It's Amazing... He said WHAT?

It never ceases to amaze me, the things people say and do, and think it's okay.
People seem to have "selective memory" when it comes to the things they say to one another.
Didn't it hurt, when we were kids, to have other kids say nasty things to us? We learned to laugh it off or come up with hurtful retorts, but the pain was still there. Why, then, do we, as adults, feel that we can say and do anything to others. As blunt as I can be, I learned long ago that I can think anything I want, but if it isn't nice, or at least helpful, I should keep it to myself... and even though it isn't easy sometimes, I try never to comment on what people LOOK LIKE! It is secretly gratifying, and has been for the last 20 years (since I started on my weight-loss journey), to see many of the people who felt the need to tell me, every day when I was a fat teen, that I was fat; get and stay, bigger than I am.
Speaking of the things people say...
People are coming down on Vice Pres Joe Biden for saying that the middle class has been buried for that last four years. They say he is dumb for saying it. I say, he is right, but he and the POTUS are not to blame for it. The Republican "party of NO", is responsible. The blocking of every helpful policy, just to make sure the President fails, has been responsible. If people, republicans, tea-partiers, and all those who trash the President, don't see it, then they are really blind and perhaps a bit "slow". (I was about to say "they rode the short bus to school", but that is mean and truly an affront to those people who actually did ride the short bus, who know what the POTUS has been doing... working for health care for them and for you and me.) 
Sticks and stones can hurt no worse than the stuff that comes out of our mouths! Let's remember that the next time we get ready to say something that isn't nice. It might just come back to bite you in the butt!!

Spouses-R-Us: The Ronnie-Test

Spouses-R-Us: The Ronnie-Test

Lord knows I’m not a relationship expert, and I never professed to be one, but I am never reluctant to comment on what I see as relationship issues—even my own. Most of my good friends are male, for many reasons, not the least of which is that men hate drama, almost as much as I do. Fortunately, however, they have taken the role as “brothers” rather than “boyfriends”. Brothers I can deal with; boyfriends, not so much. I have a few friends who are women, the best ones are just as drama-free as I am, and the others turn to me to dispel the drama from their lives. They bring it, and I dismiss it for them, sometimes by just telling them the truth about themselves, and sometimes by just telling them they’re being stupid. Either way works.

The fantastic thing about Ronnie was that he was a bit of both, a friend/brother and a lover, and there was a reason for it. Ronnie had four, all-the-way-live sisters, who taught him a lot about women, and he learned the lessons well. My male friends who seem to have the most relationship problems are the men who only have brothers. Men, especially men who are raised in a family of boys, seem to have very little workable knowledge about women. Part of it is the fact that the only woman they really know about is their mother (or perhaps aunts and grandmothers), and they either idolize her or they fear her. At the very least, they learn to dismiss her. Face it, women. Our sons, who have no sisters to keep it real, are “clueless” when they leave us and enter the realm of dating and marriage. They have not had the opportunity to watch their sisters, who are groomed from birth to become wives and maybe even mothers, grow into adulthood. Barbie dolls really do have a function, and that is why they are still selling today. They teach women how to be “girly”, a concept that men have no clue about.

 “Girly” girls exhibit the image of womanhood that men really love to see in a woman. There is this mystical “feminine-ness” about them that men just adore. I learned about this (and it’s one of those things that trips me out) when, as a child, my mother only let me stay outside and climb trees and play kickball for a while, then I had to come in, get clean and pretty, and sit down and play dolls until my dad came home. Don’t get me wrong… my dad, who had five sisters, wasn’t fooled because he indulged my love of doing not-so-girlie things by teaching me how to change the oil, and to change tires, and to cut grass. Even though he taught me those things, he still expected me to look and act “girly” at times, when it was necessary. My grandmother taught me other things about being girly, but those things relate more to my sensual views (the say no to “no nookie” things) than to simple, feminine behavior. Consequently, I learned to turn the girly behavior on and off, a sort of code-switching, which sometimes drives men crazy, and certainly makes relationships difficult. My “inner diva” likes to do this, just for the fun of it.

The woman who gets out of bed in the morning is rarely the woman that men are allowed to see, and for some, the transformation is phenomenal. It involves not only a “look”, but also an attitude… and men are shocked to death when they finally meet the real woman. Most of the time, they don’t find out until after the wedding, though. A guy friend of mine once told me that he was a groomsman at the wedding of a friend of his. The bride, during the courtship was always all over the guy. At the wedding, however, as the groom leaned in for the kiss, the bride hissed through clenched teeth, “Don’t you dare smear my lipstick!” The relationship went downhill from there. That marriage didn’t last long enough to pay off the wedding expenses.

If Ronnie were alive today, he would tell you that the most valuable lesson he learned from his sisters was how to “shop” for the woman he wanted in his life. Because his sisters were so alike, but so different, the “shopping technique” he learned was to delve as deeply behind appearances as he could before he actually made a choice. It is a technique that everyone needs to learn, but that women, in the past, learned to master more quickly. Because we played with Barbie dolls, and Barbie had a beautiful house, a nice car, great clothes, and a good-looking man (Ken for some… my Barbie had G. I. Joe but that’s another story) that was what we were taught to look for and work toward. Too many women, however, chose “pretty Ricky” over “rugged Ronnie”, and ended up with “a mess”. Many others chose “bad-boy Bobby”, who turned out to be a handsome, selfish abuser, leaving a lot of Barbie’s bitter and abusive to other guys who try to enter their lives, guys who still believe in “girly” girls. Unfortunately, guys who believe they only want girly girls cannot be told, or even shown, that what they really want is a real woman… the kind of woman they tend to fear; a woman who is always real. She is not bitter, conniving, or selfish, and she is also not rugged or domineering. She’s just not “girly”.

Ronnie and I used to always shop together for toys for the kids, and it was a riot! If you’ve ever shopped at Toy-R-Us, you know that they have a lot of great looking toys, toys that look like they’d be fun to play with. The packaging says that these toys do lots of things, have all the bells and whistles, and are the ultimate in providing an excellent play experience for the buyer. Because he knew how to shop, Ronnie would insist that we be allowed to play with the toys before we bought them. More often than not, the toys that had the most “hype” were the ones which did not stand up to actually being tested. They would break, right there in the aisle of the store. If a toy stood up to the Ronnie-test, we bought it. If it didn’t, we left it in the store. The packaging never fooled him.

Women had to pass the Ronnie-test, too. When Ronnie and I started dating, I had already been teaching for a few years, and he had only seen me “dressed up”, looking girly. Not long into the relationship, Ronnie had a car to work on that required two extra hands to get the job done. I volunteered to help, and showed up to work in old jeans and a sweat shirt. It was chilly outside, and he tried to insist that I stay inside, where it was warm. I went outside because that was where he was. I don’t remember exactly what the job was, but I do know it involved the wheels, and that the bearings had to be greased before he could put them in. You should have seen the look on his face when I dug my newly-manicured nails into that can of grease and proceeded to work the grease through the bearings like a professional. He was thrilled. I could go from Barbie to grease monkey effortlessly. I had passed the Ronnie-test. We got married a few months later.     

Too many guys who want girly girls, and girls who want “Ken”, have been shopping for spouses at Wives-R-Us and Husbands-R-Us… maybe it’s a unisex store called Spouses-R-Us. As Pete, who says he has no idea why some of the guys he knows married the women they married, who has been married for thirty-two years, and who also has a bunch of real sisters (five), says, “Body by Fisher, Brains by Mattel (I say Fisher-Price)”.  Not all of them married for looks, but their reasoning still seems a little faulty (they married for the wrong reasons). The real reason for getting married is always to have someone who cares about you, who always has your back, who loves you, who is always concerned about what you need and willing to be there whenever and wherever you need them to be, and who always has time for you, even if they’re not Barbie or Ken…. That’s who Pat (Pete’s wife) is.
If you don’t have that, it’s time to go shopping.    

The “No-Nookie” Clause

The “No-Nookie” Clause

I guess my friends know I like to listen, even though I hate to give advice, so they come to me or call my phone, just so I can listen to their problems. The reason I don’t give advice is that I was raised a bit differently from many of them. My friends, especially the women, but I have found the men, too, were taught some relationship rules that I didn’t get. Like…I learned, in college, that many of the young women were there to find a suitable husband, so, their education was secondary. I went to college to get my degree, and to learn how to make it on my own, after I left mama’s house. That husband thing went right over my head. That’s another whole story. Sometimes I still feel dumb about the things I don’t know, but I don’t mind. Sometimes it trips me out!

A few years ago (quite a few now) when I was teaching in the county, a few of my colleagues and I were sitting around, just talking. There were all women in this group, and they were talking about the things they expected their husbands to do. One said, “My husband cooks every day, and he knows he’d better have my dinner on the table soon after I get home.” I knew her husband worked the night shift, so I thought it was really good of him to make sure she had a hot meal ready when she got home. Ronnie was working noon to nine, so he wasn’t even at home when I picked the kids up and got home. I’d feed the kids leftovers from Ronnie’s lunch, play with them and, later, check homework, and make sure they took their baths. By the time he got home, he only had time to play with them a little while, and then it was time for them to go to bed. During that time, I was cooking the meal that would be Ronnie’s lunch the next day, the full course meal that he ate just before he left for work. He never ate heavily at night, which was why he stayed so slim, but he could put away some food during the day. Many times, the kids would be almost asleep by the time he got home, but that was okay. It just gave him more “mommy time!”

The next woman said, “My husband cleans the house. After I spend all evening dealing with the kids, I’m not even trying to clean anything. He knows it had better be clean.” I thought about how hard it was to keep the house clean, and how sometimes I just gave up and settled for “straightened up” because I never really got to “clean”. Besides, teaching had made me a “pack rat”. I collected school supplies and all kinds of things to use in my classroom, and I hated to throw anything away that I might be able to use with my students later. I tried to picture Ronnie trying to clean all that mess up, but really couldn’t go beyond just getting him to put his clothes in the hamper to be washed. The only thing that amounted to cleaning that Ronnie did was clean out the refrigerator at the end of each week, eating all the leftovers and washing all the dishes from that cleaning. Ronnie often left work to go to work, driving a wrecker truck on-call overnight. I never expected him to clean.

The third woman talked about her husband’s love of clothes and how he meticulously did the family laundry. She said that her husband didn’t like the way she ironed, said that he did it better and faster, and told her that she could fold the clothes if she wanted to, but most of the time he didn’t let her do that either. She told him that he’d better do the laundry if it had to be perfect. She didn’t feel like it was making an unusual demand on him, even though he worked a full time job, just like she did. I sort of chuckled at the thought of having Ronnie do laundry. He did collect his uniforms, tie them in a ball, and take them to work to get them laundered. I had to hang any clothes that were not his work clothes, in the order he needed to wear them, to make sure they weren’t mix-matched. It was sort of a “garanimals” arrangement for grown-ups. I shuddered to think of the mixture of fabrics and colors the laundry would contain with Ronnie doing it.

The thing that interested me about these declarations was that, if those husbands didn’t do what they were expected to do, these wives would withhold sex. No work, no nookie. I was appalled. When did they add a “no nookie” clause to the marriage agreement? I surely didn’t know about that. In fact, I thought that was the real purpose of marriage, to be able to have sinless, legal nookie as often as you liked. At least, that was my reason for getting married. I loved Ronnie and wanted to spend be with him, but marriage wasn’t really a necessary thing, except that we both wanted to be legal… to get legal nookie. They looked at me like I was from outer space when I told them that “no nookie” would be a deal breaker for me. I told them that I got married for the free, sinless, unrestricted nookie. I asked them why they thought I put the children to bed so early, and made sure they were good and sleepy… so Ronnie and I could have some adult recreation time. Ronnie never objected, and neither did I. Now, it appears that a “nookie” clause must be added, and if it’s not, the couple agrees that there doesn’t have to be any nookie involved. Sometimes, I think the men don’t know it until after the marriage, but that is also another story.   

As I have gotten older, and have talked to married people, I see that there must be an unwritten “no nookie” clause in the marriage agreement. So many people my age and older, some who are working on second and third marriages, have amended the marriage agreement to almost totally cut out the nookie. Well, I guess that works for them, but I’m not buying into it. As I have contemplated re-marriage, I know that the “no nookie” clause will not be a part of my marriage contract. In fact, my last relationship was long distance, and it mostly worked, but two trips, months apart, that yielded no nookie, because he had gained weight and wasn’t interested in sex, made me reconsider our proposed marriage. His last trip to see me yielded no nookie either… so it was the end for me. Little did I know he was already seeing someone else, whom he eventually married, but I know that, other than some good phone sex, she ain’t getting the nookie either. Too bad for her… but glad it isn’t me.

When I talked to my “brother” (from another mother) and sister-in-law, I asked them to share the secret of their thirty-two (as of today) year, “happily having fun with each other” marriage. They both said that they like each other, they get a kick out of hanging out together, they always have something to talk about, but most of all… the nookie is still great. I rest my case.