In “widow- widower- widowest-” a husband adds to his late wife’s art

The Vestments of My Office

(Aaron)

I still wear my wedding ring.

Once, I took it off briefly to do some messy food prep in the kitchen. I put it in the little ceramic bowl above the sink, like Polly used to do. (She was always taking her wedding ring off to do messy things, and not just kitchen stuff. Painting, carpentry, gardening, cement-mixing by hand, who-knows-what. But she didn’t want to misplace it, so she had the little bowl.)

My finger felt stark and naked. The opposite of how it felt when I was first wearing it after we were married. I remember it driving me bananas and I would constantly mess with it. But after a few weeks I got used to it, and it seemed strange not to have it on. Is that a metaphor for being married?

A voice in the back of my mind—that mix of technically-correct pragmatism and inner critic—said, “You don’t have to put this back on. What’s it for, anyway?”

The question floated there. Why do I wear my wedding ring?

It’s because I’m still married to her. She’s not my ex-wife, she’s my late wife.

(What is she “late” for, by the way? Did she miss an appointment? Why are all the death words so odd?)

The ring also functions as a kind of ward. This is not an eligible bachelor, ladies. The school counselor invited me to a recurring meeting of single parents so they could bond over how hard it is and trade tips and coping strategies. I don’t know if the horror I felt showed in my face, but I demurred as politely as I could. A room full of single moms. You just know it would be 80% women, most of them divorced but probably some Hot Widows also. A room where they would know the ring was a lie, a little metal shield. No, no way.

I rushed to finish up and quickly washed my hands and got the ring back on. Phew.

“I should make you a shirt that says Proud To Be Pussy-Whipped,” Polly said in her characteristic deadpan, in that way you couldn’t quite tell if she was joking or serious. Sometimes it was both.

We had been going through a rough patch. With our youngest turning five and starting kindergarten, it was a moment to change how we were doing things. It had taken Polly a while to articulate what was wrong, and I had been frustrated and we’d argued as we slowly figured it out. Making it more complicated, we were having to learn how to argue. We had agreed on so many things for so long that our arguing skills had atrophied, if we’d ever had them.

I was coming around. She had been reading books about the gender imbalance in domestic labor, and there was one scheme in particular that seemed like it would work. “Let’s go for it,” I told her.

Was she proud of me? Or just relieved? As she often did, Polly turned a compliment into teasing, poking right at the heart of the difficulty of an endeavor like rebalancing who does what in the home. Men can be really fragile about this sort of thing, where there’s even the hint of emasculation. I have less of this than some, but it’s still in there. It’s something I have to work against.

But the idea of wearing a shirt with the word “pussy” on it… I wasn’t sure I could do it. It was embarrassing! I wonder, would I be as uncomfortable if her idea was a dick joke? Maybe. I was never one to parade around in one of those dumb “Big Johnson” T-shirts, though I have to admit I would probably be uncomfortable more because of the frat connotations than with the dick joke itself. Jokey male euphemisms are normalized in a way that we don’t tend to think about, but if you wear a pussy hat, get ready for some attention.

Polly never got around to making the shirt. After she died, her joke popped into my head. I realized that not only did I need to make this shirt, I needed to wear it. But when?

Polly’s birthday is St. Patrick’s Day. I’d like to think it would have occurred to me while she was alive, but it would have been hilarious to order a green shirt with “Proud To Be Pussy-Whipped” on it in pink letters and just put it on the morning of her birthday. It would be like calling her bluff. Would she notice? Would she laugh? I loved hearing her laugh.

So when her birthday came around, five months after she died, that’s what I did. I sat next to her ashes and I put on the shirt and I imagined what she would have said and I imagined her laughter. And then I wore the shirt outside, my face flushed, trying not to be embarrassed. I wore it all day, on a walk, to restaurants, meeting up with her friends.

My neighbor clapped when she saw it. Polly’s friends loved it. At the coffee shop, the dude-bro cashier said, after I explained the shirt, “Is your wife, like, intense?” I plan on wearing it on her birthday from now on.

The funniest part of the joke is that I am proud. Proud to be, well, you know…

– v secret –

(Polly)

(Draft of a letter never sent.)

Okay, Victoria’s Secret, you say you’re pivoting the brand. You have a new team of representatives who have creative input. I dare you to add me to the team. I’m not ashamed of my body. I’m aware of the complexities that exist between feeling comfortable and feeling sexy. I find your attempt to branch out with your brand identity interesting, but I don’t see myself in it. So, let me tell you about me.

First, the salient points. I’m 42. 5’10.” 170 lbs. I don’t shave. I don’t get my teeth whitened. I rarely wear makeup. I have multiple tan lines, warts, moles, skin tabs, pimples, stretch marks. I look like somebody who isn’t a professional athlete or model. In fact, I look like somebody’s embarrassing mom.

I’m a SAHP (Stay-at-Home Parent) to three children. I’m not actually in the market for a job, I just long to stop thinking about my underwear. I want to stop thinking about how it doesn’t quite fit, how to wash and dry it properly, where to possibly buy a bra I don’t hate. I wasn’t always so hard to please; back in the day, I even spent a summer steaming lingerie in the back room of a Victoria’s Secret. 

My problems started when I aged out of the twentysomething target demographic of the fashionable end of fashion but failed to take on the apparently ubiquitous apple shape of middle age that is catered to, or acknowledged anyway, at the less fashionable end. Oh, and I bore and nursed a few babies. Kudos on acknowledging pregnancy as a potential state for women’s bodies, btw. There are actually quite a few options out there for maternity and nursing, so I guess it’s great that you’re getting into that game? It’s the post-nursing bra I can’t seem to find. Something to comfortably lift my little flaps up, maybe provide a flattering, yet natural, shape. You know, a bra for the many years of motherhood that come after the relatively short pregnancy and nursing period.

Personally, I have no need to don tight, performance enhancing clothes. I’m a walker, I can do that in jeans and a t-shirt. So, make your XXXXL athletic line and fill that niche in the market. Good for you.

Please, don’t abandon the lingerie. Perhaps feeling sexy doesn’t rate my to-do list as often as it used to. That’s in part because it’s begun to feel like a lofty goal, what with my perimenopausal libido and general exhaustion. You might be thinking maybe there are a few things I could do about that. Shave? Hormone therapy? But isn’t the whole moving away from a singular idealized body type really about you coming to me? Isn’t changing the models in your catalogues supposedly about idealizing me, as I am? So, if things like shaving and putting on makeup aren’t my values, doesn’t it become your challenge to develop looks that can make me feel sexy? Maybe that’s too niche. 

Anyway, I had written off Victoria’s Secret years ago as an institution of my youth that no longer applied to me, maybe never did. I know you’re trying to reflect just enough of the culture to sell more stuff, but you’re doing that by pretending to be part of the conversation. I thought it worth asking, are you going to talk to me?

I Found the Butter

(Aaron)

It was the last year of Polly’s life: less than half a year left, though we didn’t know it at the time.

The kids were asleep, and we were sitting in bed, reading. I came to a decision, put my book down, screwed up my courage, and asked, as casually as I could, “So… which kind of husband am I?”

The boundaries of our marriage had become constrictive to her. It took a while to understand what the problem even was, but Polly was unhappy and overwhelmed. Our youngest had just turned five and was about to start kindergarten—we were finally exiting Baby Land—but it wasn’t enough. Then she found this book, Fair Play, and it upended her understanding of the home workload. It gave words to the problem, and a concrete plan of what to do about it.

Among those words was the taxonomy of husbands: Giant Kid, Traditionalist, One-Step-Forward-Two-Steps-Back, More-Than-Most, Where’s-The-Butter, etc. The book is trying to snap women out of their resignation, so it’s snarky and funny and (not to put too fine a point on it) not for men. It even warns readers not to show the book to their husbands. I should know, because after Polly started talking about it, I read it.

“Well…,” she hesitated. You’re not supposed to tell your husband which kind he is, either. I get it—this whole area is fraught and it’s easy to get defensive.

I’d had my share of defensiveness. I’d gone my whole life with a certain story in my head—I’m one of the good men. I’ve always been told this by women, as long as I can remember, even by Polly. Sometimes the praise can get a little silly: boomer women in particular, if they see a man changing a diaper or wearing a baby in a sling, treat him like a goddamn war hero.

It must have gone to my head. In the taxonomy of husbands I was obviously a More-Than-Most, right? Right…?

Polly was never one to pull her punches, so she told me straight out: “You’re a Where’s-The-Butter.” Ouch.

Where’s-the-Butter comes from a classic cartoon, where a man stares into a butter-filled refrigerator and asks, “Hon, where’s the butter?” A Where’s-The-Butter husband is competent at work (maybe even excellent), but useless at home. Which puts me in mind of the equally classic Universal Cartoon Caption: “Christ, what an asshole.”

The problem snuck up on us, and it was compounded by two related factors.

One factor was that I’m great with computers, but… not much else. I combine two stereotypes of the widowed: I couldn’t cook (classic widower) and I couldn’t fix anything around the house (classic widow). Polly was the opposite—outside of computers, she was good at everything.

The other factor was the subtle trap of the stay-at-home-mom. If both partners are working full-time, it’s pretty clear (from the outside at least) when things aren’t 50/50. The wife doing 90% of the housework and childcare while also working full-time is objectively unfair (and yet it’s pervasive).

For the stay-at-home-mom, though, the boundary line is much less clear. And the line moves. When we first got married it seemed like a simple break-down: I go to work, Polly makes art and dinner (and I do the dishes). But then we had a kid. And another. And another. And then they started going to school. While Polly’s workload grew exponentially, I just kept going to work, where my workload grew (at best) linearly with a promotion every now and then.

Polly was also determined to be a super-wife and super-mom. When someone is that good at what they do, things just seem to…happen. It got to where I couldn’t even see it. Of course my ignorance was biased toward my own lazy self-interest. Or to mangle a famous quote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his wife is doing all the housework.”

So after we got done arguing, we sat down with the Fair Play cards. Each card is a task that has to get done, like Calendar Keeper, Auto, Meals, School Forms, even Returns & Store Credits. The cards don’t have point values to indicate how much time they take up. The idea is that they show how many “balls in the air” we have going on. In a deliberate omission, there is no card for Day Job, though Polly threw me a bone and made me one.

That one extra card didn’t make a bit of difference. We divvied up the cards based on how things currently were at the time. I had a few (maybe… More Than Most?). Polly had a giant pile. Oh. That’s why she was overwhelmed.

We sorted through the cards to see what I could take on. Well, I could take on Auto surely. (Which means all the car things: keeping them both gassed up, making sure they get taken in for service, taxes, all of it.)

I could also take on Weekend Meals. (Which means all the meal things: from deciding what to eat to buying the food to cooking it.) If it took me two hours to fumble through making a simple dinner, well, there was time on the weekends. Polly made sure to leave the kitchen entirely and sit on her hands. If I was going to do this, I had to screw it up on my own. We had to accept some not very great meals for a while.

As I got into the swing of it (and I saw the palpable relief in Polly’s demeanor), we started to wonder what else I could take on. Here, fix this doorknob (10x the time Polly would have taken, but she didn’t have to do it). Here, take School Forms for the elementary kids. Maybe we could start swapping cards that stretch us both, like she could take Electronics & IT for a month while I took Home Maintenance. It’s surprising, but Fair Play is not a zero-sum game. More work actually felt… empowering?

Look, there’s the butter. No, no over there. No, your other left. Up a bit. You’re getting warmer. Use your eyes. Look!

We had about five months under the new scheme. And it was working. Polly was happy. The air was just beginning to push up under her wings. She was taking off…

And then the blood clot took her from us. Our time had run out. In hindsight, those months before she died feel like nothing so much as training. Now I have all the cards.

Fair Play taught Polly to stop being an unsustainable super-mom, and it taught me to step up. It articulated so many good reasons to start this process, but it left out a crucial, if unimaginable, reason: What if my wife were to die? What will happen when she’s not there to do All The Things?

I’m now usually the only dad on the group texts coordinating kid activities. Even here, in liberal-ass Boulder, I’m one of very few men at school functions. If I want to arrange a playdate, who do I email? The kid’s mom. Why? Women seem to always be the ones who initiate change in their marriages. Why? Why wasn’t I the one see this problem and take the initiative? Why wasn’t I the one to pitch Fair Play to my wife? Why wasn’t I using my eyes to look? Why wasn’t I the one to say, “Polly, you seem overwhelmed. What can I do?”

In order to become a better husband, I had to let go of whether I was a good one. I wasn’t, in fact, a More-Than-Most. More-Than-Some, perhaps, but how is that relevant when there’s work to be done? The bar for men is low, too low. We can do better.

Polly started this process at basically the last second. I’m proud of what we did together—we redrew the boundaries of our marriage! How many couples can say that? Though I’m ashamed it took me so long to see the problem. I wish I’d had the sense to see it earlier, so that we would have had more time with the new boundaries before we ran out of time, before Polly crossed that final boundary and was lost to me.

It took a while, it took a lot of pointing and coaching and patience, but that was the year when I finally found the butter.

dear amy

(Polly)

(Letter to the advice column “Dear Amy,” never published.)

Dear Amy,

I am a stay-at-home parent with small children, I appreciate your compassionate responses to parent criticism in general. I want to add to your response to “Concerned Grandparents” who wanted their kids to get off their phones and pay attention to their toddlers. 

Some of the things I’m doing on my phone/tablet:

-Chatting with my husband, who’s at work.

-Reading a book, news, parenting advice.

-Finding factual answers to my 5 year old’s random questions.

-Emailing and texting. Keeping up friendships for myself and my kids. Setting up playdates. 

-Dealing with customer service. 

-Making appointments.

-Banking.

-Writing and submitting this letter.

-Looking up medical symptoms to help me decide if my kid’s latest cold necessitates taking the whole circus to Urgent Care.

-Researching home improvement projects.

-Control my thermostat, sprinklers, radio.

-Shopping— lots of shopping. Clothes, shoes, toys, appliances, groceries… just about anything.

I’d like these grandparents to consider, if you could have done all these things while your toddler played, continually sought your attention, and had tantrums in the privacy of your home instead of schlepping them around the department store, the hardware store, the bank, etc. and without the frustration of having telephone conversations constantly interrupted, would you have? Would you have found dividing your attention between your phone and kids a lesser evil?

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