Sometimes A Great Notion--The Mangina Monologues

Recently, my better half has become much more than that. She’s become the wealthier half: the whole loaf of our bread-winning duo. Big job. Bigger pay. If this were a race, between her profession (online marketing) and mine (magazine editing), the photo-finish would show hers crossing the line and that’s all it would show. Publishing has been ravaged, and I’m not talking bristle burn and nail marks.

Her new status will do many things for our family, put our son, Samson, in summer camp, increase our savings for the children’s education and let us pay for the services of more baby sitters to release us from the toy-corralling, poop-wiping, and high-safety surveillance drones that we’ve become. Increased wealth will afford us drinks away from the calamity of child-induced mayhem. We will drink to the children, not because of them.

But it is in our relationship where the real change will occur…I fear. With Hope heading to San Francisco every month as well as to all the nationwide summits her company will host, daddy, here, will become more…how to put it…daddy-mommy. Don’t get me wrong, feeding, washing, playing with my two young-uns are already part of my parental repertoire. What I fear is that the daddy-mommy moniker has the potential to shift in attitude how one half of the relationship, namely Hope, will see the other—me.

Already the head of household and its outright owner (Being fearful of what might happen should I meet with a terrible accident and not be able to pay the medical costs, seeing as I don’t have health insurance, we signed over my half of the house to Hope. Another perk of her new job, I’ll be back on her insurance.), Hope will be evermore that traditional and exclusive role once held by the man of the house. Forced role-reversal is what it is. And let me tell you, in my world it very much is. The Center for Gender in Organizations at Boston College surveyed 400 women on this particular matter. Eighty-six percent reported providing more than half of their household incomes, and with over a third totally responsible for paying the bills. Phew, I’m not alone.

This brings me to a question I posed to the senior executive of our relationship about what to call this blog. She was stumped. Until, that is, she was on the phone with her stepmother, who’ll remain nameless. “Suzie (Hopkins) said, ‘Why don’t you call it the Mangina Monologues?’” The slice that cut so deeply wasn’t my own realization of my place in our relationship, but everyone else’s. Mangina Monologues…really, huh? I felt my appendage retract at its very utterance. Will Hope start holding the door for me? Push my chair in as I sit down in a restaurant? Make the first move?

Essentially, this is anthropological. It’s adaptation. In last month’s Marie Claire magazine an article on the best countries for women to live in The World's Best Country for Women gave Sweden the collective thumbs up. And what makes it such a “Femirvana?” The social interchangeability of the sexes. “As one Swedish website puts it,’” says the article. “In our country, women drive the buses and men push the baby buggies.” I think it shows a social maturity that is in step with the reality of our times—which is my way of standing tall in the fact that the ladies at my children’s daycare offer up their intimate memories of child birth experiences as though I too had a cesarean scar. Is my part of the sisterhood that solidified?

And yet, is the state of sexual parity feminism’s great achievement or Governments’ devious plan for a larger tax base? Sitting in a burger joint in Cambridge, Mass, with an old friend of mine, he asked our young waitress, whether she thought living in a society where her job was to have children, raise them, make a home in return for a life where the certainty that her partner would earn sufficiently to provide the financial security for themselves and their children would be something she’d prefer to having her make her own way? Would she lay down the political notion of sexual equality for a future such as this? She walked away. I don’t blame her. What kind of bloody question to have two lunchtime punters ask? She returned and agreed. Yes, she would. The commander and big cheese of our home, concurs. As much as she relishes the workplace challenge, the feeling that she’s lost out on not being able to focus on our children is very real. To ease the pain, I reminded her that her new compensation package contains guaranteed bonuses as well as performance-based bonuses. And let’s not forget the stock options. Of course, I’m stroking her financial ego, assuaging some of guilt she must feel at getting a bigger job against the demands that will take her further from her home and family. If the stats are true, her earnings for such sacrifice are well below the male equivalent. Equality or economy?

The word package may well hold the clue to this whole feminine advancement thingy. It may have little to do with the social and cultural dynamic than it has evolution. Could we be moving towards sexual flip-flopping, or horror of horrors, asexual reproduction? Come to think of it, the phrase “go fuck yourself” might finally be elevated into the Darwinian mantra of the future? The Cleaner Wrasse is a fish that is emblematic of the Swedish social attitude perfectly—a Swedish fish of sorts. Groups of this fish consist of an adult male and a harem of females. If the male dies, the largest female changes sex and takes over the male role becoming fully functional within a few days. THEY DON’T GET ANOTHER MALE TO DRIVE THE BUS PEOPLE! SISTERS ARE DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES!

At home, I’ve been a little irritable and overly sensitive at what I’ve considered my emasculation by my wife’s bigger professional advancement. I had a dream she found some else and I wouldn’t speak to her the next morning. I mean in our society aren’t status and money the equivalent of length and girth? I figure I’ll know when our role reversal is complete. The day she gets home from a business trip to enjoy a meal I’ve prepared, drink the wine I’ve poured and check on the children who I’ve bathed and put to sleep. And when we sit down on the sofa and all the talking has stopped and we hug and kiss and I feel her hand on the back of my head pushing me towards the place where the Cleaner Wrasse females have mastered the switcheroo, the social gravitas of my new capacity will make me part my lips and the mangina monologues will be born.