Off the Male Radar

Yesterday I asked Jerry to haul up some cans of paint from the basement.   I got home: not done.  This morning I asked him to get a package of chicken out of the freezer for tonight's dinner.  We were upstairs.  I had little faith that he'd remember by the time he got downstairs. (He did it, but only after much shouted consultation/instruction up and down the stairs). Dinner is not on his radar before 7:30 pm.

I just finished a book called "'I Don't Know How She Does It," by Allison Pearson, a young British woman who is witty and heartbreakingly accurate in her assessment of what women notice and feel burdened by and DO, and what men do not.

"Women," she writes, "carry the puzzle of family life in their heads, they just do."  She's referring to couples with children, but this applies to couples, period. In my experience, men do not notice what needs to be done.  If you point it out to them, they don't think it needs to be done.  And even if they do, they don't know how to do it.  Or, to be fair, they make a stab at it and the woman has to do it over again.

Some men are on top of the details of running house, remembering birthdays, putting on a Christmas dinner. We once had a very anal male guest who inspected every glass in our cupboard and systematically dropped each mildly cracked one (and not at the rim) into the garbage.  I didn't know whether to be ashamed or pissed. Pearson covers this dilemma very thoroughly.

I used to think that not noticing what needed to be done was a diabolical plot Jerry had hatched to get me to do them.  It took me years to figure out that he simply does not notice.  It is not on his radar that 30-year old white paint has turned gray and needs re-coating.  Or that due to recent repairs,  the downstairs bathroom has three large holes in the wall that need to be filled.  Not on his radar, and that's just the way it is.