Fight Club might have had a point.
Not the obvious one - that underground bare-knuckle fighting is awesome - because that's retarded machismo.
But the idea that you can't know yourself unless you've been in a fight? There might be something there.
Getting beaten is a direct, specific experience. It isn't another thing, it is what it is. It is the most basic form of an intensely personal crisis. There's something about the implacability of it - whether or not you want to be, you are getting hurt. Losing the boys was happening, whether we wanted it to or not. It had its own momentum, and we were caught in its center. Begging for it stop would do nothing. So, as a man, I had to stand up in the middle of it. Like a beating, I had to withstand it. This is the lesson we learn from childhood - that we have to learn to take it, to push through crisis and chaos and grief and continue to function. To man up.
At one point in the film, Tyler Durden gives the narrator a chemical burn and prevents him from doing anything but experience it. No going to a serene place, no blocking it out, no mediation. Feel the agony. Be present as you are hurt by something you cannot stop. Think through it. It is an unstoppable force, and in everything - communicating with doctors, calling family and friends, taking care of S., paying attention, weighing costs and benefits, pros and cons, probabilities, having to think even as I could do nothing but scream inside - I had to become an immovable object.
And now, in many things, I continue to be immovable. As bad as it was, never say it couldn't get worse. But the stakes were higher than anything that came before. Life and death, and decisions, and raw suffering I couldn't avoid. It's hard to get really upset or anxious or freaked out about little things anymore. I've seen an abyss. The cold, unblinking eye of circumstance. I don't get as anxious as easily as I used to. I was called upon to do what men are expected to do, and I did it. I grew up that day. Ironically, it was the loss of my sons that made me the sort of man truly suitable to be a father.
I became a man. Like Richard Pryor said, you aren't a man until you've had your damn heart broken. I had my heart broken. This is what it means to be a man who suffers this loss. Toughen up. Withstand it. This is the moment that defines you and puts everything into perspective. You are in this, you have to be here and still be clearheaded enough to make one of the worst decisions of your life. And for us, that's where our story ends. We go back to work, we continue with life. We soldier on.
The first rule is you don't talk about it.
The second rule is you don't talk about it.
If this is your first night, you have to fight.
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Dust: In the wind, and elsewhere.
When S and I first started trying to conceive, she read various and sundry message forums for information, support, etc. I noticed a couple of things about most of them right away: They were damn near treacly in their optimism, and weren't very big on realism. I don't just mean that they weren't a good source of accurate information, I mean the prevailing discourse was this weird fairytale cutsey-poo sentimentality verging on infantilism. They were the intellectual equivalent of an all-pink bedroom filled to the brim with stuffed animals and unicorn posters - great when you're 12, but not so much for the whole raising a child thing.
One thing that kept coming up was the idea of "baby dust" - shorthand for good wishes, crossed fingers, etc., but with this whole magic fairy powder vibe. To a Mister Crankytrousers like me, this seemed unrealistic and not useful. Ground your support in something sincere and based in experience, not closing your eyes tight and leaving it up to chance, higher power, whatever. Now, out of all times, don't cede control over your own life. I won't even go into all of the little animated images in signature files, signature files that were longer than the posts to which they were appended, clusters and blocks and images of children which practically screamed I HAVE NO IDENTITY OF MY OWN ANYMORE. I AM DEFINED ENTIRELY BY MY CHILDREN. And in this spun-sugar world, the husbands and fathers were referred to as DH. Dear Husband, Darling Husband. DH. Designated Heterosexual. Dick Haver. Donor Here.
Yeah, I took it a little personally. How could you tell?
Fathers don't get a huge voice in this conversation. I'm frustrated by this, but I can see how and why this is case, especially over time as S and I have grieved in our own ways. It's complicated, it's all over the place, and I am as complicit as anyone or anything else in this relative silence, as my posting history vividly indicates. But when somebody pays attention to the fathers, I take notice. Any attention, please God, thank you for noticing.
S pointed out an article in the NY Times - A father's view of infertility is how it's labeled, published in the parenting blog. So I read it, hoping that somebody gets it - the frustration, the loss, the silence, shouldering pain without complaint, keeping busy, staying strong, wondering if not being able to father children makes you less of a man, mourning the father-son moments that will never happen, seeing my own eyes in the face of another. Giving voice to the rage and sadness that's so hard to express otherwise.
Instead, I get some sentimental crap about a dad who takes his daughter to a baseball game, talks some shit about The Natural, seems vaguely sad that he and his wife can't have another child as easily as they had their first, and goes on and on and one about his daughter talking about "fairy dust."
I have no fucking idea what any of this has to do with infertility. It's like reading a Thomas Kinkade painting.
Is this seriously how the culture at large thinks of men and infertility? That we're kinda sad when we aren't thinking about lazy summer days and the Great American Pastime? Because seriously, fuck that. That's just as poisonous as the idea of the DH and "baby dust" - instead of taking fertility out of our hands and giving it over to the great unknown, (which robs use of control and self-determination) it elides the possibility that men might not have children of their own at all by making our putative voice someone who already had a daughter and then articulates any negative emotion as vague sadness couched in sentimentality. Just one wrong note in a fondly remembered summer evening, complete with the innocence of childhood, fireworks, baseball - all the things you need to be an all-American man. I don't hear anything in that about tears, about helplessness, about shots and pills and operations and tests and doctor's appointments. About forms of impotence for which Viagra is not a solution. About holding your wife while she cries in frustration, wondering when it gets to be your turn to fall apart. Never mind loss. Never mind the life and death decisions you get to make in hospital rooms, the voice that says you will never have this. No, apparently it's just down to intentionally vague answers for the child you already have when she asks about getting a sister, and fairy dust. That's the father's experience of infertility.
Fuck baby dust, and fuck fairy dust. All I have are ashes. Who speaks for me?
One thing that kept coming up was the idea of "baby dust" - shorthand for good wishes, crossed fingers, etc., but with this whole magic fairy powder vibe. To a Mister Crankytrousers like me, this seemed unrealistic and not useful. Ground your support in something sincere and based in experience, not closing your eyes tight and leaving it up to chance, higher power, whatever. Now, out of all times, don't cede control over your own life. I won't even go into all of the little animated images in signature files, signature files that were longer than the posts to which they were appended, clusters and blocks and images of children which practically screamed I HAVE NO IDENTITY OF MY OWN ANYMORE. I AM DEFINED ENTIRELY BY MY CHILDREN. And in this spun-sugar world, the husbands and fathers were referred to as DH. Dear Husband, Darling Husband. DH. Designated Heterosexual. Dick Haver. Donor Here.
Yeah, I took it a little personally. How could you tell?
Fathers don't get a huge voice in this conversation. I'm frustrated by this, but I can see how and why this is case, especially over time as S and I have grieved in our own ways. It's complicated, it's all over the place, and I am as complicit as anyone or anything else in this relative silence, as my posting history vividly indicates. But when somebody pays attention to the fathers, I take notice. Any attention, please God, thank you for noticing.
S pointed out an article in the NY Times - A father's view of infertility is how it's labeled, published in the parenting blog. So I read it, hoping that somebody gets it - the frustration, the loss, the silence, shouldering pain without complaint, keeping busy, staying strong, wondering if not being able to father children makes you less of a man, mourning the father-son moments that will never happen, seeing my own eyes in the face of another. Giving voice to the rage and sadness that's so hard to express otherwise.
Instead, I get some sentimental crap about a dad who takes his daughter to a baseball game, talks some shit about The Natural, seems vaguely sad that he and his wife can't have another child as easily as they had their first, and goes on and on and one about his daughter talking about "fairy dust."
I have no fucking idea what any of this has to do with infertility. It's like reading a Thomas Kinkade painting.
Is this seriously how the culture at large thinks of men and infertility? That we're kinda sad when we aren't thinking about lazy summer days and the Great American Pastime? Because seriously, fuck that. That's just as poisonous as the idea of the DH and "baby dust" - instead of taking fertility out of our hands and giving it over to the great unknown, (which robs use of control and self-determination) it elides the possibility that men might not have children of their own at all by making our putative voice someone who already had a daughter and then articulates any negative emotion as vague sadness couched in sentimentality. Just one wrong note in a fondly remembered summer evening, complete with the innocence of childhood, fireworks, baseball - all the things you need to be an all-American man. I don't hear anything in that about tears, about helplessness, about shots and pills and operations and tests and doctor's appointments. About forms of impotence for which Viagra is not a solution. About holding your wife while she cries in frustration, wondering when it gets to be your turn to fall apart. Never mind loss. Never mind the life and death decisions you get to make in hospital rooms, the voice that says you will never have this. No, apparently it's just down to intentionally vague answers for the child you already have when she asks about getting a sister, and fairy dust. That's the father's experience of infertility.
Fuck baby dust, and fuck fairy dust. All I have are ashes. Who speaks for me?
Monday, June 23, 2008
Boys will be boys
Some comments on my previous teachable moments post got me to thinking, and wanting to respond, and wanting to make corrections, and think some more and yammer some more...
I don't take it personally or get angry that men's grief is represented the way it is in textbooks, for a couple of reasons. First, textbooks are, in my experience, rarely the best way to obtain the newest information on a subject, and there's been something in every textbook I've used with which I've disagreed or at least differed with the authors on importance. That's just how it is. I was a little surprised at first to see what I did laid out in print like that, but in retrospect, I wasn't surprised at all. Textbooks, like scholarly articles, represent only one perspective on a topic. And it's a class on development, not gender. I try to keep the soapbox moments directly relevant to the material.
Second, what other conclusions are the authors supposed to draw? The male gender role in Western culture emphasizes stoicism and agency. We're not supposed to show much emotion, and we're supposed to do work. Whether or not this helps us, this is what people are going to see. And I suspect that it's not entirely wrong, either. Not saying that it's the sum total of my experience - and whether or not I Speak For Men is a whole other ball of bees - but no, open sobbing, while it did happen, wasn't what best represented my feelings. Going back to work did help, supporting S did help. However, I strongly suspect that that doesn't represent the range of emotions that men feel, and I strongly suspect that it's wrong to assume that we're all going to get better by getting back up on the horse and being all strong and shit.
Our experiences are many and varied, and it is the very nature of what we're rewarded for doing that keeps this wide variety of experiences from recognized. I'm pretty sure that most of us are just as unhappy as our partners, even if we didn't have babies growing inside of us, but on the other hand, how is anyone ever going to know this? We aren't expected to share, we're not taught how to share, and in some instances we attract negative attention when we share. The lack of sharing means no other perspectives are articulated, silence implies strength, but it also implies consent.
And that's the weird thing about being a man writing about infertility and child loss. There ain't a lot of us. I'm not the only one by any means, but the mere fact that the male perspective garners its own category on other sites tells me that there's something about it that makes it special. Part of why I started doing this was because I feel like men often suffer in silence, and hearing about other men who'd gone through what I had and were miserable because they couldn't talk about bothered me. I like to write, I'm a wordy, long-winded motherfucker, so I was gonna talk about it. I wish more men did. I think it'd be helpful, for both sexes. Maybe if we spoke up more, there'd be more understanding.
Of course, that also assumes being taken seriously. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that people who advocate for the "man's perspective" often fall somewhere between straight-up misogyny and deeply confused. It's no wonder that it's hard to take men's advocates seriously, not only because we tend to get the good jobs and the promotions and all of that, which I think some see as sore-loserhood, but often because these guys are skirt-wearing wackos ("Why can't I wear it! Women wear it!") trotted out for freak appeal, or unreconstructed types who want the good old barefoot/pregnant/where's-my-dinner-bitch days back.
So me, I'm just talking. I'd like to see more men talking too. Xbox4NappyRash is holding it down on the infertility tip, but who else is out there? Where my boys at?
I don't take it personally or get angry that men's grief is represented the way it is in textbooks, for a couple of reasons. First, textbooks are, in my experience, rarely the best way to obtain the newest information on a subject, and there's been something in every textbook I've used with which I've disagreed or at least differed with the authors on importance. That's just how it is. I was a little surprised at first to see what I did laid out in print like that, but in retrospect, I wasn't surprised at all. Textbooks, like scholarly articles, represent only one perspective on a topic. And it's a class on development, not gender. I try to keep the soapbox moments directly relevant to the material.
Second, what other conclusions are the authors supposed to draw? The male gender role in Western culture emphasizes stoicism and agency. We're not supposed to show much emotion, and we're supposed to do work. Whether or not this helps us, this is what people are going to see. And I suspect that it's not entirely wrong, either. Not saying that it's the sum total of my experience - and whether or not I Speak For Men is a whole other ball of bees - but no, open sobbing, while it did happen, wasn't what best represented my feelings. Going back to work did help, supporting S did help. However, I strongly suspect that that doesn't represent the range of emotions that men feel, and I strongly suspect that it's wrong to assume that we're all going to get better by getting back up on the horse and being all strong and shit.
Our experiences are many and varied, and it is the very nature of what we're rewarded for doing that keeps this wide variety of experiences from recognized. I'm pretty sure that most of us are just as unhappy as our partners, even if we didn't have babies growing inside of us, but on the other hand, how is anyone ever going to know this? We aren't expected to share, we're not taught how to share, and in some instances we attract negative attention when we share. The lack of sharing means no other perspectives are articulated, silence implies strength, but it also implies consent.
And that's the weird thing about being a man writing about infertility and child loss. There ain't a lot of us. I'm not the only one by any means, but the mere fact that the male perspective garners its own category on other sites tells me that there's something about it that makes it special. Part of why I started doing this was because I feel like men often suffer in silence, and hearing about other men who'd gone through what I had and were miserable because they couldn't talk about bothered me. I like to write, I'm a wordy, long-winded motherfucker, so I was gonna talk about it. I wish more men did. I think it'd be helpful, for both sexes. Maybe if we spoke up more, there'd be more understanding.
Of course, that also assumes being taken seriously. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that people who advocate for the "man's perspective" often fall somewhere between straight-up misogyny and deeply confused. It's no wonder that it's hard to take men's advocates seriously, not only because we tend to get the good jobs and the promotions and all of that, which I think some see as sore-loserhood, but often because these guys are skirt-wearing wackos ("Why can't I wear it! Women wear it!") trotted out for freak appeal, or unreconstructed types who want the good old barefoot/pregnant/where's-my-dinner-bitch days back.
So me, I'm just talking. I'd like to see more men talking too. Xbox4NappyRash is holding it down on the infertility tip, but who else is out there? Where my boys at?
Monday, June 16, 2008
Teachable moments.
You've probably heard the term "teachable moment" before. I usually hear it used in relation to real-life events, and how they serve as excellent opportunities to illustrate theoretical concepts. They are pedagogical tools. (Some would argue that I'm a pedagogical tool, but my officemate has gone home for the day.) Make the connection between life and a larger point.
I've been thinking about teachable moments, because just as I was beginning to become accustomed to the idea that my relationship with my grief was changing, I was somewhat rudely pulled back in and reminded of a few things by a number of unconnected events.
First, there was something that came up while I was working on my class prep for next fall. One of the classes I'm teaching is on child development, and I was so excited about my new job that the ironies didn't even occur to me. So here I am, father to two dead children, and I'm going to be walking about thirty upperclassmen through the minutiae of conception, gestation, childbirth, and all the development that comes after. In the words of Eddie Izzard, "Well, that's fun." Frankly, I was more concerned with it being a class outside of my area of expertise. I study things like ideology, gender, and group relations. But I teach what they tell me to teach.
So then I'm looking through the textbook I'm going to use, and lo and behold, there's a little sidebar about "dealing with stillbirth and miscarriage" in one of the chapters. And what do you know? It's a thoughtful, concise examination of...how mothers feel. Men? According to the sidebar (emphasis mine)..."The man may have been less focused on the pregnancy, and his body does not give him physical reminders of the loss." Also? "In one small study, eleven men whose child had died in utero reported being overcome with frustration and helplessness during and after the delivery, but several found relief in supporting their partners." I don't even know where to start. I don't know that I have another gender-role rant in me right now, nor am I sure that I haven't already gone over my limit for the year. All I could do was sigh and say to myself "Really? Less focused? Relief in support? Really?" Teachable moment? I'm not done with all of this. It will always be there. Both the idea of children, and what being a man means for having (or not having) children.
Second, there was Father's Day, detailed more here. I didn't think I was going to be that bothered by it initially, but the more the ads kept cropping up on TV and the more I kept thinking about what I was missing out on by not being able to do what fathers do, where I would have been right now if the boys had been born alive and healthy, the more I felt it. I'm okay, but I'm glad I spent yesterday playing games and watching movies. Anything to not see another "we love you, Dad" commercial. Teachable moment? I'm not over it. It still hurts.
Third was the weirdest fucking thing. First, some background: My adviser is about to give birth, and one of the faculty in my department started a pool on the particulars - date, time, weight, length, stuff like that. Everyone puts in a few bucks, and the one who is closest gets the dough. I didn't find it problematic or anything - hell, I put my guesses in along with everyone else. It's part of this whole idea that my grief doesn't mean the good fortune of others should go uncelebrated. The world doesn't need to don sackcloth and ashes for me. So I was okay with it.
So I come in this morning and there's an email from someone else in the area - someone I knew was pregnant, but not by how much. She'd sent an email to the entire area saying how awful and tasteless it was that we were betting on a childbirth, with all of this game-theory stuff about how to bet to maximize outcomes included, like we were seriously hoping my advisor's kid would be early or late or something to better our chances of winning, which, uh, no. Apparently, the concept of the "friendly bet" never occurred to this person. Then she launches into how her own children (she apparently had twins) were a month premature and so this was incredibly offensive blah blah blargh fuck.
First, this was how we found out she'd had her kids. No other notice, for good or ill. So there's no way we could have known there were problems. Second, she's someone with whom it is hard to sympathize for reasons having nothing to do with her pregnancy. Third, and this is probably the grief talking, I don't have a lot of sympathy for someone delivering at 36 weeks, even if I should. I know her kids are probably in the NICU and she's concerned. I don't discount that at all. But when 36 weeks was just a fucking pipe dream for me and S, when we were juggling the probabilities of 20 versus 24 versus 28 weeks? Yeah, hard for me to get too broken up. I've burned off what didn't work, and what's left is harder. S and I didn't flip out in public, even with birth announcements and baby showers and parents in the neighborhood with strollers and babies everywhere, we didn't flip out. My first thought was "lady, my kids are dead and this doesn't strike me as a big deal." Teachable moment? We're stronger than we think.
I've been thinking about teachable moments, because just as I was beginning to become accustomed to the idea that my relationship with my grief was changing, I was somewhat rudely pulled back in and reminded of a few things by a number of unconnected events.
First, there was something that came up while I was working on my class prep for next fall. One of the classes I'm teaching is on child development, and I was so excited about my new job that the ironies didn't even occur to me. So here I am, father to two dead children, and I'm going to be walking about thirty upperclassmen through the minutiae of conception, gestation, childbirth, and all the development that comes after. In the words of Eddie Izzard, "Well, that's fun." Frankly, I was more concerned with it being a class outside of my area of expertise. I study things like ideology, gender, and group relations. But I teach what they tell me to teach.
So then I'm looking through the textbook I'm going to use, and lo and behold, there's a little sidebar about "dealing with stillbirth and miscarriage" in one of the chapters. And what do you know? It's a thoughtful, concise examination of...how mothers feel. Men? According to the sidebar (emphasis mine)..."The man may have been less focused on the pregnancy, and his body does not give him physical reminders of the loss." Also? "In one small study, eleven men whose child had died in utero reported being overcome with frustration and helplessness during and after the delivery, but several found relief in supporting their partners." I don't even know where to start. I don't know that I have another gender-role rant in me right now, nor am I sure that I haven't already gone over my limit for the year. All I could do was sigh and say to myself "Really? Less focused? Relief in support? Really?" Teachable moment? I'm not done with all of this. It will always be there. Both the idea of children, and what being a man means for having (or not having) children.
Second, there was Father's Day, detailed more here. I didn't think I was going to be that bothered by it initially, but the more the ads kept cropping up on TV and the more I kept thinking about what I was missing out on by not being able to do what fathers do, where I would have been right now if the boys had been born alive and healthy, the more I felt it. I'm okay, but I'm glad I spent yesterday playing games and watching movies. Anything to not see another "we love you, Dad" commercial. Teachable moment? I'm not over it. It still hurts.
Third was the weirdest fucking thing. First, some background: My adviser is about to give birth, and one of the faculty in my department started a pool on the particulars - date, time, weight, length, stuff like that. Everyone puts in a few bucks, and the one who is closest gets the dough. I didn't find it problematic or anything - hell, I put my guesses in along with everyone else. It's part of this whole idea that my grief doesn't mean the good fortune of others should go uncelebrated. The world doesn't need to don sackcloth and ashes for me. So I was okay with it.
So I come in this morning and there's an email from someone else in the area - someone I knew was pregnant, but not by how much. She'd sent an email to the entire area saying how awful and tasteless it was that we were betting on a childbirth, with all of this game-theory stuff about how to bet to maximize outcomes included, like we were seriously hoping my advisor's kid would be early or late or something to better our chances of winning, which, uh, no. Apparently, the concept of the "friendly bet" never occurred to this person. Then she launches into how her own children (she apparently had twins) were a month premature and so this was incredibly offensive blah blah blargh fuck.
First, this was how we found out she'd had her kids. No other notice, for good or ill. So there's no way we could have known there were problems. Second, she's someone with whom it is hard to sympathize for reasons having nothing to do with her pregnancy. Third, and this is probably the grief talking, I don't have a lot of sympathy for someone delivering at 36 weeks, even if I should. I know her kids are probably in the NICU and she's concerned. I don't discount that at all. But when 36 weeks was just a fucking pipe dream for me and S, when we were juggling the probabilities of 20 versus 24 versus 28 weeks? Yeah, hard for me to get too broken up. I've burned off what didn't work, and what's left is harder. S and I didn't flip out in public, even with birth announcements and baby showers and parents in the neighborhood with strollers and babies everywhere, we didn't flip out. My first thought was "lady, my kids are dead and this doesn't strike me as a big deal." Teachable moment? We're stronger than we think.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Babies still everywhere.
It's not just my immediate surroundings that hammer me with reminders of what S and I don't have, it's also the culture. It's television, movies, magazines. The singular of "media" is "medium," meaning "one of the means or channels of general communication, information, or entertainment in society, as newspapers, radio, or television" or "an intervening agency, means, or instrument by which something is conveyed or accomplished" (thank you, Dictionary.com), but also "surrounding objects, conditions, or influences; environment."
One of my chief coping mechanisms has for some time been the media. Music has consistently been a motive force in my life, providing a great deal of solace and reassurance to me as a rebellious teenager, film got me through an extremely difficult breakup (before I met S, of course), and film, television, and video games soothe me now. I spend a lot of time in front of one blinking screen or another. The problem is that I am discovering just how pervasive the idea of children and parenthood is. Like many, I took it for granted before. Now I can't, and everywhere I turn I see mommies and daddies and babies.
There's the movie "Baby Mama", starring the otherwise funny Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in a story about a well-to-do woman who can't have children (which is apparently hilarious) and how she recruits a trashy, lower-class woman as a surrogate (which is apparently also a laugh riot.) I'm baffled, because the principal parties should have more sense than this. It's offensive in terms of gender (women want babies at whatever cost) and class (the rich are right to exploit the poor, the poor cannot be trusted to make good decisions). And it's about the drive to have babies. Babies uber alles.
Then there's "Juno", which a friend of ours described as a "right-wing piece of shit disguised as indie cinema", wherein a quirky, spunky teenage girl gets quirkily, spunkily pregnant, and then gives the baby up for adoption without batting an eye or feeling anything resembling loss , and then she goes back to being quirky and spunky while some aggressively indie-rock soundtrack whispers in the background. Pregnancy is taken for granted, of course she gets pregnant by accident, because it's almost impossible not to get pregnant - hell, walk down the street, you might trip, fall, and land on a penis. So giving up the baby is, like, no big deal. Just have another one later, right? How hard could it be?
There are the myriad magazines in the checkout aisle at the supermarket - "baby bump" watches for celebrities, who's expecting, who's expected to be expecting soon. Who had their "miracle" twins at the ripe old age of 40-whatever? (without any help, of course - coughcoughJuliaRobertscoughcough) Who's importing an adopted child from the Third World country du jour now? Babies! Babies! BABIES! Shit, S can't even go into the grocery store anymore because it's on the newsstands, it's in the aisles. Babies everywhere.
And then there's television. Before we lost the boys, we used to watch "Jon & Kate Plus 8", mostly for the inevitable day when Jon finally snaps and leaves Kate to go to Vegas and shack up with a stripper named Stormee. Now it's unbearable. The Gosselins, the Duggars, and the rest of the parade of families with multiples. We were so excited to have twins - I have twin sisters, we wouldn't have to try and go through the reproductive gauntlet again. Each of our boys would have a brother. But multiples are tough, not that you'd know from the genial freakshows on Discovery Health. More stories of families with huge numbers of children, whether naturally (poor Mrs. Duggar) or not (Kate and her cavalier use of Clomid, man, did our RE get pissed when we started talking about that). This is the condition to which we should aspire, to have babies everywhere. Define women in terms of motherhood, define families in terms of offspring, define ourselves in terms of our basest function. Channels of baby-only programming. Life-and-death hospital shows about the valiant OBs who pull all but the most recalcitrant pregnancies through.
Never mind the blood and pain and screaming, the aching loss, the hideous parody of childbirth, me clutching S's hand, telling her to push like we'd always planned, except now it's all in the service of the dead, of an end, not a beginning. The exhaustion of parents meets the exhaustion of mourning. The swaddling clothes are all we have to remember them, and the pictures are too painful to look at, let alone show off. The nightmare version of pregnancy and childbirth, the outcome we thought too horrible to contemplate just months before. Yeah, they don't make movies about that shit. They don't feature those people on TV. They don't get cover stories in Us Weekly. Babies are cute. Grief is ugly. And ugly is never the hero, ugly never sells. In social psychology, there's a maxim - "what is beautiful is good." Ain't that the fucking truth.
So it's harder and harder to find refuge.
One night, I'm playing a video game, and at one point, my character is called upon to mediate a dispute between two people: A woman, pregnant with her late husband's child, argues with her brother-in-law about genetic therapy for the disorder that killed her husband. If she gets it for her unborn child, there might be long-term problems. If she doesn't get it, her child could get the disorder that killed her husband. She doesn't want to make a decision that might mean she killed her child.
And I'm sitting here, thinking "Really? Here too? Really? Can't I just blow something up?"
Babies everywhere.
One of my chief coping mechanisms has for some time been the media. Music has consistently been a motive force in my life, providing a great deal of solace and reassurance to me as a rebellious teenager, film got me through an extremely difficult breakup (before I met S, of course), and film, television, and video games soothe me now. I spend a lot of time in front of one blinking screen or another. The problem is that I am discovering just how pervasive the idea of children and parenthood is. Like many, I took it for granted before. Now I can't, and everywhere I turn I see mommies and daddies and babies.
There's the movie "Baby Mama", starring the otherwise funny Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in a story about a well-to-do woman who can't have children (which is apparently hilarious) and how she recruits a trashy, lower-class woman as a surrogate (which is apparently also a laugh riot.) I'm baffled, because the principal parties should have more sense than this. It's offensive in terms of gender (women want babies at whatever cost) and class (the rich are right to exploit the poor, the poor cannot be trusted to make good decisions). And it's about the drive to have babies. Babies uber alles.
Then there's "Juno", which a friend of ours described as a "right-wing piece of shit disguised as indie cinema", wherein a quirky, spunky teenage girl gets quirkily, spunkily pregnant, and then gives the baby up for adoption without batting an eye or feeling anything resembling loss , and then she goes back to being quirky and spunky while some aggressively indie-rock soundtrack whispers in the background. Pregnancy is taken for granted, of course she gets pregnant by accident, because it's almost impossible not to get pregnant - hell, walk down the street, you might trip, fall, and land on a penis. So giving up the baby is, like, no big deal. Just have another one later, right? How hard could it be?
There are the myriad magazines in the checkout aisle at the supermarket - "baby bump" watches for celebrities, who's expecting, who's expected to be expecting soon. Who had their "miracle" twins at the ripe old age of 40-whatever? (without any help, of course - coughcoughJuliaRobertscoughcough) Who's importing an adopted child from the Third World country du jour now? Babies! Babies! BABIES! Shit, S can't even go into the grocery store anymore because it's on the newsstands, it's in the aisles. Babies everywhere.
And then there's television. Before we lost the boys, we used to watch "Jon & Kate Plus 8", mostly for the inevitable day when Jon finally snaps and leaves Kate to go to Vegas and shack up with a stripper named Stormee. Now it's unbearable. The Gosselins, the Duggars, and the rest of the parade of families with multiples. We were so excited to have twins - I have twin sisters, we wouldn't have to try and go through the reproductive gauntlet again. Each of our boys would have a brother. But multiples are tough, not that you'd know from the genial freakshows on Discovery Health. More stories of families with huge numbers of children, whether naturally (poor Mrs. Duggar) or not (Kate and her cavalier use of Clomid, man, did our RE get pissed when we started talking about that). This is the condition to which we should aspire, to have babies everywhere. Define women in terms of motherhood, define families in terms of offspring, define ourselves in terms of our basest function. Channels of baby-only programming. Life-and-death hospital shows about the valiant OBs who pull all but the most recalcitrant pregnancies through.
Never mind the blood and pain and screaming, the aching loss, the hideous parody of childbirth, me clutching S's hand, telling her to push like we'd always planned, except now it's all in the service of the dead, of an end, not a beginning. The exhaustion of parents meets the exhaustion of mourning. The swaddling clothes are all we have to remember them, and the pictures are too painful to look at, let alone show off. The nightmare version of pregnancy and childbirth, the outcome we thought too horrible to contemplate just months before. Yeah, they don't make movies about that shit. They don't feature those people on TV. They don't get cover stories in Us Weekly. Babies are cute. Grief is ugly. And ugly is never the hero, ugly never sells. In social psychology, there's a maxim - "what is beautiful is good." Ain't that the fucking truth.
So it's harder and harder to find refuge.
One night, I'm playing a video game, and at one point, my character is called upon to mediate a dispute between two people: A woman, pregnant with her late husband's child, argues with her brother-in-law about genetic therapy for the disorder that killed her husband. If she gets it for her unborn child, there might be long-term problems. If she doesn't get it, her child could get the disorder that killed her husband. She doesn't want to make a decision that might mean she killed her child.
And I'm sitting here, thinking "Really? Here too? Really? Can't I just blow something up?"
Babies everywhere.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
On being a DH.
In the before-time, in the long, long-ago, when we first started trying to conceive, S made a point of visiting a number of different fertility-related message boards, essentially trying to build some community to help deal with our difficulties getting pregnant. Inevitably, I found myself looking at some of these boards over her shoulder, and it was here that I became familiar with the term "DH." And although I know it stands for "Darling Husband" or "Dear Husband," the part of my Y chromosome that passes along a rudimentary knowledge of sports insists on interpreting it as "Designated Husband." Which, given the tenor of most of the discussion, seemed about right. And it got me to thinking.
It got me thinking back to when S and I were planning our wedding. It wasn't unusual as weddings go, I don't think. But I found myself a little appalled at how little attention the husband got in all of the things we read (and I think at one point we could have built a new bed out of all of the bridal magazines we had laying around). The general consensus seemed to be "as long as he shows up on time and sober, tee-hee", and well, I was pretty goddamned excited about getting married. And lucky S, she was marrying a man who actually had opinions on things like dishes and silverware. (Of course, be careful what you wish for.) Bottom line, I felt like the role of the groom was marginalized, that ultimately, any jackass in a tux would do. Hence, "Designated Husband."
And once we got pregnant, it really struck me just how much the industry surrounding motherhood resembles the industry surrounding marriage. Each takes a milestone experience, one with tremendous individual history and variation, one which will require a lifetime commitment, hard work, and isn't always going to be sunshine and rainbow unicorns, and pares it down to its most idealized, marketable form. Of course, this sells stuff, which is the whole point, and it capitalizes on fear and insecurity over doing the wrong thing. (I remember one mother-to-be magazine we brought back from an ultrasound had articles downplaying breastfeeding and touting it as the only reasonable path...in the same issue!) Each compresses what will be a life's work into the "bride" or the "mom," as if that's all there is to it, and then sells you what you ostensibly need to be that person. And in each case, there's the life partner, the husband, standing on the outside, reduced to someone fit only to show up, say two words, handle the ice chips. The DH. Abbreviation in another's narrative.
I've tried hard not to be a DH. I try to express opinions and feelings and be involved. I'm not always successful, but I can't believe that I'm the only one out there who wanted to take part, who wanted to be involved, and got told by our culture that all that was expected of us was to show up. To be an abbreviation.
It got me thinking back to when S and I were planning our wedding. It wasn't unusual as weddings go, I don't think. But I found myself a little appalled at how little attention the husband got in all of the things we read (and I think at one point we could have built a new bed out of all of the bridal magazines we had laying around). The general consensus seemed to be "as long as he shows up on time and sober, tee-hee", and well, I was pretty goddamned excited about getting married. And lucky S, she was marrying a man who actually had opinions on things like dishes and silverware. (Of course, be careful what you wish for.) Bottom line, I felt like the role of the groom was marginalized, that ultimately, any jackass in a tux would do. Hence, "Designated Husband."
And once we got pregnant, it really struck me just how much the industry surrounding motherhood resembles the industry surrounding marriage. Each takes a milestone experience, one with tremendous individual history and variation, one which will require a lifetime commitment, hard work, and isn't always going to be sunshine and rainbow unicorns, and pares it down to its most idealized, marketable form. Of course, this sells stuff, which is the whole point, and it capitalizes on fear and insecurity over doing the wrong thing. (I remember one mother-to-be magazine we brought back from an ultrasound had articles downplaying breastfeeding and touting it as the only reasonable path...in the same issue!) Each compresses what will be a life's work into the "bride" or the "mom," as if that's all there is to it, and then sells you what you ostensibly need to be that person. And in each case, there's the life partner, the husband, standing on the outside, reduced to someone fit only to show up, say two words, handle the ice chips. The DH. Abbreviation in another's narrative.
I've tried hard not to be a DH. I try to express opinions and feelings and be involved. I'm not always successful, but I can't believe that I'm the only one out there who wanted to take part, who wanted to be involved, and got told by our culture that all that was expected of us was to show up. To be an abbreviation.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Wired differently (warning: long and tedious).
I keep telling myself I'm not going to do this, I'm not gonna, nope, nope, nope...I am not gonna go into some long, pedantic holding-forth on theories of gender. I study this shit, I do research on this shit, I can bore a motherfucker at forty paces with this shit. Just ask S. Go over to her blog right now, I bet she's nodding her head.
And yet.
So I think men do sort of get the short end of the stick in a lot of ways. It's hard for us to get custody of our own children, there's an asymmetry in how much flexibility we have within our gender role, we're often portrayed in advertising and popular media as incompetent, the La-Z-Boy dictators with all the power, our women the power behind the reclining throne. We rule the world, but can't change a diaper. Ha-ha.
One of my sisters has a mother-in-law like this. Her husband was a sexist pig, and more or less raised a son the same way. One day she confides to my sister along the lines of "well, we know who's really in charge, right?" in that "oh aren't they cute little boys" tone of voice. Which would be kinda funny in an "Everybody Loves Raymond" kind of way except men do have a lot of social power, institutional power. Those overgrown man-children pass laws and send people to war, make more money, get better promotions, and keep women "in their place". So it's kind of fucked.
But see, here's the deal: All of that social power doesn't invalidate the problems men have. It just makes it harder for us to talk about it. It smacks of entitlement, of playing the victim. We are, to some extent, prisoners of our own stereotype. It's times like this, when we deal with grief and loss, when we are depressed, when we have to struggle to go on that it's especially evident, I think. Not because we try to share and get beaten down for it, but because socialization means that it never occurs to us to share to begin with.
Boring digression: There are basically two camps in gender research, at least in experimental psychology. I can't speak for other disciplines. One is the evolutionary camp, which says that gender differences are a product of evolutionary pressures: Men are dominant and aggressive because dominant, aggressive men were more successful at mating. Women are caring and nurturing because the ones who weren't didn't take care of their children and those traits weren't propagated. There's also parental investment: Children require more time and resources from women (9 months plus post-partum feeding and care) than men (five minutes, ten if you're lucky, twenty if he's had a few beers). So women are more caring than men, because they have to be. Gender differences are thus the product of evolution. Hard-wired into the brain.
The other is the social constructionist camp, which says that gender differences are a product of social expectations about men and women. Yes, there are real physical differences, but by and large what we expect from men and women are the result of different expectations. I won't get into a whole long explanation of how this works, but basically the longer you conflate the jobs men and women tend to do (because of those physical differences) with the traits required to do them, the more you assume that men and women naturally possess the traits required to do the job, because they're the ones doing it. Women are expected to be caring and nurturing, men are expected to be dominant and aggressive, and we reward those who behave according to these expectations and punish those who don't. Gender differences are thus social - primarily (though not exclusively) the product of consensual beliefs about what men and women are and how they should act.
My perspective on gender is a social constructionist perspective. I'm highly aware of roles and what it means to not fulfill them. I'm a big believer in conditioning, that we teach people how to be male and female within a particular culture from a very young age. And I think sometimes we mistake the result of conditioning for natural, hard-wired differences. Women tend to be better than men at decoding nonverbal communication, and men tend to use more concrete language than women. We get good at what we're taught to do from birth. Men are not taught how to share their feelings. At worst, we're taught to hide them (I don't give a fuck what Rosey Grier had to say in "Free To Be You And Me", it is not alright to cry).
All of this yadda yadda is a long and complicated way of saying that I think part of the problem for men is that we aren't really taught to express emotions in the same way as women. This goes for the men undergoing loss and the men in our social support network. And honestly? We might not even be capable of identifying our own emotions to some degree. It took me a little while to be able to articulate exactly how the loss felt to me. I'm a wordy bastard, and it took some serious sitting there and focusing on the feeling for me to find a way to articulate it. And that was mostly because I knew S would want to know how I felt. We're not wholly incapable of it, it's just not necessarily part of our regular skill set. Men in Western culture are by and large taught to do things, to act, to take care of stuff, rather than process and describe.
Which I think also gets to why it's expected that we just get back into the swing of things afterward, or why during the horrible parts we act instead of feel - it's what we're taught, and the more we've been reinforced for this behavior over the course of our life, the better it feels to engage in it. I handled communications for both of us in the hospital. When we got home, I ended up ordering people around and playing host, even when all I wanted to do was collapse. Why? I suspect on some level I wasn't really sure how to do anything else, and everyone else was supporting what I was doing.
I have to admit, the feeling of control that doing something gave me was comforting. And I've been more successful at transitioning back into work than S, partially because it's easier for me to find some comfort in having something to do. It also helps that the class I'm teaching this semester is one I've taught before, so it takes less work to teach it than a new class would. And there are times where I feel sad, and I tell S. Before all of this happened, she'd have to ask me how I felt about something before I'd tell her. I usually could once asked, but it just never occurred to me to just tell her how I was feeling. Now it does. Not all the time, but definitely around the loss of our sons. Even so, even with the focus on doing and working and all that, it took a lot for me to get back into it. Especially when you work with theory, it's hard to get all fired up after your children have died. Everything else seems so much less important.
I don't know that people have expected me to pick right back up - I get the sense that I'm being ridden a little less hard than I could be, and I appreciate that. I also noticed a little hesitation when I saw people for the first time afterward, as if they were waiting to see if I would just burst into tears or freak out. When I didn't, it made it a little easier to talk to me. And it's not like I was trying to hide my grief - it's just not something that's routinely on display. I think people might think more about it if it were more evident all the time. But it's not. My relationship with my grief is a subject for another post.
In the end, it's my opinion that our thoughts and behaviors are guided by how people expect us to act and how they act towards us in return. They take their cues from what we do, and we take our cues from them and from what feels right and has felt right in the past. Are men and women wired differently? Maybe. But wiring can be changed.
And yet.
So I think men do sort of get the short end of the stick in a lot of ways. It's hard for us to get custody of our own children, there's an asymmetry in how much flexibility we have within our gender role, we're often portrayed in advertising and popular media as incompetent, the La-Z-Boy dictators with all the power, our women the power behind the reclining throne. We rule the world, but can't change a diaper. Ha-ha.
One of my sisters has a mother-in-law like this. Her husband was a sexist pig, and more or less raised a son the same way. One day she confides to my sister along the lines of "well, we know who's really in charge, right?" in that "oh aren't they cute little boys" tone of voice. Which would be kinda funny in an "Everybody Loves Raymond" kind of way except men do have a lot of social power, institutional power. Those overgrown man-children pass laws and send people to war, make more money, get better promotions, and keep women "in their place". So it's kind of fucked.
But see, here's the deal: All of that social power doesn't invalidate the problems men have. It just makes it harder for us to talk about it. It smacks of entitlement, of playing the victim. We are, to some extent, prisoners of our own stereotype. It's times like this, when we deal with grief and loss, when we are depressed, when we have to struggle to go on that it's especially evident, I think. Not because we try to share and get beaten down for it, but because socialization means that it never occurs to us to share to begin with.
Boring digression: There are basically two camps in gender research, at least in experimental psychology. I can't speak for other disciplines. One is the evolutionary camp, which says that gender differences are a product of evolutionary pressures: Men are dominant and aggressive because dominant, aggressive men were more successful at mating. Women are caring and nurturing because the ones who weren't didn't take care of their children and those traits weren't propagated. There's also parental investment: Children require more time and resources from women (9 months plus post-partum feeding and care) than men (five minutes, ten if you're lucky, twenty if he's had a few beers). So women are more caring than men, because they have to be. Gender differences are thus the product of evolution. Hard-wired into the brain.
The other is the social constructionist camp, which says that gender differences are a product of social expectations about men and women. Yes, there are real physical differences, but by and large what we expect from men and women are the result of different expectations. I won't get into a whole long explanation of how this works, but basically the longer you conflate the jobs men and women tend to do (because of those physical differences) with the traits required to do them, the more you assume that men and women naturally possess the traits required to do the job, because they're the ones doing it. Women are expected to be caring and nurturing, men are expected to be dominant and aggressive, and we reward those who behave according to these expectations and punish those who don't. Gender differences are thus social - primarily (though not exclusively) the product of consensual beliefs about what men and women are and how they should act.
My perspective on gender is a social constructionist perspective. I'm highly aware of roles and what it means to not fulfill them. I'm a big believer in conditioning, that we teach people how to be male and female within a particular culture from a very young age. And I think sometimes we mistake the result of conditioning for natural, hard-wired differences. Women tend to be better than men at decoding nonverbal communication, and men tend to use more concrete language than women. We get good at what we're taught to do from birth. Men are not taught how to share their feelings. At worst, we're taught to hide them (I don't give a fuck what Rosey Grier had to say in "Free To Be You And Me", it is not alright to cry).
All of this yadda yadda is a long and complicated way of saying that I think part of the problem for men is that we aren't really taught to express emotions in the same way as women. This goes for the men undergoing loss and the men in our social support network. And honestly? We might not even be capable of identifying our own emotions to some degree. It took me a little while to be able to articulate exactly how the loss felt to me. I'm a wordy bastard, and it took some serious sitting there and focusing on the feeling for me to find a way to articulate it. And that was mostly because I knew S would want to know how I felt. We're not wholly incapable of it, it's just not necessarily part of our regular skill set. Men in Western culture are by and large taught to do things, to act, to take care of stuff, rather than process and describe.
Which I think also gets to why it's expected that we just get back into the swing of things afterward, or why during the horrible parts we act instead of feel - it's what we're taught, and the more we've been reinforced for this behavior over the course of our life, the better it feels to engage in it. I handled communications for both of us in the hospital. When we got home, I ended up ordering people around and playing host, even when all I wanted to do was collapse. Why? I suspect on some level I wasn't really sure how to do anything else, and everyone else was supporting what I was doing.
I have to admit, the feeling of control that doing something gave me was comforting. And I've been more successful at transitioning back into work than S, partially because it's easier for me to find some comfort in having something to do. It also helps that the class I'm teaching this semester is one I've taught before, so it takes less work to teach it than a new class would. And there are times where I feel sad, and I tell S. Before all of this happened, she'd have to ask me how I felt about something before I'd tell her. I usually could once asked, but it just never occurred to me to just tell her how I was feeling. Now it does. Not all the time, but definitely around the loss of our sons. Even so, even with the focus on doing and working and all that, it took a lot for me to get back into it. Especially when you work with theory, it's hard to get all fired up after your children have died. Everything else seems so much less important.
I don't know that people have expected me to pick right back up - I get the sense that I'm being ridden a little less hard than I could be, and I appreciate that. I also noticed a little hesitation when I saw people for the first time afterward, as if they were waiting to see if I would just burst into tears or freak out. When I didn't, it made it a little easier to talk to me. And it's not like I was trying to hide my grief - it's just not something that's routinely on display. I think people might think more about it if it were more evident all the time. But it's not. My relationship with my grief is a subject for another post.
In the end, it's my opinion that our thoughts and behaviors are guided by how people expect us to act and how they act towards us in return. They take their cues from what we do, and we take our cues from them and from what feels right and has felt right in the past. Are men and women wired differently? Maybe. But wiring can be changed.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
It could be worse. It could always be worse.
I've gotten so much great support from the post on how others respond to me versus my wife that I want to elaborate a little if I can.
I don't think my immediate situation is entirely due to my gender. Part of it has to do with the difference between my doctoral program and S's. S is in an education-related program, and they tend to be a little more touchy-feely over there anyway. My program is a quantitative experimental program, and as a group we tend to be a little introverted. The joke is that "research is me-search" - we tend to study the things we don't understand. Since I work in a field that deals with how people think and behave as members of social groups, well, maybe you can see where this is going. On top of that, I'm not the easiest guy to get to know in daily life. A friend of mine once commented, "you know how some people have an aura? You have a force field." Even before all of this started, being social and developing and maintaining friendships was tough for me.
Part of it is also the "I don't know what to say" factor. And believe me, if people don't know what to say, I'd rather they not say anything than bust out something like "God has a plan for you" or "everything happens for a reason" or "you could always have another" or "you have two little angels in heaven right now" or "have you considered getting a dog?" The occasional "how are you doing?" might be nice, but if people are unsure, I appreciate not wanting to say the wrong thing, especially since "I don't know what to say" doesn't seem all that comforting. They don't know that that's okay, because they haven't been through it. On the whole, we have been extremely lucky to get a minimum of inappropriate comments. I see other people's accounts and I'm appalled at some of the insensitivity there. I don't take our good fortune on that front for granted.
In some ways, I think dealing with our chemical pregnancies was harder. They didn't impact me to the same degree as they did S, but I knew she was in pain and grieving. Still, we have absolutely no norms in our culture for near-misses. As horrible as the death of our sons was, at least people have some idea of how to respond to the death of children, compared to unsuccessful pregnancies. Those we really did get through on our own.
I also think about the comedy of horrors that is all of the huge life changes occurring in our immediate support network. Out of S's three closest friends, one lost her father the same day we found out Joshua was dead (detailed here), and another was both helping to care for her father, who suffers from dementia, while working, caring for two children, and dealing with her husbands' serious heart problem (detailed here). The third? She's actually having a pretty good year, and deserves it, because last year sucked for her. One of S's best friends in town is pregnant with her second, S's sister is also pregnant, and these two women have been tremendous support for her through our struggle with infertility. The festival of wacky circumstances continues, but it could always be worse. We have our physical health. We have two beautiful cats. The sun is shining. I at least take some comfort in these things.
I don't think my immediate situation is entirely due to my gender. Part of it has to do with the difference between my doctoral program and S's. S is in an education-related program, and they tend to be a little more touchy-feely over there anyway. My program is a quantitative experimental program, and as a group we tend to be a little introverted. The joke is that "research is me-search" - we tend to study the things we don't understand. Since I work in a field that deals with how people think and behave as members of social groups, well, maybe you can see where this is going. On top of that, I'm not the easiest guy to get to know in daily life. A friend of mine once commented, "you know how some people have an aura? You have a force field." Even before all of this started, being social and developing and maintaining friendships was tough for me.
Part of it is also the "I don't know what to say" factor. And believe me, if people don't know what to say, I'd rather they not say anything than bust out something like "God has a plan for you" or "everything happens for a reason" or "you could always have another" or "you have two little angels in heaven right now" or "have you considered getting a dog?" The occasional "how are you doing?" might be nice, but if people are unsure, I appreciate not wanting to say the wrong thing, especially since "I don't know what to say" doesn't seem all that comforting. They don't know that that's okay, because they haven't been through it. On the whole, we have been extremely lucky to get a minimum of inappropriate comments. I see other people's accounts and I'm appalled at some of the insensitivity there. I don't take our good fortune on that front for granted.
In some ways, I think dealing with our chemical pregnancies was harder. They didn't impact me to the same degree as they did S, but I knew she was in pain and grieving. Still, we have absolutely no norms in our culture for near-misses. As horrible as the death of our sons was, at least people have some idea of how to respond to the death of children, compared to unsuccessful pregnancies. Those we really did get through on our own.
I also think about the comedy of horrors that is all of the huge life changes occurring in our immediate support network. Out of S's three closest friends, one lost her father the same day we found out Joshua was dead (detailed here), and another was both helping to care for her father, who suffers from dementia, while working, caring for two children, and dealing with her husbands' serious heart problem (detailed here). The third? She's actually having a pretty good year, and deserves it, because last year sucked for her. One of S's best friends in town is pregnant with her second, S's sister is also pregnant, and these two women have been tremendous support for her through our struggle with infertility. The festival of wacky circumstances continues, but it could always be worse. We have our physical health. We have two beautiful cats. The sun is shining. I at least take some comfort in these things.
Monday, March 24, 2008
The strong, silent type.
Part of it is being a man.
The masculine gender role in Western culture is defined in part by agency - the ability to provide, to take action. The feminine gender role is defined in part by communion - the ability to connect, nurture, support. All kinds of traits and acceptable/unacceptable behaviors stem from this distinction. Expectations about appropriate responses to an event stem from this distinction as well. Not just how you should act, but also how others respond to you.
I am especially feeling this right now.
It's not even necessarily other people putting it on me as much as me putting it on myself - I assume that because I'm less prone to let my feelings overwhelm me, it must be my responsibility to take care of things when S can't. I may be the walking wounded, but I'm still able to walk, right? So I should keep walking. And I know from previous experience that keeping busy helps me to outrun pain, but right now, it's tough. The depression has set in in a big way, and just getting out of bed and doing what I have to do feels like a victory. I made dinner from something vaguely resembling scratch tonight for the first time in who knows how long, and just doing that felt like one more rung on the ladder out of the dark. I don't really want to do anything but sleep, surf the web, watch TV and play video games. But neither does S, and it's all got to get done somehow, so I do it. Time to grieve later.
It also affects how others respond to you. For the most part, we've been very, very lucky in how others have spoken to us. There's been some inappropriate stuff, but not really from unexpected quarters, and nothing too offensive. Honestly, I'd braced myself for much worse. But how people treat me is very different from how people treat S.
S has people asking her how she's doing, mostly being sensitive, checking in on her. For me, it's been mostly silence. I got condolences early on, but it settled very quickly into awkward silence, then less awkward silence, and now it never comes up. And I don't know if it's because I'm a man or what, but when someone does say something thoughtless, I don't want to say anything because I don't want to be perceived as playing the victim.
And I'm surrounded by baby stuff. I mean, of course it's on the cover of every magazine, all over the TV, it's all over the place. My advisor is pregnant. Another faculty member just gave birth and of course I get the email announcement. Why wouldn't I? Why would that be a problem? Sometimes when my officemate starts waxing rhapsodic about our advisor and how pregnant she's looking, I want to snap and say "look, I don't care how fucking pregnant she looks now, because we already have a weird relationship and every time I look at her, I see all of the happiness I should be getting ready to enjoy but won't be because my fucking children died."
Not one "how are you doing?" from any of the people I see every day. Not now. First week back? Sure. Couple months later? Old news. Maybe I should just be over it by now. Maybe I should just man up and get back to work. Gary Cooper, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood. The strong, silent type.
But it fucking hurts.
The masculine gender role in Western culture is defined in part by agency - the ability to provide, to take action. The feminine gender role is defined in part by communion - the ability to connect, nurture, support. All kinds of traits and acceptable/unacceptable behaviors stem from this distinction. Expectations about appropriate responses to an event stem from this distinction as well. Not just how you should act, but also how others respond to you.
I am especially feeling this right now.
It's not even necessarily other people putting it on me as much as me putting it on myself - I assume that because I'm less prone to let my feelings overwhelm me, it must be my responsibility to take care of things when S can't. I may be the walking wounded, but I'm still able to walk, right? So I should keep walking. And I know from previous experience that keeping busy helps me to outrun pain, but right now, it's tough. The depression has set in in a big way, and just getting out of bed and doing what I have to do feels like a victory. I made dinner from something vaguely resembling scratch tonight for the first time in who knows how long, and just doing that felt like one more rung on the ladder out of the dark. I don't really want to do anything but sleep, surf the web, watch TV and play video games. But neither does S, and it's all got to get done somehow, so I do it. Time to grieve later.
It also affects how others respond to you. For the most part, we've been very, very lucky in how others have spoken to us. There's been some inappropriate stuff, but not really from unexpected quarters, and nothing too offensive. Honestly, I'd braced myself for much worse. But how people treat me is very different from how people treat S.
S has people asking her how she's doing, mostly being sensitive, checking in on her. For me, it's been mostly silence. I got condolences early on, but it settled very quickly into awkward silence, then less awkward silence, and now it never comes up. And I don't know if it's because I'm a man or what, but when someone does say something thoughtless, I don't want to say anything because I don't want to be perceived as playing the victim.
And I'm surrounded by baby stuff. I mean, of course it's on the cover of every magazine, all over the TV, it's all over the place. My advisor is pregnant. Another faculty member just gave birth and of course I get the email announcement. Why wouldn't I? Why would that be a problem? Sometimes when my officemate starts waxing rhapsodic about our advisor and how pregnant she's looking, I want to snap and say "look, I don't care how fucking pregnant she looks now, because we already have a weird relationship and every time I look at her, I see all of the happiness I should be getting ready to enjoy but won't be because my fucking children died."
Not one "how are you doing?" from any of the people I see every day. Not now. First week back? Sure. Couple months later? Old news. Maybe I should just be over it by now. Maybe I should just man up and get back to work. Gary Cooper, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood. The strong, silent type.
But it fucking hurts.
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