My husband came home last Friday night and announced that his boss wants him to start carrying around a Blackberry. He also said that Steve wasn’t being a team player, because he didn’t go drinking with his co-workers on Friday nights.
Let me get this straight. He’s gone from the house for 60 hours per week. He sees his kids for an hour per day. And now he’s supposed to be checking his e-mail, while he watches his kid’s soccer game. The people that he spends 10 hours a day with are making him spend more time in the evening with them, so they can do jello shots and pat each other on the back for closing all those deals. As he’s pounding shots and head butting the other guys, the kids and I are supposed to amuse ourselves.
After I processed this information, I arranged the words, shit, fuck and damn, in all sorts of unique combinations.
We discussed the dropping test scores and college admission rates of boys the other day. One of the hypotheses that might explain the drop is that boys don’t have male role models. Many boys are raised in single family homes and don’t have male teachers. They need guidance from older men with similar interests to keep them motivated, some researchers maintain. Well, even in two parent homes, the dads are increasingly absent.
Corporate life is the enemy of the modern family.
As I was pulling nails at Chris and Tammy’s house last Saturday, I told everyone about this new development. My dad asked why the wives put up with this. Well, hardly any of Steve’s co-workers are married. And those that are married have wives that have been bought off. The wives accept the absent husband, because they have those awful handbags with the logos.
I don’t know too many of these women, aka the Handbag Patrol, because I avoid places where they congregate like Pilates classes and PTA meetings. I got an insight into their mindset after reading Sandy’s post on Darla Shine's book, Happy Housewives
It is important to note at this point that this absent father/bought off mother model is not everywhere. It is a very small subset of families with the high powered money or policy jobs. Not all guys so willingly shun responsibility and not all women accept the payoff. Husband to his credit holds back the wolves from work and refused the blackberry and the drink fests.
I explained to my dad the corporate family life as we did the demo work. Dad may be conservative in some ways, but not in this way. He was appalled and said that this was a return to the 50s. Assigned reading for all.
The absent father syndrome is bad for the kids and bad for the women. I am a big believer in quantity time with kids. They need lots of regular hanging out time with both parents. Also, if parenting isn’t the central concern of both people, then one ends up like the women in The Feminine Mystique – isolated, abandoned, unappreciated. Trading their equality in for a nice leather bag.