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.

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.

Wow.

I'm amazed by the compassion and reception this thing of mine has gotten. It's maybe even a little overwhelming, though not in a bad way. I guess, over the course of my life, I've gotten so used to working through things pretty much on my own, that having all of this is a brand new experience. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I appreciate all of your comments and words of support, and try to respond when I can. I'm not the best person in the world at staying in touch, but this has just been amazing. Thank you.

This recent interruption in my posts has been brought to you by trying to put together a job application for a visiting professorship for next year in something like four days. Lots of running around and shrieking. Better now. Calmer now.

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.

Apropos of nothing.

I can still remember one of the first things S did that really endeared her to me.

When we first started dating, I was in a crappy job that I didn't like. Inevitably, our evenings together would start with me venting for about ten or fifteen minutes about my stupid job. After one particularly firebreathing rant, she looked at me with an amused expression and said...

"You don't scare me."

And, just, awwwww. I loved that.

Missing completely at random.

Antigone asked a good question in response to a previous post...

"What if there's no sense to be made?"

I think it depends on what's meant by "making sense."

I'm sure we've all heard it from well-meaning people: "Everything happens for a reason." The last thing I want to think about is what possible reason there could be for the death of my sons. I mean, there's the cause of death, but I know that's not what people mean. They mean "this wasn't some random occurrence, the universe isn't completely arbitrary and frightening in its uncaringness." And I know they're trying to make me feel better, and I know that it's a powerful human motivation to seek order. I try not to judge them too harshly.

Personally, I am generally okay with the idea that the universe is random and arbitrary. Knowing that this could have happened to anyone is actually more reassuring that wondering what secret rule or law I violated brought this suffering upon me. It's part of my worldview. I don't believe in God, I don't believe in higher powers. I believe that this is all there is, and that it's up to me to derive meaning from the events of my life. I make whatever sense I can, I figure out what good I can take away from something horrible. Whatever it is, no matter how small, if it helps me to grow or become stronger, then it hasn't been for nothing.

I have lost my sons for no good reason. I accept that, and I am stronger for knowing that I am able to survive it, if nothing else.

The purge, the long slow climb.

In the process of grieving our lost sons, a lot of things about how we live our life have sort of gone ignored. Lots of things that held over from before, the artifacts of a difficult pregnancy, stuck around because we were/are too busy being in shock to do anything about it. What I've found, over the last few weeks, is that trying to restore a certain amount of normalcy is good for me, even healing. And this means a lot of getting-rid-of. I finally got my hair cut about three weeks ago - I was already a little shaggy when we lost our sons, and by the end of the whole process, it was all I could do to shave off my week's worth of beard. But when I finally did, it felt good. And when I got the damn-near shoulder-length hair cut off in favor of my usual short, clean-cut look, a little more weight left my shoulders. It was one more step away from that awful, awful time.

As if this wasn't mundane enough, a few days ago I cleaned out our refrigerator, getting rid of some of S's staples from when she was still pregnant - the only foods or beverages she could take without getting ill. It left a lot of room, and again, I felt a little freer.

Mundane? Oh hell yes. But in each case, shedding something, removing it, made me feel a little calmer, a little lighter. Every reminder of those horrible weeks around the death of our children got shed, and it left room for something new. I don't expect it to take the grief away, but the more I can clear away, the easier it is to deal with what's left. The easier it is to deal with what's left, the closer we get to being people again, instead of victims.