesn’t make anyone any saner). is this just a post-feminist reversal of the same old thing? does there have to be this kind of good-cop bad-cop method when it comes to parenting? and how the fuck did i go from worrying about my own disorganization to doling out shallow analysis of turn of the century family politics?
where am I?
what time is it?
1 response so far ↓
maggie // April 20, 2009 at 6:12 am |
i loved this book.