The Shared Space

Between layers of gender and snow

Once upon a time my belly belonged to you too, I tell my children. My body was a shared space. But now it belongs to me again, and your body belongs to you.

Then I wonder how true this is. Or more like I hope it can be true for them.

It feels like the man I knew got short-circuited, I tell my husband. And you are trying to devalue me rather than rescue yourself.

We are living separately right now, a break that wasn’t anything I’d have chosen, but has nonetheless had me hoping he might see it and make the indicated changes.

So far that has not been the case.

It seems we are both a bit relieved and a bit stressed at the absence of each other’s presence.

The cynical side of me thinks of course that’s the case, as I’m now taking on the lions share of the caregiving, one of the big points of contention.

I’m allowing myself to be bitter as I sleep next to the baby, who moves closer and closer to me in bed, digging her tiny heels into my ribs until I move over, contorted, waking up halfway off the mattress, with a sore back that may be due to the sleeping arrangements or from doing all my own snow shoveling by hand after the machine decided to crap out.

Inopportune is a word that could describe a lot of things before me right now. The email I got from the Y saying the snowstorm power outage damaged the pool electronics and it’ll be closed indefinitely for repair. The fact that the snowshoveled paths on most sidewalks are wide enough for foot traffic but not the back wheels of a stroller wagon. My usual stress relief valves, blocked.

So I have been praying for rain to melt it all away and thinking a lot about how the timing for all this could not be worse. My father in law is dying. Our toddler and six month old are tag-teaming me with teething and snot-induced night wakeups.

I could lose my shit, but then who would scoop the cat box?

Although, inopportune though the circumstances and timing might be, perhaps it could not be better either. I order healthy groceries within the budget and then let the kids pick cereal containing marshmallows. I clean and organize my kitchen, then spread out the ingredients needed to make pasta and tacos. I work on projects that have the promise of turning into a paying job, my mind free of the existential angst and physical clutter of a man who has veered into distraction and projection rather than just sitting with his fear and grief.

In my experience with trauma and upheaval, I am doing something new. Letting people be here for me without scrambling to make it reciprocal.

I reach out to friends, a circle of doers and carers. I let them help me and rather than being consumed with not being indebted (a past obsession of mine), I just notice that I have met some really beautiful souls. People who see all the damage and pain in the world and rather than letting it harden them, decide to be the antidote in small ways.

I’m friends with people who write letters to save hundred year old oaks or do research to prevent public assets from being sold off to the rich for pennies on the dollar, or who decide that being an honorary grandparent sounds like a fun thing to do.

I hope I can be like this too.

I have come to see that the most important parts of life involve caregiving.

It is easy to focus on how ill-equipped men often are for much of the caregiving work life holds, and how I believe this is socialization rather than something innate. It is easy to be disgusted at how patriarchy teaches that everyone else will do the work while the man claims it. He will someday be the one on the deathbed, surrounded by loving descendants grateful for his leadership, but not the one changing the sheets or washing the hair of the person dying.

And if you ask men, they’ll say it’s true. And maybe for a long time it has been. But men love caregiving when they really let themselves. Cutting the cord for the new baby, setting up the crib or the hospital bed sent by hospice for your elder, running errands to get needed items. And this is why patriarchy deliberately underprepares them for it, lies to them when it says that what the world requires from them instead is physical strength and aggression. Misrepresents caregiving as being only for girls.

Because if there’s one thing that men learn, painfully, harmfully, it’s don’t be like a girl.

I don’t need you to take a bullet for me, I tell him. I don’t need you to give up an arm or a leg to be with me. I just need you to wash the dishes.

From a young age the logistics of caregiving isn’t even a thought most men entertain, but if they do, it’s as unskilled labor, a feminine specialty they naturally receive, a touchy-feely task to be handed off to the more touchy-feely, someone less masculine than them. Less valuable than them. Less noticeable than them.

When really caregiving is everything.

Noodles fed to the baby who just learned how to slurp. Soft pillows and pain medication for the elder who is suffering. Even self-care. The simple daily filling of the humidifier in winter. Using lotion on dry skin. Brushing your teeth. Setting yourself a bedtime.

I think about how on an interpersonal level this lack of preparation and understanding can create a marital schism, in a community a communication breakdown, and on a societal level a morass.

But within the individual it is a form of suffering, and I know my husband suffers.

How many men choose overtime hours or a second job rather than caregiving at home? How many don’t realize that their family time is not worth that hourly wage but much much more? $1,000 an hour would be far too low, if anyone would even pay us that, as this is the only precious life we have.

And this doesn’t even count the masculine discrepancy stress, the fear men have that they’re not measuring up to whatever a man is supposed to be.

So they’re scrambling to be something they already are. It leaves itself the butt of jokes even as sad and error-laden as it is.

I listen to the wind howl around my house at dawn in what I’d describe as a category 2 snow hurricane, all the lights on, because the smart bulbs all turned on after a power outage induced reboot.

How many men does it take to design an actually smart lightbulb, one that maintains the position you’d left it in when electricity returns?

The thundersnow begins and my children sleep through it, two in their own beds and one on my chest. I lie awake feeling lonely, full of thoughts.

Some men marry in order to have a friend. Some play a sport. Other join a cabal of evildoers. There are many ways to have closeness, camaraderie, connection. Many men also just choose to be alone (even if that’s not their intention) by making the choices not to care-give or not to value it, or to continually criticize the care work of others.

I cannot solve this problem - lord knows I’ve tried - but I can say that I am sure it’s not just one that belongs to me or to my loved ones, but to our society. As I wrestle with it, so do we all.

It is a shared space, no matter how we may remain divided.