Parenting

Motherhood Is Not For Wimps! MR. MOM, GET A JOB! By Judy Gruen judy@championpress.com Copyright 2002 Permission granted for use on Dr.Laura.com Have you heard the news? Scientists have finally #145;fessed up that being a househusband is dangerous to a guy#146;s health. Women in very high-stress jobs also risk having their tickers give out early. This politically charged evidence was presented by bona fide medical researchers, the kind who wear their glasses pushed far down on their noses and have cheap pens stamped with names like #147;Zoloft#148; sticking out of their shirt pockets, so it must be true. The scientists studied more than 3,600 men and women over a ten-year period and revealed their findings at an American Heart Association meeting in Honolulu, a place where you are not allowed to have heart attacks since it scares away tourists. I could have told them all this, if only they would have sprung for my airfare to the Big Island and plied me with drinks decorated with little yellow umbrellas. But can this news really have come as a surprise to anybody? Just watch any man have to choose between the #147;regular fabrics#148; versus #147;delicate#148; cycle and you can sense his blood pressure rise. His life experience vis-agrave;-vis laundry has most likely been: wear clothes. Drop dirty clothes into closest receptacle. Wait for clean clothes to magically reappear in closet. Sure, he may know how to fix the washing machine when it goes kablooey, but using it is another matter entirely. And think: laundry is only one of the 459 typical daily challenges of running a home with children! Observe as a regular guy tries to figure out how to make dinner and get to the market when the baby is spiking a fever, he#146;s on for afternoon carpool and it#146;s his turn to sell scrip in the carpool line, and you can almost see the plaque on his arteries multiply by the minute. And when his wife calls at 6:30 p.m. when the kids are shooting peas up their nostrils, the dog is biting a neighbor and the smoke detector has started beeping and she says, very apologetically, #147;Sorry, hon, but I#146;ve got an emergency brewing here and I may need to take the red-eye to Baltimore to discuss the merger,#148; five more years have been whacked off his life. After all, it is bath night and the book review and display board are due tomorrow. And on top of all that, he#146;s somehow got to remember to put Tyler#146;s slugs from the yard in a shoebox since she is excited to bring it for show-and-tell the next day and he knows she will probably need heavy sedation if, God forbid, they arrive at school and the slugs have been forgotten. There is only so much a man can take. I mean no disrespect to men. I like men, and I have found them to be very capable beings in many guy-oriented areas. I am happily married to one and am raising three men-in-training, so I have a vested interest in the self-esteem of guys. It#146;s just that in my experience, men perform best when they are given specific instructions, such as #147;Load that truck over there until all the boxes are gone,#148; or #147;Run out and tackle the guy with the ball.#148; They like to finish one thing before moving on to the next. But women must be able to do thirty-seven things at once, and if I do say so myself, it is a skill that comes quite naturally to us. Our work may be stressful, but as long as we haven#146;t maxed out our credit cards, we will probably be okay. We need to help reverse this alarming trend in heart disease, and I say, let#146;s start by giving flex-time to women trying to shatter the glass ceiling. (Just the thought sounds painful, doesn#146;t it?) And we must immediately pull all those Mr. Moms out there off of yard duty and send them back where they belong, out in corporate America, staging hostile corporate takeovers. After all, their very lives may depend on it. "Motherhood Is Not For Wimps!" is Judy Gruen's sometimes hilarious, sometimes serious reporting from the front lines of motherhood. Judy, the mother of four, is the author of "Carpool Tunnel Syndrome: Motherhood as Shuttle Diplomacy" (Champion Press, 2002). Her work has also appeared in "Ladies Home Journal" and "Woman's Day" magazines. Judy's semi-monthly humor column, "Off My Noodle," is available by email subscription. Go to www.championpress.com/offmynoodle.htm . Contact her at judy@championpress.com .