Let’s get this straight out the gate:no one call my wife in a panic. I’m not contemplating killing myself, at least not more than usual.No , the death I’m talking about is both metaphorical and real at the same time. Confused? Let me explain.

I was raised in a normal suburban house. At least, that’s what it looked like. Inside was a whirlwind of dysfunction. I used to hate Friday nights, because while fights would sometimes break out during the week, Friday was pretty much damn guaranteed to be one. Why? The unrealistic expectations my father was raised under.

While I was born in 1969, My household was pretty much the 50’s. My father allowed no rock, unless it was Elvis. Hippie shit was non-existent in my house, like it never happened. To say both my parents were unprepared for the economic realities of life in the Seventies is like saying a dog is unprepared to be mayor. My father expected to be the bread winner , while his wife was the housewife. With abusive undertones, that was the status quo in my house until the mid 70’s.

My mother had always worked a little. She’d waitress at the late great Marathon on Washington. But when the economy started spiking, my mother took on a second job, teaching for Waukegan schools. Which she thought was great, but drove my dad berserk. Nothing upsets a racist farm boy more than his wife working and helping dark skinned folks all day. Plus, those other females she worked with had some seriously modern ideas about what a man and a wife’s roles should be. To add fuel to the fire, Dad’s cushy job as a shoe store mamanger evaporated when the owner decided (rightly) that there was more money in nursing homes.

Losing a job was devastating to my father. In the dictionary under workaholic, it has his picture. If my father has any admirable trait, it’s his work ethic. He can be a horrible person to deal with, but you could never say he ever gave you less than a hundred percent on the job.

But his burning need to be the breadwinner left him with no time for anything else. He’d had hobbies, like model trains. and working  on the house. But god forbid if I expressed interest in anything that wasn’t his interest, or unmanly.

I’ll skip the rest of the sordid story. It isn’t pertinent to my point. But the attitude my father had exists to this day. I’m a married man. I’m supposed to be the breadwinner. I’m not. I’ve never been In my entire existence, I’ve survived on my own for exactly  two years, without roommates or anything.

And I feel like a failure for it every day. It isn’t rational. I know full well my wife is a thousand  times the nurse that I’ll ever be at anything, career wise. I should be OK with it. I should be OK with helping to raise my daughter and grand daughter. I cook, I clean and care for people. That should be enough.

But it’s not. Because every day I’m bombarded with messages about how men should be the kings,making that paper. Because there’s that perception that male caretakers, unless they’re also working full time, are somehow less. And we’re still building that into men. You add that into my brain cocktail of anxiety , ADHD, and depression, and some days it’s all I can do to keep passing the open windows. *

And I keep trying to write, to start making some money writing, but it ain’t easy. And every time I sit down to the keyboard, I have to resist thinking that it isn’t all a waste of time, that you’ll never make any money at it, so why bother? I end up numbing my brain with tv and internet, but the message that I’m a failure follows me there..

Don’t believe me? Go look at pop music. It’s all about how men can care for their family by working. There’s no rap hits about making dinner or ensuring that Jimmy gets to batting practice.Country music isn’t making ballads about how Daddy used to make us dinner and take us to the library. And there sure as hell ain’t any slow jams about the great short story her man wrote her.

I can try and rationalize it,but something has to change. How we define ourselves as men has to be something more than the fruits of our labor. My father busted his ass, but never felt it was important to care what I was about . If you held a gun to my dad’s head and asked him who my favorite author, if you gave him google and a 100 guesses, he couldn’t get it right.

We don’t praise the little things. The things that kids remember. Because kids aren’t going to remember that extra shift you took at the factory, they’re going to remember that you called during that shift to see how their Little League game went. And men aren’t being taught that’s important

And it’s costing us. If you look at all these school shooters, you’ll find a cloud of toxic masculinity behind them. Their minds are filled with rhethoric of minds poisoned by the idea that some “other” person is to blame for the economic failures of their lives, and not market forces and changing technology. Maybe if we made it OK and tried to support our fellow man, instead of fucking them over, we wouldn’t have so many dead kids on our hands.

In an era of worsening economic times, I don’t have any easy answers. I’m trying to find a part time job, both for our economic survival and for my self esteem, It’s a vicious world out there, but we could be making it less vicious.Neil DeGrasse Tyson said the greatest horror of all is the universe’s vast indifference to our existence. We’re here  for a short time. Let’s try to stop killing ourselves and each other for the last piece of pie.

PS.The title of this post is named after “Cats in the Cradle”, the song by Harry Chapin about a corporate climber who ignores his son , then realizes by doing so, he’s perpetrating the cycle of ignorance and greed. I hate it, because I lived it.

*  The term “passing the open windows” is from my favorite book of all time, The Hotel New Hampshire . There’s a bit in there  about a street performer named the King of Mice who jumped out a window and killed himself. The Berry family uses the phrase “keep passing the open windows”. to keep themselves going through some truly awful times.