Macho, Macho Man!

There are many a thing in this world of which I am a fan, such as eating, bicycles, mummies, and shuffleboard. Machismo, though, is not a thing of which I am a fan. Machismo is a thing by which I am frustrated.

Most frustrating is the fighting, but that I'll save for another post. Today you get to read all about housework.

Women love cleaning. It's a fact. We can't get enough of it. It's our instinct. Quitting my job and becoming a housewife and mother has pretty much fulfilled all of my innate desires. Cloud Nine.

The occupation of housewife is made all the more stimulating by the following factors: (1) I up and had a baby. (2) The side of the highway is an incredibly dusty, dirty place. (3) Our house is "open" to the outdoors, and all that dirt and filth just comes sashaying right in, asking for a cocktail and a footstool. (4) Weak washing machine + laundry lines. (5) All meals must be prepared basically from scratch. (6) Men do no housework ever. (7) My mother-in-law and I are far out-numbered.

So, it's the two of us against my father-in-law, his mother, my husband, his two brothers, my eight-year-old nephew, and the two babies (my mother-in-law watches my niece six days a week). Three meals a day for some seriously picky eaters. Laundry. Mopping. Blah, blah, blah. It's really fascinating, isn't it? Shall, I blog more about mopping? I know it's captivating. Shut up, you love it!

Anyway, this wouldn't be so bad, except the men are all macho guys, who need extra special care. As in, they can't serve themselves food. No, really. My father-in-law and brother-in-law can't serve themselves. My mother-in-law has to. And she's not supposed to start eating until she's served them and her mother-in-law their plates. Then, if they want second helpings, she has to jump up and serve them that as well.

My father-in-law is a very traditional man. He's a farmer. He bathes once a week before going to mass. If my mother-in-law is not at home, he doesn't know how to reheat the meal she left for him in the microwave or warm tortillas. He's probably never washed a dish. He taps cigarette ash onto the floor and throws the butts there, too.

My brother-in-law is married, but because his wife isn't home to make him breakfast or lunch, he comes to his mother's house every day. She'll be busy watching his daughter, making lunch, serving her husband, and who knows what all, but he'll still call to her from the table that he wants her to bring him a glass for his soda. He has never changed his own daughter's diaper.

I thought Hernan and I had been making progress when we lived in California. He sometimes helped around the house and occasionally cooked, particularly if friends were over to witness it. But now, living in Macholand, with his mother (no less!) that's all over. Now he can't let anyone witness him cleaning or picking up after himself, because the other men will ridicule him. He can't even carry plates to the sink outside (the kitchen itself has no running water, so the sink is outside). That's women's work. If I don't launder his clothes, he carries them downstairs to his mother.

I don't really care how the other men in the family behave. It's between them and my mother-in-law. They understand that I'm one of those modern women and a bad wife, which is pretty much exactly what I want them to think. It's my husband who's in the doghouse. I feel like the victim of a bait-and-switch, so I call him off all the time. He comes home and says, "Baby, I'm hungry" and then sits down to watch soaps on TV. So I say, "Alright. Well, I'm feeding our baby, and then I'm giving him his bath, and getting him ready for bed, and getting him to sleep, and about a hundred other things, so unless you feel like helping me you can have yogurt for dinner." But this never results in him lending a hand, because by the time I come back downstairs to my in-laws place, I see that his mom has made him dinner and he's already eaten.

So it's me that gets yogurt for dinner.

There are macho things I do like, I suppose, like how my husband can build and fix things and how he's great at killing cockroaches and rats. But mostly macho makes me mad.

The other day, while we were seated for lunch, my mother-in-law came in from the kitchen to ask what is was she'd been yelled at to bring in. Hernan told her, "Forks!" and she went back to the kitchen to get them. I looked at him and said, "What? You don't have any legs or something?" And then immediately realized that he had only been repeating what his brother had said. Naturally, my brother-in-law assumed I was criticizing him, so he got real quiet and confused. Everyone was kind of amazed that I'd just called him off, since nobody calls him off for anything. Ever.

After a few seconds everyone realized what had just happened, and since then the new joke in the family is to ask my brother-in-law whether he has legs or not. I'm glad it didn't cause a family rift, but my inadvertent criticism hasn't effected any changes either.

Ah well. So it goes.