Janice Crow

June Reflections – Boss-er or Boss-ee

We all know that the man is the head of the house, right? If you didn’t read it in the Bible, then you probably learned it watching Michael Constantine in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. He certainly believed it…and made everyone else in the house believe it, too.

I grew up hearing that phrase at some point almost every day. My dad was the head of the house; and although my mom was the neck that could occasionally turn it, most of the time the head had a mind of its own.

My brothers could grow up and say, “Just wait…when I’m a man, I’ll do as I please.” But as a girl, I had no hope. I would never be a man……short of some weird surgery that no one ever heard of back then. As a girl, I was doomed to be the “boss-ee”, not the “boss-er”. Not that I was bitter about it…..okay, maybe. It just seemed that men had all the rights and privileges according to the Bible. And the preacher, a man, was pleased as punch to tell you about it…..over and over and over again. Okay, all right already. We get it. The men tell you what to do and you just jump. Don’t bother to think, because after all, you’re just a woman.

Growing up I would see an uncle rattle his glass, and my aunt knew it was time to jump up and refill his ice water. I’ve seen men at the dinner table just point and grunt and expect his wife to know he wanted more mashed potatoes. Those kind of scenes don’t paint a very hopeful picture for a young girl. Then follow it with a popular tongue-in-cheek country song like Tompall Glaser’s “Put Another Log on the Fire”, and you would be discouraged from ever taking the plunge. If you’ve never heard it, the lyrics go something like this:

“Put another log on the fire.
Cook me up some bacon and some beans
Go out to the car, jack it up and change the ‘tar’
Darn my socks and sew my old blue jeans.
Come on baby, you can fill my pipe and then go fetch my slippers
And boil me up another pot of tea.
Put another log on the fire
Then come and tell me why you’re leavin’ me.”

Who on earth would want to get married if that’s all it is? He’s the boss and you’re just a glorified step-and-fetch-it.

Although my girlfriends beat me to the altar by about six years, I eventually dipped my toes in the matrimonial waters and unfortunately found it to be just as cold as I feared. It was not a successful venture, for many reasons, so I spent the next sixteen years feeling idiotic for having taken the chance. Then one day I got my courage up and tried again, this time with a wonderful Christian man who treats me like gold.

Looking back now, it’s funny to realize that all the preachers I ever heard quote the scriptures on the subject of marriage conveniently left out a very important part. While they were busy beating the women to death with Ephesians 5: 22, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife,” they “forgot” to mention what followed in verse 25 of that passage, ‘‘Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.”. That makes all the difference in the world. Who couldn’t submit to a husband who loved you like Christ, somebody who was willing to give his very life for you?

I spent many years annoyed with the “rights and privileges” I thought God had bestowed on men alone until it dawned on me one day what some of those “perks” were.
I remember hearing my dad get up at 2:00 a.m. on an icy winter night and trudge across a cold linoleum floor, heading to the basement to rebuild the fire that was dying in our coal furnace. He could have stayed in bed, but he had a wife and five kids to keep warm.

I remember dad coming home on Friday afternoon from the foundry where he’d spent all week welding parts for farm machinery. He would clean up, swallow his supper whole and, while most dads were settling in for a relaxing evening, he got in our bright green ’54 Olds and went to his weekend job at Tri-City Grocery. He had a wife and five kids to feed.

I will never forget the gargantuan spider…it had to be the size of a saucer, with all its young hanging on…and who do you think had the “privilege” of doing battle with it? Who had the “right” to walk behind a dull push mower for hours on a 90 degree day? When King, our big yellow chow, died, who buried him? And who had to fish the dead skunk out from under the house?

Those things crossed my mind again the other day as my husband Bruce spent Memorial Day weekend doing his “favorite” job, snaking a hopelessly clogged toilet, and then scraping his knuckles bare trying to do maintenance on my little Toyota. Then, of course, he has the honor of climbing up on the roof and cleaning the nasty leaves and “helicopters” out of the guttering, while trying not to break his neck. Or how about crawling on his belly for 28 feet under the deck where the half-dollar spiders live, just to vent my clothes dryer properly. Ah, the blessings of manhood!

With that in mind, as Father’s Day approaches, I’m sure I’ll look at Bruce differently….not just as the guy with the final word, but the guy on whom the weight of the world rests. And, you know, I think I’ll pay my dad, now 98, a visit and thank him for all the “rights and privileges” he exercised for me.

Have a wonderful Father’s Day guys.

Janice