So what's with this "woman's disease" thing? Why do I hear and read so much more about women with MS than I do men? It's not like there's twice as much written about women with MS as there is about men. It's much worse than that. Why did my first support group meeting (organized from the local chapter of the MS Society for the "newly diagnosed") consist of 19 women, including two from the MS Society and one social worker), and only one male newly diagnosed MS patient sitting there in my shoes feeling a little alienated and adrift in a cloud of female fellow-feeling? The only other guy there was the Director of the local chapter who was just sitting in, a fellow MS sufferer but past being considered newly diagnosed. Not that I mind being in a room with 19 women even if none of them would be considered a good risk for life insurance and none of them are in any mood to dress for success, or as you might say, having their goods well positioned for display in the marketplace of love. After all MS doesn't make me exactly a babe magnet even if it is good for the occasional pity hug from a friend. The social worker was cute anyway.
I guess Real Men don't go to group therapy meetings. That reminds me of the Real Men Don't Eat Quiche book back in the 80s. I was once actually eating quiche in a restaurant back then when some macho guy walking by told me "Real men don't eat quiche". Now remember, I was a skinny geek at that time. I looked up at him without changing expression and said "Real men eat what they damn well please. You got a problem with that?" He just laughed nervously and walked on, you see, I may be a geek but I had "the look".
A couple of years ago I briefly subscribed to one of those men's magazines, you know, the ones with the articles about how to get washboard abs and drop-dead gorgeous women. Most of it was as dumb as those so-called "women's magazines", but I remember one article in particular. It talked about how in a relationship between a man and a woman there were once (back in caveman times, probably in the 1960s) things known as "men's work" and "women's work", and that since women have been liberated for decades a mature responsible guy had better stop thinking about some things as "women's work" - he'd better cook and clean and change diapers and watch chickflicks for example. However, although women have been liberated from their role models and now felt free to take on whatever components of "men's work" they felt empowered to tackle, they practiced selective blindness where some tasks are concerned. In short, there now is no such thing as "man's work" and "women's work": there's "people's work" and.... wait for it... "man's work". The "man's work" has been redefined by the revisionist feminist hierarchy to be the things that men formerly did but now women don't feel like doing. Particularly, if it is:
My wife's not a feminist and neither of us feel bound by so-called traditional gender roles, but sometimes I have to wonder. For example, when our septic tank backed up, who was it out in 20 degree weather (that's Fahrenheit for all you foreigners listening in) all day hacking by hand through 2 inches of frozen ground and 2 feet of putrid reeking muck trying to find the exact location of the clogged outlet pipe so that the backhoe driver would know where to dig, thereby reducing the number of hours we would have to pay him $100 for while he sits snug and warm in his long underwear and noseplugs placidly pulling on levers while his mechanical avatar does the digging for him? Who was it out in torrential rain scooping leaves out of an overflowing gutter getting soaked to the skin in 40 degree weather so that the water wouldn't get under the foundation and pop up even more of the ineptly laid ceramic floor tiles in the kitchen, hallways, living room, and bathroom? And who was out there chipping ice out of said gutters with a trowel in the Spring thaw for exactly the same reason, with frozen hands and feet perpetually on the edge of slipping from the stepladder? I'll give you a clue. Think convex, not concave.
I will allow that she did give birth to our 3 children, and Turn About is Fair Play so rooting about in the muck from the septic tank is payback time for the hippopotamus pun (hip-o-bottom-us) and the "It won't hurt if you breathe honey"... but where was my epidural? And now that I think about it, I remember in the corner of my mind once reading somewhere that postpartum women secrete a hormone that makes them forget the exact details of the birth process, thereby making them willing to go through the whole damn thing another time. Why didn't my biology give me a hormone that makes me forget that fetid, festering septic tank? And the fact that I understand how the sense of smell works (a little knowledge can truly be a dangerous thing). I'd like to forget that what we call "smell" is actually little tiny clumps of molecules wafting through the air and settling on delicate mucous membranes only a synapse-gap or two away from our brain. That when we smell flower that means that little bits of flower are snuffed into our noses and when we smell septic tanks or a ripe diaper that means that little bits of... no, let's not go there. All I will say is that parenthood teaches you lots of new skills, like mouth-breathing for example.
So what's a guy with MS to do? When we're not being sensitive and emotionally available we're expected at the whim of a woman to be strong and silent macho John Wayne clones who can tote that barge and lift that bale, delivering the male through rain and hail and sleet and snow. I'm still the one who brings in the groceries from the car, the one who has to lug the suitcases in after the trip, the one who gets embarrassed because there never was a pickle jar that he couldn't open with bare hands, never was weather that he couldn't go out in and now is reduced to not even being able to open that damn jar even with one of those wimpy jar-opening tools and hates the heat because it exacerbates all his MS symptoms and hates the cold because it makes the spasticity even harder to bear? "I'm sorry honey, but I've only got a small energy budget for each day and if I use it now I'll be in bed for the rest of the day" just doesn't cut it in the real world. With 3 kids and a stuff-rich environment (my wife is the Garage Sale Queen) there's just so much that needs to be done, and sometimes I'd rather spend 3 days in bed feeling like hell than put up with 3 days grumpiness from my wife and knowing full well that she's right, even Mother Teresa would begin to get slightly testy in her shoes.
I'm at the stage where I can still do things, but at a much reduced level and a higher cost. Which part of my body am I willing to surrender to numbness in order to do that chore? Is that morning task important enough to justify being too tired in the afternoon when some unforeseen but more important task might turn up? I'm between the proverbial rock and a hard place, up the proverbial creek without a paddle. I guess, as John Wayne said "Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway".