What I Did for My Summer Vacation

I travelled.

This wasn’t my usual trip to Atlanta to see my sisters or five hour drive to the beach or even the more rare flight to Orlando to see the Mouse.

My family and I, much like the Griswolds, took a European vacation. We spent four nights in London and five, with an unplanned sixth night, in Paris. We flew from our town to Washington to Ottawa to London. According to our passports, Ottawa counts as having been in Canada, which means we had our first practice run on going through customs and changing flights in another country. In between London and Paris, we took the Eurostar through the Chunnel. We had an extra night in Paris, well, a hotel near the airport, which in itself was an additional adventure. Then we came home and our lives are forever changed.

You know a vacation is good when you take days not just to recover, but to process. To think about all the things you did and saw and ate. To consider how life is different but the same. To be glad to have the things you missed but to lament the things you don’t have that you experienced.  

My main regret is that I forgot to pack a notebook or journal. I know I am going to forget something, some thought or opinion or observation that thanks to my forty five year old brain will be lost in there forever.  As I continue to reflect on my trip, I have been increasingly unsure how to write about it. Do I write a chronological detail of every day, of every museum and meal, hoping that by retracing my steps mentally, I will recall all the thoughts and feelings I had at the time? Do I concentrate on anecdotes, telling a snippet of here and there, in no particular order other than how I remember them? Do I ponder the ways in which the little bit of life abroad I experienced compares and contrasts to my own typical days here in the Southern United States? So many options, so many possibilities, so many ways to tell my two week story that may have possibly changed my life and the lives of my children.

I am asking you to weigh in. I don’t tell my stories in a vacuum. I share them with you, when you stop by for a little visit. The truth is I have a lot to tell, and in my head, it’s all fucking fantastic and interesting. At the end of the day, however, isn’t this the modern version of having you all over for dinner and then forcing you to sit through the slide show of my vacation? I already did that on Facebook, by the way. I attempted a daily post or two of the things that captured my attention, sharing small observations along the way. It’s not the same thing as painting those pictures with words.

So, if you care to comment, tell me what you would find more interesting. Do you mind sitting through the “we did this Monday and we saw that Wednesday?” Or would you prefer a more all over the place approach, like what makes our toilets so different or who knew that was what yogurt could taste like? Granted, you are going to get a whole lot of B with your A, so keep that in mind.

And please stick around, because I am pretty sure in the story telling, I will have something for everyone, even if all of it is really for me.

Ditching the Double Standard

I am sick and tired of the double standard.      

My friend MS’s daughter wore, as she put it, the “dreaded yoga pants,” to high school, and for violating the dress code, she received in-school suspension. The same week, the school planned “water play” day for the students, and the girls were instructed to not wear white t-shirts. MS was pretty upset about the suspension, but more so that the same week, the school in essence sponsored a wet t-shirt contest for the high school students and then gave it a name that half the student body uses as a keyword for porn searches. Why is it not okay to wear long black fitted pants one day, but the next day students are encouraged to soak and squirt each other, making their clothing not only sopping wet but also clingy and revealing?

The whole dress code issue is out of hand lately, with top students being stripped of their honors for wearing spaghetti strap dresses to award ceremonies and plus sized students banned from proms because even in a long sleeved gown, cleavage is showing. School dress codes and fashion trends have never seen eye to eye, but the burden of this issue is always on the female students.  Wouldn’t it be great if school administrators could stop being the fashion police and get back to the business of educating?

I am a fan of uniforms for this very reason. Between the ridiculously overpriced preppy clothes that are so popular in the south, the attempting to dress for the temperature, also a Southern issue, and the constant uncertainty of what is or isn’t permissible, uniforms would pretty much solve all of those problems. I don’t understand why more parents don’t see it as a pretty easy solution.

That isn’t the only double standard that has me all riled up right now.

While young girls face all that pressure to look or dress a certain way, they have no end to the burden of maintaining an unrealistic and usually unattainable physical appearance. Women face an enormous amount of pressure to preserve their youthful look but men are allowed to age gracefully. I can name a handful of men that are still considered sexy despite their advanced age, wrinkled faces, and graying hair. I can only think of one woman with gray hair, Jamie Lee Curtis, and all she is fit to do is sell yogurt that helps you shit.

Men have somehow managed to turn bald heads into something so desirable that even men with hair want to shave their heads. I will never understand why anyone with a perfectly good head of hair would prefer to shear it off in the name of fashion, but it appears to be a trend that is here to stay.  Just a reminder, men, enjoy it while you have it. Chances are good that one day you won’t have it to cut off.

What’s your opinion of the hipster beard? I have to admit, I find them fascinating, but at the same time, how fucking unfair is that? I have been shaving my legs and armpits for over thirty years now, and for at least the last decade and a half, I have felt like I had to reduce the amount of hair in the basement because even pubic hair has been subjected to social pressure. Meanwhile, men have even less to do to maintain any sense of good hygiene. They can let both their face and crotch hair grow out to caveman proportions, and everybody is super cool with it.

The epitome of the double standard is something called dad bod. Dad bod is what a guy looks like when he drinks all the beer and eats all the bacon cheeseburgers he wants, leaving him with a borderline barrel gut and noodly thin arms from not lifting anything heavier than he can fit in his mouth. You know, like your dad. It isn’t a repulsive form, it’s just a normal body, maybe a little pudgy in the middle, maybe a little touch of gynomastia, not enough to make people cringe, but enough to say, hey, I don’t need to look like I do Cross Fit. I am comfortable in my body.

Name me one woman you know who is comfortable in her body, ever.

Men have reached a point where they have totally given up. They can be bald, hairy, flabby, gray, wrinkled, whatever, and they somehow make it not just acceptable but hip.  Women, on the other hand, are having Brazilian waxes and labial rejuvenation surgery because even their pussies can’t look old.

Why isn’t anyone talking about the fact that baby vaginas are in and have been for a while? Anyone else creeped out about that?

I would say it’s time to embrace the mom bod, but I too have been conditioned to think that mom bods are better not seen by the naked eye. I don’t want to gawk at another woman’s lumpy cellulite and stretch marks and wrinkles and sagging breasts any more than I want to look at my own. Blech. Droopy knee skin. Bat wing upper arms. Turkey necks. So many ways to self loathe. Are women going to be able to start growing out their upper lips and those three wiry chin hairs? If men can be lumbersexuals with questionable hygiene and dad bods, can we trend #lunchladylook?

In an ideal world, we would stop judging others and ourselves by our outer layer. We would go back to considering intellect, compassion, ingenuity, hard work, creativity, friendship, humor, empathy, and caring as the things that are important, the things that matter.  Kim Kardashian’s or Nicki Minaj’s butt wouldn’t be more important than ending world hunger or saving the whales. Girls at school would be more concerned with being top of the class and less concerned with who has the straightest, blondest hair. 

We have our priorities all fucking wrong, which is why a girl is excluded from learning because she wore the wrong pants to school. It’s also why a woman who grew another human inside her body feels like she needs to surgically remove her loose skin before she can wear a bikini, or why a post-menopausal woman feels she needs to continue having a moist vagina to compete with her husband’s Cialis prescription. We forgot how to value what makes a woman amazing at every age, and it has very little to do with how she looks.

What's My Motivation?

Sometimes going to the gym is torture. It is all you can do to make it through your workout, and you barely feel better for having gone. Other times, it is perfection. I don’t know what makes a perfect day for you, but for me, it’s the total experience. It isn’t just the work out or the motivation or achieving the optimal level of endorphins. It is more about getting your fitness on while being totally entertained, exercising with so many good distractions that the time flies by, that you don’t even realize you were working out.

Last Saturday was that day.

I went to spin class at an earlier time than I usually do, and I had an instructor that honestly is not my favorite. He has been teaching the early Saturday class for over ten years, and other than an occasional change in music, he hasn’t really mixed up that workout in over a decade. He speaks in a monotone voice for fifty-nine and a half of the sixty minutes of class, and only a handful of his words are clear enough to be understood. The rest of them are garbled like an airline pilot’s.

He likes to sprinkle his commentary with motivational things like “this is you” and “this is what you can do.” After hearing him say that for ten years, it’s more depressing than inspiring. I imagine him saying it in the form of a question, “this is you?” or “this is all you can do?” The rest of the time, I pretend he is making comments about our altitude or how long the flight will be or when it is safe to take off our seatbelts and move about the cabin freely. He takes a break in the narration every so often to exhale loudly into his microphone.

He also uses his words to paint a little picture to distract us from the fact that we are in a smelly dark dirty spin room. Normally his imagery revolves around climbing a mountain on a last leg of an intense bike race, where we try to fool the riders in the front to think we have lost our mojo until we barrel past them with a burst of energy no one expected from us.

Saturday, he took it old school. We were steam engines. We were shoveling coal, chugging along the tracks, and releasing hot clouds of sooty smoke into the air, until suddenly, we transformed back into racing, sprinting hard core cyclists. I was so confused. Am I the little train that could or Lance Armstrong? How relevant is a steam engine to today’s workout? Is it too soon to use train imagery following the latest Amtrak tragedy? I recall at one point thinking, wait a minute, I’m winning a bike race? What happened to my coal shoveling?

It was awesome.

During the cool down, he recapped whatever the fuck he talked about for the whole class, with our levels three, four, and five, our switchbacks, our hammering, our patting ourselves on the back, all while mopping the sweat from his face and his laminated workout cheat sheet he parks on his handlebars.

As fascinating and distracting as his teaching style is, it doesn’t even compare to some of the spin class regulars. There was the German man who sits near the door, the one who looks remarkably like Robin Williams.  I love when he is there. He wears a mock turtleneck shirt in that spandex wicking material which accentuates his aging man breasts and brings a gym bag that is more like an old-fashioned salesman sample case, square and bulky. He unloads three large water bottles and balances them on the water cage of his bike, because he takes his hydration very seriously for an hour class. Then he puts on a head covering made from the same material as his shirt, which I believe it is referred to as a “do-rag.” Halfway through class, he takes off his long sleeved mock turtleneck fitness shirt to reveal another mock turtleneck shirt made out of the same material, only with short sleeves. I never see that part coming.

About forty minutes into class, German Robin Williams takes off his do rag and swabs his balding skull with a hand towel provided by the gym. Then he holds the do rag in his fist and squeezes all of his sweat into one of those complimentary hand towels before putting it back on his head. It is a whole process, and he does it every time.

It was also awesome.

Who showed up next but the weird woman who loves exercising. She doesn’t just love to exercise, she LOVES to exercise. She came in halfway through spin class, hair long and flowing, big smile on her face. She saddled up on her bike, and after a brief warm up, which I think for her might be foreplay, she was ripe and ready to go. She began to make those whoop sounds. She closed her eyes and felt the music. She bounced on her bike. Chances are better than not that she was experiencing multiple orgasms. Some people might think she is extremely enthusiastic. They are wrong.

It isn’t just awesome, it is also an uncomfortable sight to see, and you don’t even need internet access or verification that you aren’t a minor.

After spinning with the airline pilot, the German sweater, and the spinner who gets off in public places, I cooled down by walking a few laps on the track. In the work out area was a man doing the most awkward squats ever. He squeezed his eyes and knees shut and sat back like he was going to fall in a toilet. I have no doubt he was at the very least holding in a fart, but based on his facial expression, he might have been holding in more or failed to do so. His form was terrible either way.

Next I walked past the man who wasn’t just balancing on an inflatable fitness ball, he was actually humping it. I have never seen anyone else violate one of those balls like that, but it seemed to be working for him.

Awesomeness.

As I completed my last lap, the creepy old guy who wears long camo pants, Birkenstocks, sunglasses, and a really unfortunate wig came in to “work out.” Usually his work out consists of walking around the gym, scouting out any prospects. Sometimes he parks himself on the abductor machine so he can scan the entire square footage while demonstrating his inner thigh flexibility. He apparently doesn’t let his seventy plus years stop him from using the gym as his own personal Tinder because he can’t use apps on his jitterbug phone.

In a word, awesome.

A perfect gym day like that may only come once in a lifetime, but the chance that it might happen again is what gets me there every day.

Never Gonna Give You Up

My cat may have Stockholm syndrome.

To the casual observer, he might seem well adjusted and happy living with my family. But the more I really think about it, the more I believe he is trying to survive a life of captivity, one from which he may never be free.

Granted, life is a precious gift for my dear Moshe. He was a foundling on the doorstep at the vet’s office, delivered to them in a small shoe box, holes punched in the sides, duct taped to trap him inside.  He came to live with us soon after his abandonment, and while he was understandably skittish at first, he never really outgrew that constant level of fear.  You can see that fear in his eyes, constantly bulging and darting around, like he may flee at any moment. Plus, he has some serious trust issues.

 

Moshe is now seven. He has been confined inside my house for seven years. He leaves only for check-ups at the vet’s office, which means he is even more frightened to leave the house than he is being trapped inside. Better the devil you know, I suppose.  

Sometimes we just manage his health without actually taking him for an exam, like when he threw up repeatedly last week in an effort to purge a hairball or disagreeable insect he ingested.  That episode involved me yelling at him, tossing him out of my bedroom, and eventually rubbing a thick and smelly paste on his arm, one that he was forced to remove by licking it off. It was a bitter pill for him to swallow, if he could swallow pills.

Most of the time, he is free to roam the interior of the house as he wishes. Usually, he takes advantage of that freedom to hide. He likes to hide under beds, in closets, and when he was younger and thinner, inside the furniture through a secret tunnel in the lining under the couch.  In fact, when he was a kitten and began perfecting his disappearing act, we thwarted his efforts by having the first knuckle of each toe removed. If that isn’t torture, I don’t know what is.

I am now convinced all that hiding is in an effort to get a moment’s respite from us, his captors. Usually when he hides, he sleeps. He is probably exhausted from trying to anticipate when the next random torture session will occur. He has to be ever vigilant, constantly seeking out new and more secretive hiding places.

No matter how well he hides, we can find him, and when we do, we don’t leave him alone. We pick him up. We carry him around. He force him to sit on our laps, sometimes holding him still until he gives up the fight and purrs softly and deceptively, waiting for us to loosen our grip on him so he can dash off to safety.

Our endless assaults on him happen at all hours of the day. He has no peace. Sometimes we make him play patty cake. Sometimes we hold him draped across our arms like a baby. All the while, we shove our phones in his face and snap pictures of him against his will. It is not unlike what happened in Abu Ghraib, only without the car batteries. He even has a series of humiliating outfits he must endure, a shark fin, a Halloween dinosaur head piece, a sailor’s collar, even a fake neck tie. The torment never ceases.

He is unable to read or write, so he is limited in his ability to articulate what his internment means to him. Mostly, he chews off the handles of the shopping bags. It is his form of civil disobedience. He is also partial to certain types of shoelaces. And pissing on the floor, just outside of the litter box, so that it looks like an accident. Take that, my jailers, he must think to himself. He also likes to rub his face on every available surface, marking them with a cat’s version of invisible ink. I was here, it says. My life matters.

I want to be perfectly clear: I love this cat, my Moshe. I am his number one fan.  In turn, he has either developed his own version of love for me, or he is the best damn cat actor since Morris.  We have a certain understanding. I know that whenever I feel the need for feline company, I can force him to cooperate with my snuggles. He knows that despite being fed the same bland food pellets day in and out, he can count on me providing them. He knows if he behaves, he might even get a special kind of pellet in the mornings as well as the regular ones that he has to eat out of a bowl on the floor, a bowl he shares with another abducted victim who has been trapped in the house for even longer, eleven years.

It seems that in addition to maybe loving me, he definitely loves his food.  There is never a time that the crinkling of a foil lined package fails to rouse him from the most secluded spot.  He can detect the opening of the deli meat drawer from the deepest sleep. In short, Moshe eats his feelings.

I can’t tell if I should feel badly for my victim. He is one in a series of such captives I have had over the course of my life, and chances are pretty good he won’t be the last. I doubt I’m the first abductor who feels the love I have outweighs the life of misery and fear I’ve caused.  I don’t know if this “relationship” is healthy for either one of us, but I do know that I just can’t quit him. All I have to do is look into his wide, vacant eyes, and I am a captive of his little soul, if he has one.

Dramatic Paws

When I was a kid, I watched the movie “Fame” about a gazillion times. I too wanted to have massive amounts of talent, to dance and sing and act and spontaneously break it down in the cafeteria. The idea that you could go to school surrounded by your people, and learn cool stuff in addition to math and science and boring old history, that every day was a musical, well, it seemed too good to be true.  Alas, I don’t have that kind of talent. In fact, I am still trying to figure out my talents. 

But for kids who do, there is a school like that in most cities, a performing or fine arts center, so the students of today can explore their creative side, and maybe, just maybe, one member of their graduating class will be an extra on CSI.

I never took drama in high school, so I don’t really know if it’s like Fame or High School Musical or Glee. My younger daughter, S, is currently taking drama in seventh grade, but so far, it’s not really shaping up to be a fictitious art school experience.

At S’s school, it’s very difficult to get drama as an elective because it is extremely popular. The teacher that used to teach it was adored by all her students, and the entire middle school would have gladiator style fights to try to get placed in her class. Unfortunately, she doesn’t teach at the school anymore. There’s a new drama teacher, one who walked off the set of the Hobbit, complete with short stature, smart little vest, and odd hair growth in uncommon places.  A lot of students were exceedingly disappointed their beloved drama teacher, the one they thought they would bond with over a semester, come back to visit while in college, and eventually friend on Facebook, was gone, leaving this troll in her place.

The funny part is that S didn’t even register for drama. She wanted keyboarding or Spanish, but thanks to an injury that required us to rearrange her electives, she was placed in drama against her will. I couldn’t really do any switching around since the school already accommodated her broken foot and knee scooter, so she just had to deal with it. Deal with it, I said to her.

This may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t want to be that mom. The pain in the ass one, always making demands and seeking special treatment for her children. I prefer to approach school much as I would a prison sentence. Do what they ask of you, don’t get involved in yard fights or romances, keep your nose down, and do your time. If you’re lucky, you make it out alive with a little time off for good behavior.

S was pretty unhappy about the drama class, but I pointed out to her that it wasn’t going to be much work. Just participate when you have to and you should be fine, I told her. For the most part, that’s kind of how it’s going. She has to write the occasional monologue or small skit, but for the most part, they play a lot of games.

What kind of games? Well, this is the part that I am not really clear about. Most days, S gets in the car and gives me a debriefing. What quizzes she had, what she did in PE, who talked to whom, the deliciousness of her lunch, and then, the daily drama game. As far as I can tell, at least three days a week are devoted to drama games, and they all appear to be some version of Seven Minutes in Heaven.

Maybe you played it as Two Minutes in the Closet, but whatever version you experimented with, it involved the same thing, right? Intimacy was initiated at a party by pairing up two victims. The unlucky couple would go off privately and explore their budding sexuality while waiting for the timer set to two or seven minutes to go off, at which point they would step out of the closet, away from the forced groping and straight to the public humiliation awaiting them from their so-called friends.

The games in drama class don’t involve a timer or a closet. Instead, they all involve a blindfold and some probing. Basically, one person in the class is blindfolded and then must connect with a classmate in some physical way, thus ending the turn until the groped individual dons the blindfold and takes a turn grabbing at his or her classmate’s body parts. Hilarity ensues, perhaps, but so does some level of sexual assault. Basically, the blindfolded person, who in S’s report is always male, puts out his hands to feel up the other students. She has had her hair grabbed, her hip and waist caressed, her knees fondled. One time she had to endure the breathing of her male classmate on the nape of her neck. She spends drama game time with one arm across her chest and the other one protecting her virginity, down there.

The games have different names, like Statue or Zombie, but they always involve the blindfold and some heavy petting, not unlike Fifty Shades of Gray. Maybe they are more along the same lines of Marco Polo without the pool, but the potential to get past second base makes them more like rumpus room party games than lessons in acting. Unless the goal is to act like you aren’t uncomfortable or traumatized, in which case, they are quite effective.  

I suppose the point is to be more comfortable moving their bodies or to trust your fellow classmates to not do something horrible to you or just to kill time while the teacher continues his search for the Ring. At least there isn’t a class play we have to attend at the end of the semester, although I could see them pulling off Kinky Boots or Chicago or a Bob Fosse Classic like All That Jazz.

I keep telling S just to let someone have a little feel if that gets her an A. Better to do that in drama than Algebra, right?

Bait and Switch

A few weeks ago, I told you all about my period mishap inthe carpool line. What you didn’t know is there is more to the story. Trust me, there is always more to the story.

While I was making the very difficult decision to stick my hand in my pants in the carpool line, I was also talking on the phone to my friend, EL. She was aware of my predicament and was offering her moral support the way any girlfriend would over the phone, by laughing at me.  After I took care of my immediate issue, I lamented over the wastefulness that goes along with the use of feminine hygiene products.

“I can almost see the attraction of reusing rags like they did a hundred years ago. I bet I have filled a landfill on my own over the course of my long  and exhausting career in menstruation,” I told EL. “Seriously, diapers ain’t got nothing on me, girl. What a shame that used pads and tampons can’t be recycled somehow. Like, why can’t I donate blood with my used tampons? Can’t they just extract the blood and use that? Why does it have to come directly from my arm? There has to be at least a pint in a super plus, easy. I would store them in the fridge until I could transport them.”

“Are you through?” EL asked.

“Almost. I refuse to believe that A. all feminine hygiene is so ridiculously expensive and 2. We haven’t come up with a way to recycle them yet. If pads and tampons were used by men, not only would they be covered by insurance or free to all who need them like stray kittens, they would also be able to be repurposed into road repair materials or emergency bridge construction or something.”

“Hunters’ll buy ‘em,” EL said.

“It just seems like such a waste,” I said. “Wait a minute, what did you say?”

“Hunters. They buy them. I heard about it on the internet,” she said.

“You’re shitting me? What for? Fishing, maybe I could see, like shark or deep sea fishing. But hunting? What would possibly be baited by a used tampon?”

“How the hell should I know? But it’s true. Look it up.”

So I did. I couldn’t believe she could be right.

If anybody checked my Google search history, they would have me committed or, at the very least, investigated by the authorities. Seriously, the random weirdness that makes up my Google searches is a small window into a disturbed mind.

I did not find a plethora of hunters looking for a few used tampons to up their game. I did find a few hunting blogs, though, that talked about unused tampons as a tool to attract male deer. Apparently, and again, this is based on a few opinion pieces and not scientific studies, hunters will use a cotton wick soaked in deer urine as bait. They stick the wick in the ground in order to attract horny male deer that are into piss. Instead of using a wick, some hunters think the better absorbency of a tampon does the job much better.  They recommended buying a box of generic tampons for the purpose, although it wasn’t clear whether it was best to soak a tampon still in its cardboard tube applicator before ground insertion or just soak the cotton wad itself and then toss it into an inconspicuous spot and hope the deer doesn’t see that what they think is a hot leaky doe is actually just a piss covered Playtex.

What I did learn, in addition the resourcefulness of hunters, is that there are some men who might indeed be interested in your used feminine hygiene products, bait that attracts an entirely different kind of man. It turns out that the perverts who want to buy your used panties are not the only perverts out there. In the world of sexual deviants, make way for the waste fetishists! Just as some men might enjoy strappy stilettos or borrowing their wives’ panties, there are also men who do indeed want your used pads and tampons, only not for hunting, and are prepared to pay money for them.

The main issue isn’t the freshness factor, either; it’s the shipping. It turns out the postal service frowns upon shipping your bodily waste and potential biohazards through the mail, so put away those Ziploc bags, ladies. You will need some sort of sophisticated biomedical shipping containers and even a permit to send biomedical waste through the mail, so unless you are selling them locally, which, let’s face it, is the more ecofriendly and socially responsible way to conduct your period business, then you are going to need to do a little research and planning.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t really get an idea of how many men there are out in the wide wonderful world who want your used period products, only that there are indeed some vampire types walking among us. Like it or not, period blood isn’t a taboo for some dudes. The Urban Dictionary word for these guys is “Bloodhound,” referring to men who like to have sex with a gal while she is menstruating. There is a whole subcategory of oral sex fans of the red tide sort, but we won’t go into that here. Feel free to Google that on your own time.  But as far as men who want to own your old rags, well, I can’t really get my finger on that pulse.

The point is, EL was only partially correct. Yes, hunters like to use tampons. No, they don’t want your used ones. But yes, some other people might, and hopefully you will never have to meet them, unless you want to, in which case, good luck!

Maybe you are comfortable with hawking your used wares on the Internet. The rest of us will have to make do with a big wad of toilet paper wrapped around our used hygiene products and stuffed in the bottom of the trashcan, knowing that it will take more than a lifetime to break that thing down in a landfill.

 Also, ew.

Free Advice

This is an open letter to husbands everywhere.

Dear husbands:

I’m curious. Do you get upset that your wife talks to her friends about your marriage? Does it bother you that she confides in her girlfriends or that they know so much about your relationship? Do you perhaps feel threatened by how close she is to her friends? After all, you don’t tell your friends shit, and you are still as close as bros can be without going all Brokeback, right? You never understood why women went to the bathroom in groups or told the same story twenty times to twenty of their closest friends, and you still don’t understand that constant need for contact and conversation. You wish it would all just stop, and your wife could just be your wife. Am I right?

Well, guess what? Get over yourself.

First of all, when you got married, your wife didn’t become your property. Just because she is your wife doesn’t make her under your control. She can talk to anyone she damn well pleases, about whatever the hell she wants to. You don’t get to decide who her friends are any more than you can dictate the topics of conversation. It isn’t all about you, no matter how much you want it to be.

You need to chill the fuck out.

Or maybe it is all about you. Do you really want to hear what she thinks about your snoring or how you destroy a toilet or how she laments that you are physically unable to put a dish in the dishwasher? If all the Hallmark cards for men are about how you fart and fall asleep in front of the television or play golf all weekend, then maybe you need to stop. Possibly it’s time for you to be a little more considerate. You are a man now, after all. So enough sniffing the armpits of your t-shirts and put them in the laundry hamper already. And while you’re at it, throw a load in the wash. Take a moment to hang up her bras before you put that load in the dryer. Stop giving her a reason to complain about you. Just a thought.

Here’s something else you might not have thought about. Maybe, just maybe, your wife likes to talk about her problems. Maybe she finds discussion about what you consider to be unpleasant topics helpful and positive. Just because you don’t do that doesn’t make it wrong. Guess what’s cheaper than therapy? A bottle of wine at girl’s night out.  Give her a break from you, Jonathon Livingston Seagull.

And if you are the unpleasant topic she wants to discuss, let her have at it. Talking to friends is a great way to get advice or just vent. Despite what you may think, we wives aren’t all sitting around trying to decide how to make your life miserable. Trust me, you don’t need our help for that. What we are doing is something you might not be very good at. We are listening. We take turns saying how we feel, and we listen. We might validate. We might say wait a minute, you need to look at it this way. We might say hey, friend, you are way off base. What we do know is the very act of listening is what helps. We like to be heard, and talking to friends is a great way for us to get that need met.

If your wife didn’t have friends to talk to, do you know who would have to listen to her? That’s right. You. Do you really want to listen to your wife go on and on about what’s bothering her, especially if you are the bother?  She might criticize, and chances are you would counter with some choice words about the constant nagging, and there you go, giving her more reason to need to vent. All that time she is talking on the phone, or texting, or instant messaging, that could all be aimed at you instead of sent to someone else. Seriously, you should be buying roses and chocolate and shit for all of her friends, thanking them for giving you some fucking peace. They are making your marriage better and you don’t even realize it, you dumb schmuck.

Remember when you were a little boy and you were told to buck up and stop crying and be a man? Well, your wife wasn’t. She was allowed to have emotions. Now that she is grown up, she still does. You do too, by the way. Having emotions is compatible with having a penis. Expressing those emotions is also allowed for you. If you choose not to, well, so be it. That doesn’t mean your wife doesn’t get to.

It’s time for you to stop feeling so threatened by your wife’s friends. She isn’t plotting your murder with them. She is expressing how she feels with them. She might be complaining about you, but so what?  What if her friends complain about their husbands too and you turn out looking pretty good? She might even come home and show her appreciation that you weren’t as horrible as she thought you were.

The next time you feel vulnerable because of your wife's oversharing, take a deep breath and go back to whatever the hell you were doing. Go watch a football game. Go drive your car too fast. Go eat four double cheeseburgers and drink too many beers and put extra salt on your fries. Go Dutch oven your bed. You are going to do all those things anyway. Just give your wife a break when she bitches about it to someone else. Because that is the thing she is going to do, and you can’t make her change that behavior any more than she can change yours.

Sincerely,

Your wives and all her friends