The Ado-Man

My husband and I have noticed a disturbing pattern among some of our married friends--the ado-man (short for adolescent man). Usually this man is in his late twenties to early forties, and surprisingly he has not really settled down into any stable job or career field. Instead he has flitted from job to job, often because he is "bored" with what he was doing, or it wasn't challenging enough, or it just didn't suit his temperament, etc. Most of the time, these men are also married with young children, and tend to be quite traditional in their marriages and childrearing preferences--i.e. they prefer that their wives stay home with their children, they are the "boss" of the household.

What is really disturbing to us is that these men seem incapable of providing any sort of sustainable support for their families, but they can't seem to connect the dots to their own decisions. Losing a job is "bad luck" and not due to the fact they were bored with work and stopped giving their best. The fact their wives have to scrimp, save, buy the scratch & dent cans and shop at Goodwill for their kids' clothes (NTTAWT) doesn't register when they go out and blow $500 on a Bose surround sound system because "Hey, I haven't treated myself to anything for a while and sometimes you just gotta do it, you know?" These same guys will buy themselves a new truck every two years because they feel like it (while their wife's car, the chief family transport, is held together with baling wire), have poker night with their buddies at their house even when their ten month old is teething and dealing with a miserable ear infection, and then they don't understand why their wives get so hopping mad that they are making a lot of noise and staying up until past midnight.

DH and I have encountered repeated species of these males and frankly we are just baffled. Just when do we hit the "Grow Up!" button for the American male of the species? What is wrong with our society that we give a pass to these guys hanging on to the good old days of teendom, when they have adult commitments, relationships, and very real fiscal needs? I get the traditional marriage, but frankly if you aren't providing LEADERSHIP to your family, then you aren't cut out for the male role in a traditional marriage! If you aren't leading by example, showing your kids that yes, sometimes your job is NOT your passion, but that's okay because you need to feed, clothe, and house your family, what kind of message does that send to them? What does it say to your wife when you SAY you support her, but every action is a sabotage to your financial stability and a demonstration of your lack of respect for her wants and needs?

Now that's not to say that the wives in these cases aren't responsible too. I would probably have quite a strong argument with my husband if he weren't pulling his weight in our marriage or family. And I have to say that some of these women are not communicating with their husbands. They complain to their friends but don't actually talk to their husbands about what has them so hopping mad a lot of the time. Is it any wonder we see the rate of divorce we see in the Christian church? Yeah, all of these examples are in CHRISTIAN households.

I just really mourn the lack of good, strong male role models. In an age where marriage is increasingly irrelevant, the whole idea of "service" to your marriage and family is fast falling out of favor. One need only look at the single parent phenomenon in African American households to see how ugly this gets when the dad is allowed a complete pass on responsibility. What is even more frightening is that moms are getting in on the act now, too. It seems increasingly common for moms to be committed in early childhood years, then to get tired of solely shouldering the responsibilities for childraising and leave their teens to go solo (figuratively speaking). Sometimes this takes the form of highly structured schedules, which has the added bonus of making Mom feel like a good parent, because John and Judy are in band, cheer, every sport imaginable, Mandarin, and a host of other "college ready" extracurriculars. Of course John & Judy are so busy you never get to talk to them, and they never get a break, but that's just preparing them for the "real world". Or you just stop listening to your kids, don't make an effort to understand them any more. Hey, it's just because they're teenagers, right? Eventually they will sort it all out and move out for college--the hard part is done. Yeah, because we all know how well that absentminded parenting works for teenagers.

I think we need to be honest with ourselves. Marriages take work. Families require solid commitments. That means sometimes (a lot of the time) you are working at a job that, at its best, drives you crazy sometimes. But you do what you need to do to put food on the table. If you want to "find yourself", "follow your passion", or "find the job you love", you wait to do it when you aren't putting your marriage and family under tremendous strain in the process. If that means drastically changing your lifestyle with everyone's agreement, so that you can afford to start your business or chase your dream, great! But if that is not possible, you need to be mature enough to recognize it and postpone it until you aren't putting other people's lives and well-being at risk. I realize that flies in the face of our hedonistic society, but you really AREN'T priority #1 when you have kids and a marriage. I'm not saying you don't need to take care of yourself, but you can't take care of yourself to the exclusion and detriment of all others. And you need to be involved in parenting your kids, period. Your wife is not the exclusive caregiver if the kids are under X years of age. You ARE responsible for the messages your behavior sends to them. You DO have to sacrifice some of your personal pleasures. It's called being a grown-up--how about trying it sometime, Mr. Ado-male?

Ugly But Functional

Lately I am pondering why we (meaning my DH & I) feel the need to embellish the functional to make it more aesthetically appealing. In so doing, we often complicate our lives greatly, saddle ourselves with expensive and time-consuming projects, and then get bogged down while doing them and get very frustrated by the stagnation.

Looking around our house & garden, I see numerous examples of this. We had a functional but weedy yard. We decided to embellish it by creating a huge flower bed, to make it prettier and get rid of the almost 100% weeds that were established there. Fine. But that huge flower bed now needs to be filled. We've spent nearly 2 years trying to fill it, and in the meantime it is more often than not filled with different kinds of weeds that just grow taller than the ones they replaced, and are more time consuming to get rid of (at least with a weedy lawn you can mow it, whereas a weedy flower bed has to be, well, weeded). Trying to solve a problem and make it beautiful gave us a lot more work.

Similarly, we decided to redo our ugly but functional kitchen. We spent numerous hours sanding, priming, & painting the cabinets & countertops, then sealing the countertops. It does look a lot prettier, to be sure--but now we have cream colored cabinets that show all the spills and dirt that get spilled on them on a regular basis. So where previously we had dark but ugly mid-tone oak veneer, now we have warm but dirty cream cabinets that require a pretty vigilant hand with the Magic Eraser (which, frankly, I don't have, so they're just dirty). More beautiful, but more work.

Now we have to decide what we're going to do about the fencing for the dog. We talked about it and DH would like to do a pretty lattice fence for the front part of the yard, with flower beds and pretty stuff growing up the trellises to make it look really pretty. I agreed with the lattice part, I would like that. But the more I think about it, the more I think we are better off to go for ugly functionality over the beautiful. Frankly, we don't have time to keep up with the "prettified" bits we already have around the house & garden. We're adding a new baby to the mix mid-summer, and we're already training a puppy. We have a list a mile long of projects that also need to be done (not want, need). Wood shed for firewood (keeps heating bills down in the wintertime, wood has to be kept dry). Cut up firewood for wintertime early in the summer so it can cure a bit before this winter (see above). Repair pump shed (houses our well pump & needs to be well insulated & actually INTACT to prevent 3rd year straight of freezing pipes & defrosting with hair dryer...one of these times we're going to have a broken water pipe and this is really a NEED). Tear down kids' old swingset (metal, exposed concrete safety hazard, already missed contact with small heads by a mere inch) and replace with freebie wooden playset (it's on my driveway in pieces, it's been there a year, it's time to put it up, m'kay?).

Add to this the fact that we are a little constrained in the old budget and it makes for a nervous nellie. We need to buy more gravel for the driveways ($200-$300). We need to buy materials for the sheds (repair/construction) and the rotten bits of the freebie playset ($200?). Our electric furnace is an antique and we really need a replacement fund for that ($3500, and wouldn't it be nice to replace it this calendar year with that nice tax break plus the energy company's rebate?). Both of our cars need the transmission fluid to be changed, and our minivan needs at least a recharge on the a/c coolant, and hopefully not anything more expensive like a broken compressor that needs to be fixed ($300-$400, without the compressor). And I still don't know if I'm going to be employed this fall, which means our tight summer budget could get really ugly this fall if I'm not working.

Yeah, I'm really not thinking that pretty fences are my cup of tea right now. I'm thinking functional, cheap, and quick to install is what would float my boat. I would love to have a pretty fence with lattice and pretty things growing on it. I think it would look GREAT. However, I also know that we have a lot of demands on our time and our money, and I also know how low our batting average is for completing projects in a timely manner. Really, I am fast becoming a fan of ugly but functional. Give me functional, folks!!! LOVIN' THAT FUNCTIONALITY! I CAN deprogram myself from our society's fascination with all things bright & beautiful (and expensive, and time consuming). Frankly I just don't have the energy for it any more.