There are so many things that can define a man and more importantly a husband. Some people will go with the Hallmark answer of loving, caring and giving, but let's start with reality for a second, if you don't mind. Some might say selfish. Others could drift over to closed off and emotionally void. There is another group that would say "oh, he's just a man" or just simply state a man is a pig. Of course the latter are probably intolerable specimens of the female influence who have mullets and own a carabiner to clip their keys onto their belt loop. But to accurately portray a man is to call him a self-loather.
Men have an incredible capacity for self-loathing. This is why in the sixties and seventies there was a massive backlash to feminism and it wasn't because we thought that women weren't equal. It was because we as men already knew and still know what pigs we are. Of course we do. We knew it from day one. We knew it when we were on our nap mats in elementary school and tried to look up the teachers skirt. It happened ladies. It was the eighties, those flowing summer skirts were in style and it showed us everything. We know what slobbishness we are capable of. And by the way, women aren't equal to us, they are way better. That's why they shouldn't have to slave at a shit job that eats at their soul every damn day of their miserable life. It has nothing to do with some silly notion of superiority (refer to the self-loathing mentioned earlier.)
Do you know what we saw when you ladies started screeching at us about equality? We saw a huge nagging, ugly mother. Just a giant bitch we all wanted to strangle. Do you know what I read the other day? A man who was married for seventy years, at the age of ninety-four, stabbed and killed his wife and then tried to kill himself. Didn't accomplish killing himself, but afterward said "she screamed and complained at me every night and I couldn't take it anymore!" I know that for about .000001 second I thought that he was a monster or a psychopath. Then I thought, after that small flash of nothing, "Yeah, I get it. I don't agree with what you did sir, but I certainly understand." Some of you might be shaking your head in disgust, but the majority of the men who read this just nodded their heads in agreement. So ladies, you're not telling us anything new.
Contrary to that, you read about great men. Men who gave their lives for freedom, leaders who led countries to greatness, successful and powerful men of integrity and they all have the same things to say. I wish I was better husband, father, and man. The one that hits at home the most are fallen soldiers; the armed who stormed the beach at Normandy, the long lines of Gettysburg, or the pin point accurate modern soldier at Fallujah. Read their journals and they all wish to be better. We all wish to be better, but we know what we are. We are glorious, horrific, inventive, great, awful, and self-loathing men.
That having been said, I am one of those inner-psyche torn men. The only difference from me and other men is I have to work a little harder because my wife was diagnosed with cancer this last Christmas. Unless of course your wife has cancer, but not necessarily around Christmas time.
Let me start a some time back. About a year ago my wife's lymph nodes started swelling up. We thought that this occurred because there was some black mold in the basement were she spent time doing the laundry. We combated the black mold, stopped it from spreading but my wife's node stayed swollen. We got a test done and nothing came of it. So we just put a heat pad on it and dredged her with vitamin C. It would then fluctuate from not being swollen to Dizzy Gillespie neck. Some months later the foundation to our house started to sink (our home was very old, about 80 years) and water poured in from the summer rain. Life was brought back to the black mold and it was out of control. It got so bad so quickly that we moved out of the place in about a week's time after we saw how severe it was. Luckily my parents have a large house and we could (and currently do) occupy the third floor without much difficulty, I mean besides being torn away from a house we had been living in for six years. Basically the last few months my life has turned into a country song; I lost my house, had to give away my dog, went bankrupt over the house, lost a job I wanted and my wife got cancer. I'm basically an incest incident away from winning an award at the CMA's.
So now, as my wife is going through the treatments, I have been faced with an old adversary, my feelings. Ugh, that felt gay just typing it out. More specifically the feeling of being totally helpless. Within that array of things a man is (self-loathing fart factory) there is another trait that is simply overwhelming, the intense need to protect. We men protect our family in various ways. Bringing home a paycheck for food, shelter and clothing comes to mind. Also steering the children away from the weird uncle is on the list. This need to protect is so ingrained in our heads that we can at any moment lose control on anyone that poses a real threat. The problem with cancer is that doesn't apply. If it were possible, every husband, father, and brother would shrink down to the size of, oh I don't know, of Dennis Quaid in "Innerspace" and enter the body of their loved one, armed to the gill with weaponry and wreak havoc all over that cancer like we were packing heat in a small theater with no exits, no A/C and "Good Luck Chuck" is playing on repeat with Dane Cooke sitting on a stool next to the screen giving commentary. You would go ballistic.
But in the real world (so boring) that doesn't happen. You sit there unable to do anything. The first time I heard it might be cancer I didn't make a joke. As you can tell from reading this, that's how I deal with every scenario in life, a fact that has earned praise from some but way more disliking from others. When I didn't make a joke, my wife cried. She knew I wasn't doing well with the whole situation because I didn't deal with it through humor. I have since, obviously. In fact during Christmas time I sang "Vickie's getting Chemo for Christmas!" to the tune of "I'm gettin' nuttin' for Christmas." Luckily she didn't cry at the bad joke.
The hardest part of the whole ordeal is you don't really get to do anything about the cancer except do more around the house than usual. That's it. Go to work, keep up the the health insurance, come home, make the dinner, clean the dishes, put the kids to bed, and repeat. For this to be the absolute most you can do during such an awful time in a marriage is brutal. There are times I feel as though my wife is being held hostage and I have to wait for the negotiator to get her out alive. The doctors essentially being the negotiators in this analogy. Other times it's fine and we have a good laugh at what is now, because of the miracles of modern medicine, a mere inconvenience. I will wait and see how things turn out. Luckily the odds, at the moment, are in our favor.
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