Holy. Crap.
So in case anyone was wondering, I have been knocked down by quite possibly the worst cold I’ve had the pleasure of enduring. It was 2
If ONLY I looked like this....
weeks long, the soreness went all the way down to the bone, I couldn’t breathe well and I was constantly washing my pillow cases because of the open-mouth breathing drool and snot factory. It was totally gross. I can’t even describe how gross this cold is. The worst part? Both kids had it too. Three snotty noses, three mucousy set of lungs, three very whiny people. It also made me REALLY sensitive about things. Dear husband decided that it was a good time to ask me if I was planning on using the shower any time soon and I freaked. Turns out he was asking because he wanted to do laundry, not because he thought I was stinking up the place. In fact, I was so sensitive that I couldn’t help but notice something about women and sickness. It didn’t help that a commercial triggered my rage last night and confirmed my suspicions.
So, I gotta ask. Why is it that when women are sick, we’re expected to warrior through it while society insists on enabling the man cold?Know what I had to do while sick? Everything. I cleaned, I cooked, I got K ready for school, walked her to and from school, did all the baby things and had to motor on like everything was normal. Dear husband lost a few points with me last week when I asked if he could make me soup and he said that I can make my own soup. I was tired, it was 10 o’clock at night, and I had done everything….he is going to go through hell next time he’s sick. He can make his own damn soup. Wanna know why? Because just like everyone has been telling me, he can fucking DEAL. No more man colds in this house. If he can’t tough it out, too bad.
I’m sick of people telling me it’s a given that I should keep up all the commitments because I’m the wife and mother. I’m sick of not being allowed time to heal. I’m sure I would have shaken this off faster if I didn’t have to do a million things at once. I’m also sick of taking care of sick men. Most importantly, I resent taking care of sick men and their big baby asses just because we decided as a society that men are allowed to act like children when things don’t go well in their world. I would like to sit on the couch, surrounded by tissues, and be waited on hand and foot. I would like to take care of myself, but apparently that kind of selfishness is reserved for the dudes. Women are the weaker sex? My big fat ASS it’s the weaker sex.
I’m still shaking off the remnants of said cold, but I would love to hear your “I See Sexism” stories. It will tide me over until my brain is no longer fried with meds and I can get back to regular me. Have any incidents like the man cold or just day-to-day crap no one acknowledges? Do tell. Hopefully I’ll be back to my blogging self with the healing powers of the Harpies.
My cousin is a SAHM of two young kids. As she once noted—with only the slightest hostility—when her husband gets sick, he takes a sick day and sleeps in until he feels better. When she gets sick…she still has to do exactly the same things as when she’s well. She was more than willing to call sexist bullshit.
Can’t the dads of the world take sick days when their SAHM partners are sick? (although in a situation like yours, MA, everyone would just be sick together, which…I dunno if that’s an improvement or not).
I think when everyone is sick together and taking care of each other, it adds to the family bond a bit. It’s when there’s an inequity in care…like the soup incident.
Ugh, I hope you feel better soon.
My I See Sexism story:
Women do the meal planning, shopping, cooking and cleanup for every meal at every family reunion.
It’s so ingrained in our traditions that even when I bring it up no one sees the problem. It’s just “what women do…”. Or they say that food would somehow show up if no one planned anything or that I must not be remembering things correctly.
I don’t know how to change something that half of the family doesn’t even see as a problem (and the other half has been doing for so long that they don’t see how things could change.)
Thoughts, anyone?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Amina Mithri, Pursuit of Harpyness. Pursuit of Harpyness said: I See Sexism: Cold Edition http://bit.ly/dW9BsB [...]
In my family the women cook Christmas dinner…and do the dishes.
I once tried to organise a strike unless the men helped with the dishes but couldn’t get any support from the other women. So the oppression goes on.
I recently declared that I WILL be taking sick days when I am truly ill, and if it means my husband has to use one of his vacation days to be here and tend the children then so be it. I’ve ended up in the hospital twice since November because I put off seeing a doctor so I could keep up my regular housework/childcare duties. Being in the hospital is worse for everyone than just letting me hang out on the couch with some tea.
I think I remember seeing a commercial recently about the “man-cold” that made fun of what big babies men are when sick. But of course it was meant to be cute instead of truly pointing out how unfair that behavior really is.
My husband and I have plenty of issues with inequality when it comes to house/childcare but fortunately this is not one of them. He doesn’t even like to admit that he’s sick (let alone malinger) and he’s very protective of me when I’m not feeling well.
We’re still working on him doing a little more of the housework but it’s gotten better since I made him read “The politics of Housework” a few months ago. It pissed him off but once he calmed down he did start doing a better job of pulling his own weight.
I think women are definitely tougher enduring pain and sickness than men, although I’m having trouble reconciling this image of whimpering men with the supposed fact men dont go to the doctor and therefore die years earlier! I haven’t been to the doctor in 25 years. Maybe thats why I feel so lousy eh.
Granted, I have no children, but when I had the worst flu ever for the entire month of December, my husband took awesome care of me. From the moment I called him and said, “I have a fever of 102 and can’t get out of bed without fainting,” he came home (a privilege) and took a few days off work (a privilege) to care for me in the worst of my 8 days of fever. He remembered to give me meds, made me soup, fetched the few foods I felt I could bring myself to eat, made sure to get the good Kleenex, made hundreds of cups of tea, and kept our dogs alive. All the laundry got done, the house didn’t devolve into chaos, and he stroked my hair when I’d cough and cry that I was never going to get better.
Still, I have no idea what we’d have done if there had been kids to deal with. Dogs you can feed and water and ignore. Add kids to the deathflumonia mix and my mom would have had to come get them. No way could I have cared for kids with that illness, and no way could my husband have managed it.
I am currently dealing with Evil Cold of Doom. I’m very lucky to live with someone who kindly offered to make me me an AMAZING saline gargling solution thingy. The point of which is to say: here is a recipe that you can gargle if your throat hurts. It’s brilliant and it’s the only stuff that is making my very, very sore throat feel better.
2 teaspoons of salt
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 pint of water
Boil it and mix it and store it in an airtight container for up to a week. It’s easier to gargle when it’s warm. Also your supposed to make noise when you gargle so as to get a “deep gargle.”
I know you did not ask for advice, but this is really impressively good stuff (for me, anyway). I’ve never used baking soda before, and I think thats what makes it so good. It does, however, taste really really disgusting. Not as disgusting as my throat feels, though.
(The recipe comes from http://www.doctorhoffman.com/ydouche.htm)
I see sexism in that almost every time my husband and I agree to do something together (cook, clean, shower, etc.), I am the first person who will get up to do it. In fact, usually I’m the one who brings up the fact that we need to do it, though he usually then readily agrees. It’s such a minor thing but it really drives me crazy.
As for sickness, we are both whiny babies who would rather be left alone when we aren’t whining and the healthy person always takes care of the sick person. For the first time in our 8 years together, we got sick at the same time this year, which was actually a bad thing because we were both so miserable and cranky at the same time. But we still made each other tea.
On the sickness issue, well I’m partnerless so I don’t really have that, but boyfriends I’ve had have usually been quite caring, probably because for some reason I tend to awaken their protective instincts. I usually tend to hide in bed until it goes away and will do nothing. I’m stubborn.
My mother hardly ever gets sick, but when she does it’s BAD – the last time she ended up in hospital because of pulmonary embolism, so when she got home we all ran around taking care of everything, and to be honest the only other time I really remember is when she broke a couple ribs when I was a kid and had to stay in bed for a month at least, so in my memory at least when one of my parents is sick the other is in charge of everything.
On the other hand, my mother tends to do the inside things while my dad does the outdoors, but that’s also complicated since my parents live on a farm and have horses and there’s a lot of outdoors stuff that needs doing, so I don’t know how fair the split is.
And the rule for dishes is that if you cooked, you don’t clean!
But my mother is the one who does things like sending thank you notes and christmas cards.
I have to say that the whole kitchen is women’s territory is such an engrained sexist trait. I’ve come to the point that anytime my boyfriend and I have friends or relatives over, I count who helps clean up after a meal. And not once has there been a guy. The women automatically rise with me to help carry things to the sink, but the men just sit there, continuing the conversation. I am open about my dislike of this and tell them straight off that they ate, so they need to contribute. With friends that has never been a problem and the guys usually feel a little ashamed for not doing it in the first place. At large family get-togethers, though, uncles and grandparents just laugh at the little feminist. Why change things when they’ve worked for this long? Ugh.
I am pretty disgusted by the sickness inequality, and it’s something that I hadn’t actually thought about before now. While I haven’t experienced it firsthand, TV commericals definitely help continue this idea.
AAGH! This is one thing that makes me see red. I LOATHE this wimpy-man-cold vs. warrior-woman phenomenon. I broke up with husband(before he was my husband) partly over this. I have migraines, and for the first few years we were dating, whenever I got one, which was often, or was otherwise sick, he’d get all anxious and accusatory and manufacture an imaginary illness and be like, “No, *I’m* sick now! Take care of ME!” I generally DID take care of him when he wasn’t feeling well, but it was ridiculous to be expected to do it while throwing up and blacking out, while he never did anything and acted like I was either his mommy deserting him by having needs or else a car with a defective part. We became a couple again six weeks later only after he agreed to a) stop it and b) take care of me when I’m incapacitated too. It took several big fights for him to see what I was talking about–he genuinely couldn’t, and thought I was imagining an issue or making something up to trick him. Fortunately, he’s a lovely man in general and just had to be hit over the head with the injustice of the scenario before he got it, which he now totally does.
I was talking with a staunchly feminist close mutual female friend of ours from his area of the world (Central Asia), and we established that we were both thrown into an incandescent rage by the idea we were both brought up in that women’s health, sleep, and leisure time don’t matter and mens’ do. I decided recently that I’m never going to put up with this sh*t again, in any form. No women cooking for hours *and* cleaning up for hours while the men sit around in our house! This was happening at our place on Thanksgiving so I sat with my husband and the other dude and pantomimed a ball-scratching leisure-hoarding man–and informed them that that’s what I was doing–until my husband got up to help. (To be fair, he’s generally very good at cooking unasked and not too bad at cleaning unasked.) I also refuse to get up two hours before my husband on principle when we’re in his village, the way my mother-in-law still thinks she has the power to insist on (in a “our men are well taken care of by our tireless energizer bunny women” way). It doesn’t accomplish anything except reinforce the status quo and make us women cranky, sleep-deprived, and more vulnerable to illness, which they then have to ignore while ministering to everyone else’s needs. I’ll help with the common work so that other women aren’t stuck with everything, but I’m not going to do this just-for-show symbolic stuff. No thanks!!!
I’m also trying to get used to refraining from doing the invisible wifework and not feeling guilty about a messier house as a result when guests come over. It’s a process. We’re currently living in a more socialist-type country than the one I was born and brought up in (US), so I’m hoping that we can stay here while we have kids, because I don’t want to be a second-shifting superwoman with no social support, and it seems like I have slightly larger chance of avoiding that here. I have a feeling that despite our best intentions, we have a tendency to fall into these roles if we’re not conscious of what’s happening. Fortunately, my husband seems to get it, now that he realizes that this double standard is a form of social injustice.
Anka FTW!
Any other UK readers regularly filled with rage by that dreadful Boot’s advert?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9C4UVs3JD-g
RAAAAAAAAAGE!
And yes, all of the above. It does nobody any favours, encourages women to treat men like incapable children who need looking after and there-thereing and men to act like them, and it encourages women to martyr – and to go into work when they’re ill and spread it around the entire office.
My husband is ok about taking care of me (and the kids) when I’m sick, as long as I constantly remind him that he needs to. If I go two hours without telling him that I feel awful, he reverts to assuming I’m fine and can do everything.
Sick days are sometimes a huge point of contention in our house. I know that it’s not that easy to take off work in America, even when you’re privileged to work in a company where you have sick days. But the attitude I get when I tell him he has to stay home to keep the kids alive (and it’s only happened three times in four years)is kind of appalling. I feel like I’m single handedly setting his career back six years when I ask him to let me have a sick day. I do wonder how much flack guys get from other (douchey) guys when they do things like take off work to do childcare.
And my husband is, on the scale of husbands, awesome about pulling his housework weight. Some things just go deep.
Twenty-odd years ago, my father lost some serious points with my mother when he started complaining about his feet. He’d been standing for hours in his dress shoes, which he to this day insists were very uncomfortable. I guess he felt justified in griping about it, especially since his wife got to lie in bed for most of those hours. He lost points because that bed was located in the maternity ward and my mother was in the process of evicting my brother from her uterus. But, clearly the real emergency was his very uncomfortable dress shoes. ;P
On a more serious note, I feel for people like Alecto’s mom who cultivate the reputation of never getting sick unless they’re very very sick. This is often an indication that the person in question (usually a woman) won’t admit to feeling crappy, sometimes even to themselves. So they don’t take care of themselves and often end up very very sick. A few years ago, my mother had bronchitis for two months before she missed a day of work *or* saw a doctor. The year before that it was a severe sinus infection that took forever to resolve because she felt that she couldn’t slow down. Now every time I hear her cough I worry that she’ll end up with pneumonia.
omg – Thanksgiving dinner. I cook, the inlaws come over to eat. Then Mrs Inlaw wants to bond with me over doing dishes and gets seriously hurt when I say “I cooked. Spouse will do dishes in the morning. Let’s just enjoy the evening.”
Her response, “Oh, I don’t think he’ll like that.”
Seriously? Who the fuck cares if he likes it or not. He’s doing his share. We all do chores we “don’t like”.
Thanksgiving dinner, or any food-related gathering really, at my septuagenarian aunt’s house. The dudes (ranging in age from 76 – 16) only appear in the kitchen if cutting or wrestling of meat is involved, and only if specifically asked. Otherwise, they’re parked on the couch or the deck, watching TV and talking. And I, I am torn, for I *have* been raised to help and think it only polite, but plopping on the couch and telling them to go help it has no effect! THEY ARE OBLIVIOUS!
At my mother’s house, however, occasionally a dude with help without being asked. I can’t decide if it’s the lack of my aunt shooing them out of “her” kitchen, or that my dad sets a great example in his own home.
My ex-mother in law was very much like this. My ex has a sister, and when the four of us were there at weekends, she’d ask me and his sister to set the table, help with the cooking, while her partner and mine were never asked. As it was we both delegated to the men to do things and they did, perfectly happily, but I can see why our life at home was a struggle in this regard. He was always happy to ‘help’ but in his head he was ‘helping’ – not doing it because he lived there too and had as much responsibility for household nonsense as I did. It was one of the major bones of contention between us for the 10 years we were together, and did contribute to our split as he wanted me to have a kid, I was less keen and definitely didn’t want to end up being totally in charge of it while he did the fun stuff.