LUISAH TEISH
In THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK: WRITINGS BY RADICAL WOMEN OF COLOR (Kitchen Table, 1984), one of the editors, Gloria Anzaldua, interviews Luisah Teish, a civil rights activist. Anzaldua discusses the power dynamic in families. She talks about women possessing power within the family while pretending that the men were in charge. Teish responds, claiming that this represents women seeing “the child in men” and then catering to that. She sees it evident in women handing money under the table to husbands or boyfriends so they can pay. Teish recognizes this when women make hints, and then when their ideas are used, “you praise him” as if it was all the man’s thought.
This shined a jaundiced light of recognition into my life and experience. Growing up, I saw this happen repeatedly. It was all about my father’s ego for my mother. He was “the man” and he was “in charge.” In reality, like Teish and Anzaldua discuss, my mother orchestrated everything. Thankfully, I broke that cycle in many ways. Regardless, when I worked full time while in graduate school and my husband took on the entirety of household chores like a single parent, my grandmother warned me that I might lose my husband. She scolded me for letting him cook and take care of the house and our children while I researched and wrote after work. She told me that it was my job to do those things. I attempted to share with her our egalitarian view of housework and childcare. She wasn’t buying it.
GLORIA ANZALDUA
I’ve written before about the equal responsibility my husband and I share with regard to raising our children and household chores. While we’ve shared these tasks, what was not “equal” for a number of years was the care and keeping of my husband’s ego. I was not previously conscious of my attention to his ego, and when I ceased feeding his ego, I was just as unconscious of the weaning process I undertook to accomplish this. To his credit, my husband never consciously or unconsciously expected the kind of backward control or ego-care hinted at in the Anzaldua and Teish interview, or blatantly stated by my grandmother.
Early in our relationship, I did the kinds of things my grandmother and the authors said were the “way” to get and keep a husband, though I was not aware of this as purposeful behavior. It was learned behavior from my childhood home that was merely repeated into the next generation. While I did not recognize it at the time, resentment grew within me. Years ago, I would not have been able to name this as such. However, I now recognize it. When I went back to school to complete my degree, I underwent a major change. Part of this change included a slow weaning of my former ego-building behavior within my relationship with my husband. Again, at the time, I did not realize I was changing this behavior since I did not recognize the behavior itself yet.
As my meta-awareness of this behavior in myself grew, I consciously worked to eradicate it, both for myself and for my husband. It might sound silly to say that I’ve ceased ego-building behavior toward my husband for his benefit. However, since this behavior is not something he ever wanted, even unconsciously, I approach him and our relationship with more respect as this behavior was left behind.
This whole thing has caused some conflict in our family. The conflicts have not been with my husband, but rather with our son. Henry is 14 and he is not sure what to make of the changes I’ve undergone. He sometimes accuses me of lacking empathy or asks if I’ve stopped loving his father. He sees the changes in me even more than my husband does. Partly, this is because as our child, Henry is excluded from the intricate dance of intimacy that is our marriage. He is not privy to the lifelong conversation we have, every talk as we drive somewhere, the things we say before bed or as we converse in the mornings. Our son is a part-time observer, while my husband and I are partners in motion together.
While our son might see my behavior change and see it as my lack of empathy or loss of love, the opposite is true. I actually have more empathy for my husband’s struggle to define himself as a human being developing his identity. Because I no longer cater to Chris’s ego with behaviors that negate my own identity and sense of self-agency, I love him more.
All of this is more complex than what I’m able to write in an article. When I read this aloud to my husband, he is likely to feel hurt that I was ever resentful, even unconsciously, at times in our marriage. It will feel to him that he’s been indicted for a crime he never committed. As I’ve become more aware of this former mindset, I move along a developmental trajectory, and I harbor no regret or feeling of victimization or loss.
I share all of this because I see this pandering to the “child in men” within so many relationships. I see women resent the backseat driving they’re forced to undertake to have power and control in their marriages, and how this merely leads to unhappy marriages. Men are not so childlike that they don’t feel the undercurrent or the invisible strings their wives manipulate.
This, to me, is one of those “problems with no name” within marriages. I write about it so that men and women in relationships might recognize learned behaviors from their families and come together on more equal terms emotionally. Even as my husband and I approached the tasks of a relationship and responsibilities of family and household equally, we still had to overcome learned behaviors of our families to bring our emotional relationship to the same level of equality.
Like most movements that seek to change power or social dynamics, this one, too, must start in the home. As women, we must raise our children to not only do the same amount of dishes and laundry and vacuuming whether they are male or female, we must also raise them to openly discuss and share decision-making and emotional support within their partnerships and marriages as adults. As we come to consciousness about injustices, especially when they are evident in our personal relationships, we need to tread lightly. The usual stages of anger and outrage should not be projected onto one another, since we’re all on the same team. If we can merely become more aware and leave the resentment behind as a by-product in order to move forward as whole individuals, we will honor our relationships and build stronger bonds with one another. Instead of seeing the “child in men,” I propose we look beyond and recognize the man in men to seek equal footing emotionally within our relationships.
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