Stand By Your Man

I think Tammy Wynette had my husband in mind. Relating to old school country tunes has never been my bag, but Tammy and I might have a thing or two in common. In fact Tammy might have something in common with every woman who's ever been married; maybe I just don't know it.

My primary wedded role model, my mom, seems to think it's so. Whenever I get on the phone with her to chew about whatever my husband's doing wrong today, I hear a little Tammy in her. Common pearls from my mother include "Try to catch him doing something right" and "It's hard on him too", and my favorite "Things will never be 100% equal". From someone I used to consider a raging feminist, this advice strikes me as strange. I don't know. Maybe she just really loves my husband and wants him to win.

There are a few things about my husband that must be understood. First of all, family in the traditional sense is a second language for him. My husband went home from the hospital in Austin in 1973 with his grandparents. His parents were young and inexperienced when it came to children: his father the eldest of three street kids adopted by a postal worker and his wife, a teacher, his mother the youngest of six born to a military man and his wife. They'd married after finding they were expecting, probably because that's just what people did, but when my husband came along, I guess they just decided they couldn't handle it. My daughter and I take our name from the postal worker and the teacher who opened their home to three children from the street, and then did it again for a grandson, my husband. He stayed with them until he was old enough to go to school, which he started just before his fifth birthday. Then he finally lived with his parents, who were a little bit older and wiser in their mid-twenties. Before he was ten years old however, they were divorced, but not before my husband witnessed some drug use and some domestic violence. He and his mother moved in with her parents, but the situation proved unstable when his aging maternal grandmother attempted to harm him in her increasing senility. So it was back to the paternal grandparents' house for him, and there he stayed until after his grandfather passed away. Then he was a freshman in high school and decided to have one more try with his mother, who was finally living on her own. The situation proved volatile, and he only stayed the length of a semester before a fight with his mother prompted him to move back in with his grandmother. He finished high school there and started his freshman year at UT. Barely a year later his grandmother went to live in a nursing home and soon passed away, leaving him eighteen and virtually all alone.

He was left a reasonable sum of money and his grandparents' house as an inheritance, or so he thought. After he blew through the money, as any eighteen-year-old might, he learned that his grandmother's will had been changed by her cousins, who'd been granted power of attorney while looking after her estate before her death. However legitimate or illegitimate it might have been, the house was apparently theirs, and my husband was forced out of it, coming home one day to find the locks had changed. By then he'd dropped out of school and he didn't have a decent job if any, he and his mother didn't get along, and his grandmother's funeral was the first time he'd seen his father in years, so he went to the only place he could.

My husband's best friend since high school is Bret. Bret's mother is Bianca, a widowed librarian with three children of her own and an entire family of full-grown adoptees. My husband is probably the oldest of those. When he was kicked out of his house at eighteen, he went to live with Bret and Bianca, and Bret's younger brother and sister. He spent a couple years there, working off and on and otherwise screwing around, until Bianca finally sat him down and told him he needed to do something with his life, and if he didn't go back to school or into the military he'd have to leave her house. So he enlisted in the army, with Bret, and after basic training both of them went to study at the Defense Languages Institute in Monterey, California. From there Bret decided to make the army his career. My husband came home. One day Bianca told him the story of her first child, a baby boy she'd had before Bret, who died shortly after birth. She told my husband she'd always known she was meant to have four children, and he was her other son. He met me some ten years later and still called Bianca's family his. Now Bianca is my mother-in-law, my daughter her granddaughter.

So my husband never knew anything close to a traditional, stable family until he was an adult. Before that he was raised by, well, grandparents. They were dead long before I came into the picture, and I know they were very special people, but if my parents' love for my daughter is any indication, I know these people spoiled the hell out of my husband. He wasn't made to do much that didn't please him. Vegetables weren't forced, housecleaning was optional, and self-entertainment was key to my husband's childhood. The television was probably on non-stop in their house. As for male role models, my husband had an old man, an actual old man, who left this world just when my husband was becoming a man himself. What resulted is a bona fide meat-and-potatoes bachelor with an extensive knowledge of television programming and old pop standards, who frequently entertains by talking to himself or making other sorts of music with his mouth. Well, that among other things.

Then here am I. The first born to young parents from large families, and a big sister before I was two, family is all I know. I grew up in a family of five, with grandparents, several aunts and uncles, and a host of cousins and family friends nearby, and pets too. I came to Austin from a small East Texas town, which for good or for ill champions a family atmosphere of its own. In my house space was shared. I didn't have my own room until I was seven or eight years old, and I can remember more than one fight with my mom about keeping it clean. As for the rest of the house chores were the rule, simply because when five people live in a space without cleaning it up, it ceases to be a functional space. That and the old adage "if Mama ain't happy, then nobody's happy" certainly applied in our house. I left home to live on my own when I was nineteen, leaving town to go back to school at twenty-two, and I definitely spent a few years doing my own thing. By the time I was twenty-five I'd made up my mind to be happy with whatever life handed me, whether it was a magical man, a magical woman, or the single life. I left behind my carefree, typical early-twenties attitude and focused on the future, my future. Then as soon as I stopped looking, he appeared. After I met my husband and he got down on his knee, my mind promptly switched back into family mode, if it ever really left.

And perhaps this is where I started screwing things up.

I didn't even want to think about marriage until I'd finished school, but my husband and I celebrated our first (pre-marital) anniversary just a few weeks before I was supposed to graduate, and he couldn't pass up the opportunity to propose. So I finished my last semester of college both exhausted and engaged. As soon as the summer began, my single life began falling apart directly. My much anticipated graduation, conditioned on the completion of one college algebra class, was postponed when I quite miserably and impressively flunked. Then my nine-year old car fell on its last legs, and I had to buy a new one, with my fiance's help, of course. We planned to marry on our second anniversary the next spring, and we wanted to go ahead and find a place to live. So my roommate beat me to the punch and found a new place to live himself. Unable to pay the rent on my own, I had to ask my fiance to take my roommate's place, although he had three months remaining on his own lease. After three months of awkward bouncing between "my" apartment and his, he finally, officially moved in. We ended up postponing the wedding plans for another year, due to the usual restrictions on time and money, but for the time being we were happy cohabitating. At least I think we were.

Anybody who's ever lived with, well, anyone, knows that's when you really get to know somebody. The two years I lived with my husband before he became my husband, I was getting a full dose of a man I didn't quite know before, his grandparents' grandson: the meat and potatoes, the ever-expanding encyclopedia of television that was in his head, his cooking and cleaning habits (or lack thereof), his disliking of animals, his disliking of my side of town, his command of obscure and useless trivia, and a love of role-playing games and miniature-painting that went to a level never before seen even by an English nerd like myself, although to be fair, he did warn me on our first date that he was, in fact, an uber-geek. We had two bathrooms in our first apartment and didn't share for the most part, so that at least was an experience I spared myself until we got our first house. I might not have been able to handle it. Some of the biggest problems my husband and I have today originated in those first couple of years. We weren't yet married, but it seemed the honeymoon was already over. A wonderful, blissful year of being in love but not being on the same lease was forever behind us.

At first I saw it as an opportunity to start anew. Yes, we were engaged to be married, but we simply saw ourselves as together, a year and a few months into a relationship that would last forever, no matter what we called it. I certainly didn't see our living situation as playing house; I saw it as making a home. I wanted to put into motion the systems and traditions I saw us incorporating as a family. My husband-to-be, of course, was part of that family, the figurehead, in fact. So I began asking him questions about things I thought were an important part of family life. How would he like the kitchen cleaned? How would he like the bills paid? What did he want to do about trips to the grocery store? When did he want to eat dinner? And I wasn't just asking about banal, rote household chores. What did we want to do to keep our bedroom warm and inviting? When did we want to go out on dates, now that we were no longer "dating"? These were just a few things I had opinions on, and I wanted to know his. I wanted to come up with some way of living that would be ours, and harmoniously so.

These questions made my husband look at me as if I were speaking Swahili. And I got my answer; over and over again it was usually the same. It was whatever. He had no opinion. He had no stance. In fact, these were things he'd never "really" thought about, he said. Sometimes I found this answer off-putting. Sometimes I saw it as an opportunity to teach him how I did these things, thinking I had some good pearls to offer. Sometimes I asked him to think about it and get back to me. Either way I began to develop the impression that he didn't care that much, especially when I re-addressed these "get back to me" issues and found he still hadn't really thought about it. So I figured if and when he didn't care to take a stance on an issue, we could just do things my way, right?

Not exactly. As it turned out, he did have strongly felt opinions when it came down to the time to do something, or to get out of doing it. I never expected him to just know intrinsically what I saw as the correct way to do things, although sometimes his lack of household knowledge did irritate me. I realized where he was coming from, and I tried to teach him by asking him to do things, like closing cabinet doors after himself, not leaving his boots in front of the door, wiping down the kitchen counter tops at the end of the night, or even eating at the table with me in the first place. I tried to get him to drink water and eat vegetables, and to prepare them as part of our daily meals. I tried to convince him that the bedroom floor in front of our closet was not the best place for him to keep his dirty laundry. And most importantly I tried to teach him that I would not be the only one responsible for making sure all these things happened. I thought we were running a household in the only way I'd ever seen one run: two grown adults, both bringing home the bacon and both taking care of the place, and taking care of each other. I even accepted his adamant denial of any duties pertaining to my cat, particularly her feces (he never went near it until I got pregnant; we, or rather I, had two cats by then). Still, my husband-to-be resisted my requests.

So I welcomed him to plead his case. Why don't you want to do things this way, I asked. How would you like to do it? I refused to believe he just didn't care. The most common answers I heard were "Because I don't" or "Because I do it this way", or again, "I never really thought about it". And usually I'd retort with the reasons I did things the way I did, the reasons I thought my way was better. More often than not, these discussions turned into our earliest arguments, and my husband, gentleman that he was, usually ceded. But I quickly realized he was doing it to end uncomfortable discussions, when the chores continued to go undone or be done by me. This dodging strategy left issues to keep coming up, and I kept getting more irritated every time. After all, these were not the things I wanted to talk about. These were things I wanted out of the way so we could enjoy life, but not at the expense of just leaving them undone. I was persistent as hell. I tried to think of better approaches, such as not bringing things up in the heat of the moment. Instead of bringing things up when I was exasperated because the sink was full of dirty dishes again, I picked calm, detached times to bring them up, like when we were riding in the car. But nothing I tried worked. Usually this just made things heat up, and suddenly I was responsible for starting another argument.

Inevitably my husband began to accuse me of wanting everything done my way. He insisted that I was more worried about how it was done than if it was done. While I'd admit that my detail-oriented, female brain is prone to such desires, I didn't feel that was the case. I'd also agree that men's brains are not wired to deal with details as well as women's brains are. But I really didn't care how he went about cleaning the kitchen. Sometimes I snickered at his methods, because it was obvious he'd taught himself, hamfistedly, as a bachelor. He snickered at me the same way when I couldn't figure out how to do something on the computer. In reality, I really just wanted jobs to get done. And the way he most often chose to do something was to leave it undone. Even when we agreed it was his job, because I'd done it the night before, or I'd cooked, or just because he said he would, I'd usually wake up the next morning to pots and pans with dried food all over them and crumbs all over the stove top. It's not that he wasn't doing it the right way; he wasn't doing it at all. His suggestion was that I learn to work around messes like he did. The real problem, I eventually realized, was we had entirely different ideas about what needed to be done in the first place. Where were these ideas when I'd asked about them? I had no idea.

This began to turn into a vicious cycle. When I asked, he had no opinion, so I thought it wasn't important to him, and I got more used to doing things my way. When an issue came up, suddenly he had an opinion to discuss. But discussion of methods (his vs. hers) made him feel like I didn't value his opinions. So he refused to share them. His battle cry became the heroic anthem: "If you want something done a certain way, do it yourself!" And when it got too hot for me, I'd take his advice to heart. Okay, I will, I thought--until I realized that left me to do almost everything and got frustrated. It was ridiculous, but it just kept going and going. We tried a few successful interventions along the way. We made little agreements to try to keep each ourselves from driving each other crazy. I'd make an effort to keep the Brita pitcher full and cold if he'd make an effort to make the bed in the mornings. He even brought up the idea of joining a website that disguised household chores as a role-playing game, with XP and leveling up and all that, and much to his surprise I agreed. For a while it even worked. We got competitive about house-cleaning and the house got cleaned, and since we both agreed we couldn't claim any housework unless we claimed it on the website, arguments were settled before they began. But our little agreements weren't happening often enough, and we soon grew lazy about logging housecleaning XP. The game grew unrealistic, and household problems just re-surfaced. These arguments went on long after our wedding. I'm sure our daughter heard plenty of them from inside the womb. After all my being pregnant with our child didn't exactly light a fire under my husband to do a little extra housework (cat poop excluded).

About halfway through my pregnancy we went for the silver medal of the American dream. We moved out of our apartment and into a rent house. A duplex actually, the larger of two units built out of an older house in a charming neighborhood in north central Austin. We had agreed that our now cluttered two-bedroom apartment wouldn't be enough room for a baby, her parents, and two felines. We hadn't agreed on where in town to live. I had always lived on the south side and loved it. My husband had the same feelings about the north. So we decided whoever found the best house would win. He found the place on Craigslist. It was in a great neighborhood, (actually it was exactly where we wanted to be, should we move north of the river), and it had a pool. The pictures looked nice, it had three bedrooms, the rent was manageable for us and great for the area, so we decided to have a look. If it looked half as nice inside as its location was, we wanted it. We took a look, and we liked. It was much larger than we'd expected. It looked a little more run down on the outside than the pictures implied, but the interior was something we could work with. We weren't interested in buying it; although we'd originally hoped to find a rent-to-own situation, it needed quite a bit of work. But it would do just fine until we found something we did want to buy, hopefully in that neighborhood. So we applied and were approved for our first house.

Again I looked at the move as a new beginning. By then we'd spent more than two years under the same roof, and finding a new one was more than refreshing. We'd have an additional room to contain our lives and accommodate the new one coming in. The cats would have plenty of room to run around. And we were moving in six weeks before our lease ended on the apartment, so we could move in slowly and only bring what we needed, purging useless crap along the way. On top of all this we'd have all the comforts of a free-standing house, which outweigh the costs so heavily when you're used to living in an apartment. We were thrilled.

But the intensity of it was short-lived. The move took its toll on my husband, who handled most of the heavy lifting himself, except on the actual moving day when we hired movers and called on friends and family. There was some financial stress in the beginning because of our choice to pay double rent for six weeks. We also chose to move over the Christmas holidays. Our slow moving plan dissolved into a reality of ignoring all the stuff we'd left in our apartment until the last minute. Of course, my hormones were out of control. Just after the New Year, we had the worst fight I can remember, after I prepared a nice dinner in our new kitchen and my husband delayed coming to the table to do something I found less important, leaving me to eat alone. After we fought over the same old issues I left the house and went for a long drive, but when I came back I was still mad. So I said nothing to my husband. I broke up a cat fight on the way to our bedroom, and then I holed up with a book to distract myself, and shortly after that my husband left. He went over to Bianca's house and hung out with his brothers until I called him in tears, because when I finally came out of the bedroom I realized one of the cats was missing from the house. We'd been in the neighborhood little more than two weeks, and the cat I'd loved since the age of nineteen, when I'd first moved out on my own, was gone. I was a wreck. I felt like all the fighting had driven her from the house, and I was desperate to find her and get her home so I could make it up to her. But repeated searches of the neighborhood turned up nothing, and I was miserable for weeks. All the baggage we'd left in our old apartment ended up coming right back into our lives, much of it literally, as time ran out on the old lease and we had to move it somewhere. For a few more months, things didn't really change. We just had bigger things to fight about. Even painting our daughter's bedroom turned into an argument.

Then came Lucy.

We were good to each other the first couple weeks Lucy was in our new home. My husband was on family leave. My mother was there with us while I recovered from surgery and Lucy and I learned to breastfeed. And of course, family and friends visited frequently to get peeks at the new arrival. We were all tired, and the house was far from spotless, but we were all happy to be centered around Lucy, and not much else mattered. We got a little snippy with each other during a couple of Lucy's late-night crying jags, but as soon as we realized we were better served to work the nights in shifts, we got along fine. Then after a couple weeks my mother went back home and my husband went back to work, and I began my new life as a stay-at-home mom. I quickly realized just how much work a newborn requires, and everything in my life had to be adjusted yet a little bit more. It was stressful at times, but I loved it. I was right where I felt I should be.

Then some more weeks went by, and soon the time came to think about going back to work. I was allowed twelve weeks' leave from my day job, but only the first six were paid. I planned to go back to my home business after six weeks, but because of my surgery I couldn't. I waited until the doctor gave me the green light, and when Lucy was two months old I started trying to drum up business to get myself started again. By this time I'd decided I didn't want to go back to my day job and couldn't afford day care if I did. I was going to depend solely on my work at home to pull in my half of our income, and my husband was going to provide our health insurance. It would mean a pay cut, but we could handle it. I resigned from my day job.

But as it quickly turned out I'd highly overestimated myself. I was not under the delusion that I'd be able to care for an infant, work full-time with said infant by my side, and keep a sparkling clean house, but caring for Lucy was a priority that couldn't be questioned or compromised, our need for money was a reality, and some things did have to be done around the house. For example, for this new, old house we'd given up having a dishwasher, and there was always laundry and grocery shopping to be done. We'd splurged on an automatic, self-cleaning litter box for the cat poo, but it still had to be maintained, and it jammed occasionally, filling our house with the smell of shit soup. Also, in the six months we'd been there, the house had revealed many new characteristics with which we were less than pleased. Most notably it had shifted on its foundation as the seasons changed, creating some situations that were merely irksome, like doors that stuck, and some situations we realized could be dangerous to our daughter, like cracking floor tiles. I soon found myself completely overwhelmed, and my appeals to my husband to help me around the house were louder than ever.

My logic was simple. If I was going to stress myself out trying to pull in half the income while staying at home with the baby all day, how could I possibly be expected to take care of the house too? What had changed besides where I was working and what kind of work I was doing? I was still working. Obviously Lucy had added new dimensions of stress and worry to both our lives, but my husband still found time to watch TV at night when the dishes needed washing, and to go play role-playing games with his buddies on the weekends when the laundry was piled up, while I worried about every aspect of our household around the clock. He still left behind work for me to take care of: his breakfast remains in the sink, his clothes and painting supplies on the couch, his laundry in the dryer with no basket in sight. I knew he didn't do these things intentionally or spitefully, but he definitely did them thoughtlessly. By putting chores off for later, whenever he could, he essentially left them for me. With him gone eight to ten hours a day and me home alone, somehow I always got to his messes before he did. On Saturdays I begged him to help me get the house under control, and he reluctantly agreed, quite often with a heavy complaint first. I felt like everything I asked him to do was a huge and bothersome inconvenience, and I found myself weighing in my mind whether the task at hand was worth the trouble of asking for help. After much ado, I could usually get things going for a little while. But when I sat down to nurse the baby, which I did approximately eight times a day, sometimes for an hour at a time, he must have thought I was taking a break, because he usually excused himself for some computer time. If I protested, we were usually on our way into another argument. But since the baby it wasn't so much about methods anymore. It was about freedom.

It was an argument as old as time, I'm sure. My husband worked forty hours a week, and when he came home he wanted to relax. Who wouldn't? All along I'd been trying to get necessary evils like housework out of the way so we could enjoy as much time as possible together. Who knew? Maybe we could even enjoy the housework. I was all for the two of us being happy together. And I was all for personal freedom. I definitely wanted more of it for myself, especially after Lucy was born. I just didn't want for us to enjoy so much personal freedom that our household ceased to function. To me it seemed perfectly acceptable for us to devote a certain amount of time each day to personal fulfillment and relaxation, just as long as we spent the rest of the day focused on our family's needs. I would respect his time if he would respect mine, which I felt I deserved just as much as he did. And at the very least I'd be happy at the end of the day, knowing we both did as much as we could to keep our family on its feet, and then enjoyed ourselves. So I made it my mission to find out just how much freedom he wanted from me, so I could respect it. But I came upon the same roadblocks. He didn't think about things that way; he didn't have a time period in mind. Sometimes he wouldn't even answer, as if he knew where the road was going. As usual we could never come to an agreement, and soon I just came to the conclusion that he wanted to feel free to do as he pleased all the time, or it wasn't freedom at all. I was just some dominatrix trying to make a work horse out of him. All I wanted was work, work, work all the time, and never any fun. When would I understand?

Which brings me back to Tammy.

I understand the evolutionary theories about women and men. I know that women have traditionally taken care of the home and the family because their natural abilities are honed for the job. I know that men have traditionally brought home the meat for the same reason. I know that things have generally worked out well this way, and I'm fine with the man ruling the kingdom and the woman ruling the castle, as long as exceptions are allowed. I see great balance and fairness in that. If a woman wishes to stay home and take care of children and a house while her man goes off to work, that's what she should do. If she wishes to work, she should. I'm glad I was born after the feminist movement, with my own choices to make in life. I'm glad women are working all over this country, and men for the most part are on board with that. After all there are dual incomes for them to consider. We now live in a dual-income society and a dual-income economy, where it's been made difficult at best to live on one parent's salary. Men and women, for the most part, are sharing the responsibilities of food, clothing, shelter, cars, and big-screen TVs. Women have taken their new responsibilities and run with them. So when are men going to get the memo on dual parenting? When are they going to get on board with housework? If a woman is working to help her husband support their family, shouldn't her husband be helping her take care of the kids and the house? Shouldn't they be working a second shift too? Shouldn't a woman be able to enjoy some free time without leaving the house to fall down around her?

Apparently I've failed to make my husband understand this concept, and I'm just about ready to give up. The only thing holding me back, besides my conscience, is my suspicion that he's pretended to be clueless so I'd stop asking him to do things, like the Shel Silverstein poem about the kid who hates drying the dishes so he starts breaking them. Consequently I have also failed to bring in the income we so desperately needed, as the summer rolled on and our utility bills soared, and the hospital bills came, and my husband's paychecks choked on health insurance premiums. So I decided to try something new; my original plan wasn't working. I decided to stand by my man. I relinquished control of the family finances. My man makes the money, so he pays the bills. When I go to the grocery store, I go with an allowance he decides. My home business income, from what little business I manage to do, amounts to spending money for me, "the little woman". Obviously the responsibility for Lucy lies with both of her parents in the end (my husband's not a complete caveman), but the responsibility for household chores now lies with me. I'll not question my husband's methods of making money and paying bills, as long as he does it. And things around the house will get done my way or not at all, because I'll do them or blow them off myself. It's time to let a woman be a woman and a man be a man. If I need my husband's help, I ask him. And if he needs my help, he has to ask me.

Will this work? Or are Tammy and I both insane?

Sugar's Note:
Since writing this I've learned a little bit more about my husband's estranged father, who unfortunately passed away recently. My husband's father was actually the youngest of three siblings, who were not adopted from the street as my husband previously believed. My husband's biological paternal grandmother died when her youngest child was only three, and her children were sent to live with relatives, who raised the three children and later became my husband's grandparents. The grandmother who raised my husband is a relative of his biological grandmother.