(The second in a series of blogticles talking about Generation X jumping over the 50+ hurdle.)
When I was a kid my Dad would tell me, “you need to find a woman like your Mom”. If I was gay that statement would actually be pretty funny but being that I am a straight dude, it comes across a tad weird…
Until you understand how my parent’s relationship worked. Although I am a part of Generation X, I was born to people from “The Greatest Generation”, those who survived the great depression and WWII. That was an era of Dad going off to work and Mom…well Mom stayed home and took care of the household. What is now done by upper middleclass households of today by landscapers, maids, fast food restaurants, daycare and cleaning services used to be done by a person who would stay home and do all that work. This was, of course, until it was stigmatized as being “just a stay at home Mom”. “Oh you poor dear you don’t have your own life”.
Me, I really don’t care what you do, but to hate on someone who takes care of all the duties of a home and doesn’t go out to join “the workforce”, is just having a very skewed view of reality.
Be that as it is, I figured what my Dad was telling me was “you need someone to take care of all this stuff”, that I mentioned above. By the time I was of age to really get out there a lot had changed and the realities of the single income household just were not there. Wages were not what they were when my parents were young and I would tell him when he made the “find someone like your Mom” statement, that I just could not afford that! LOL! But what I was hearing and what he was saying were, now that I am a bit older, not the same thing.
He was saying, you need to find someone who cares about you. Who gets you and is willing to do for you, what you don’t even know you need done.
Which brings me to the crux of this little tale. This past Fall, I, for some strange reason, decided to wash a 30+ year old stuffed R2-D2 doll I had since I was a kid. Yea a little piece of nostalgia from my childhood. Unfortunately after a bout in our new deluxe high speed washer…it was a mass of soggy, decimated toy goo. Little R2 had bleeped his last bloop. I was a bit bummed and actually felt sorta guilty that I had stupidly tried to machine wash a super old toy! I put the remains of R2 out by the deck of our house, just not quite able to come to grips with tossing it in the garbage.
Well, my gal Chrissy decided to take the little guy and get to work on him putting all the stuffing back in and redoing all the markings on it that had worn off.
She gave it to me as a Christmas gift this year. Quite frankly, it was pretty awesome and really a huge heartfelt gesture by her to repair something that meant a lot to me.
So there it was, I finally realized what my Dad meant by “finding someone like your Mom”. Someone who cares about you, knows what you are feeling even when you are not sure how you feel and does things for you that you didn’t realize you needed done.
I turned 50 today and as I roll through this year of well past middle aged craziness, the biggest gift I have is the lovely lady alongside me, Christine Blake. I’m lucky to be able to say I have found the right person to be with, hopefully she feels the same way.
