On Being Staff For Men
“If you want to ask your dad to go over to a friend’s house, you need to do it like this...”
It starts early. The emotional management of men.
A lot has been made, thankfully, over the past decade or two about the presumptions within hetero romantic relationships that labor is (at best) unequal. We’ve even begun to broach the topic around the required permissiveness in the workplace – typically when it comes to the men who have power over the handful of women attempting to break one of our many glass ceilings.
We talk in vague generalities about men making more than women and how this puts us at disadvantages. We roll our eyes now when men get praise for “babysitting” their own kids and washing the occasional dish.
We are allowed to have our own bank accounts and credit cards. Most municipalities no longer allow men to rape their wives with impunity. Most people will cringe reading that sentence, preferring to think of the “Mad Men era” as so long ago none of us alive now can remember it.
In some intersectional spaces we note that our lifetime economic deficit puts many of us at risk for hard to escape abusive situations. Why women stay is less of a mystery in the #MeToo and #BelieveSurvivors era. Stats on the lifetime financial cost of being a rape victim float around social media in April; here in January, the occasional post about one in three women being stalking victims offers a glimpse into the very real threat of simply existing in a woman’s or AFAB or femme-presenting body.
All of this discussion understandably focuses on the end point, the destination here where even those of us too busy under patriarchal capitalism to notice or memorize statistics inherently understand we must exist in a state of hypervigilance. We carry our keys between our fingers as pedestrians. We glance in the back seats of our vehicles before unlocking our doors and getting in. We have door stop alarms that could wake the dead affixed to the entrances of our living spaces.
This destination place we call adulthood is dangerous and requires these awareness campaigns and protests and demands within our (supposed) representative democracy for better protections. Anyone with multiple marginalizations is at increased risk, their bodies seen as disposable by not just white men, but those who shamefully feel relief that they are not disabled, undocumented, transgender, genderqueer, BIPOC, chronically ill, neurodivergent, and/or…and and and and and.
As a white cisgender woman whose marginalizations are entirely invisible I have absolutely benefited from my White Lady status – a stand-in as a “diversity hire” in an economic system that continues to use bodies like mine to justify the erasure of the multiply and visibly marginalized. My struggle can and does coexist with my privileges; two things, as they say, can be true.
All of this focus on where we find ourselves leaves little time or space to consider how we got here.
To be clear, I’m not cosplaying as an academic or an expert; scholarship is best left to those whose work is already widely available. I readily admit I’m certain I have excluded important people and considerations here (and will again) in this small exercise of adding my experience to the existing chorus. I am intentionally labeling this series as “essay” and “personal” not to circumvent taking responsibility for my words, but to ensure they aren’t seen in any way as me asserting myself as the authority on these topics.
Many more voices are needed. On my hopeful days, I ruminate on the emergence of those being raised right now by GenXers and Millennials who are offering a refusal to adhere to the rules and presumptions of their grandparents.
I am not a parent, but have benefited immensely from the peers who are actively engaged in reparenting work. We have begun to talk openly about the expectations imposed upon us from our childhoods – discussions I will share (with permission) as I write about the validations that have helped disabuse me of my internalized tropes these past three years. I am certain I would not be in the process of healing my own traumas without this labor and increasing openness.
It is in part from watching how differently kids and teens are supported now that has offered me the chance to develop self-compassion for my own inner children – ultimately leading to accurate (ongoing) medical diagnoses that are saving my life.
I see my needs much differently now. On my hardest days, I continue to choose to live as a commitment to little four-year-old me holding her injured cat and six-year-old me struggling with the death of her beloved grandfather and eight-year-old me being scolded for fainting because it meant a parent would be late to work that morning. It was never fair that I was seen as a prop. Or expected to stand-in for the emotional support of a spouse.
But as a child in the 80’s, I was inundated by declarations of my luck for having found myself part of this particular adoptive family. I’d been discarded and saved. Neighbors, teachers, doctors, friends’ parents, random adults at the grocery store – all gushed over this opportunity bestowed upon me.
Praise for my “good behavior” passed over my head to my mother who swelled with pride. Nobody saw the corporal punishment dolled out on a three-year-old “refusing” to be potty trained or daring to burst into tears from a (purely accidental on its part) cat scratch. I can still feel the sting from my father’s backhand shocking the tears from my eyes for a brief moment in 1982; it was the first time I heard the words “Knock it off or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
Over the decades that followed, I would be told I couldn’t possibly remember any of that. Besides, I was “only spanked twice” – the family fiction I was required to parrot if I wanted to avoid additional consequences. My young brain struggled with the cognitive dissonance of my memories routinely brushing up against the demands that I chime in supportively to extended family and my parents’ friends as my mother detailed her successful and creative parenting choices over the years. Opening my mouth to correct a detail would draw the look from my father that told me I better fucking shut up or I’d be dealing with him later.
To survive under the intense and constant scrutiny, my young brain began to protect me. I’m still learning how to articulate the various types of dissociation that became my escape. It seems impossible that I wouldn’t realize until I was 38 that nearly the entirety of my first sixteen years was “missing”. It had taken eight years of distance following my expulsion from the family before I could take a breath and turn my head to “look” at my childhood.
I’d been asked to write a descriptive paragraph set in my childhood home. My brain is hyper visual – something I’ve learned since. So when I reach for a memory or a fact, I very specifically LOOK in my mind then describe what I SEE. But when I went to look for something – anything – that took place in the house where we lived from 1979 to 1995, all I could pull up was the hallway. I couldn’t see inside any of the rooms. And when I attempted to picture things I thought I knew had happened there, my brain showed me the interior of the house where I lived the last two years of high school, 1995-1997.
It looked wrong. Fuzzy. Like pastels where primary colors should be.
The experience was a bit like trying to turn your head, but being frozen. I could feel something there off in the periphery with no way to drag it into view. It was frightening. I was locked out of the file room or the photo album. My nervous system kicked into gear like a warning from a cheesy haunted house telling me to turn back now. A panic attack threatened, swelling up in my chest – a feeling I would later learn to harness to unlock that file room door I’d just had slammed in my face.
If I pushed, my tinnitus roared to life and I felt physically like my seams were pulling apart all over my body. I vacillated between a compulsion to know and the terror of finding out what could have been so traumatizing that it had been securely walled off.
For the next four years, until the pandemic would shut most of life down and my nervous system was granted permission to stop forcing me to put one foot in front of the other or else face hunger and homelessness, I lived with the looming threat that eventually I wouldn’t be able to hold back whatever was over there. Back and to the left. Not quite behind me, but held out of view.
Facing those memories would mean recognizing the effect of those years on the rest of my life – including how I had wound up beholden to yet another in a series of violent, expectant men – whether I was ready or not.
And I absolutely was not.
I would spend several years piecing my psyche and my body back together – a process I’m still stumbling through. At first, it felt unfair being forced to do both at once. In hindsight, it was the somatic experiences brought about by constant, intense sensory overwhelm as my nervous system blew every fuse that provided the validation I needed — a time machine of sorts that would propel me back to the moments when I first felt the same sensations and fears.
I couldn’t deny my present and would quickly become too debilitatingly exhausted to resist the insistent flashbacks.
My body and my brain had begun sinking into severe Autistic Burnout – a clinical condition not to be confused with a very real and important, but distinctly separate experience of neurotypical fatigue under the impossible expectations of our shit economic system – back in 2016. The skill regression increasingly impaired my ability to perform my only marketable skill: writing. As my cognitive capacity declined, I was less and less able to understand what was happening to me or describe it to my physicians as they continued to grossly misdiagnose me.
I was terrified about the burden I was becoming on the few remaining “support” people in my life. I’d internalized our bootstrap myth fuckery in a culture where the only ones we’re taught to hope we can somewhat rely on are within the parent-child or romantic partner relationships. I had failed supremely in both spaces.
And so I took what was apparently my last shot at reciprocal life support: joining forces with someone who had called me a “sister” since we met in college. As another only child adoptee of supposedly overbearing parents, I was swept up willingly into an intense trauma bond. Over the years, I saw him as the older brother adult provider and myself as the younger sister fuck up.
I would co-create a living situation where I would take on 100% of the emotional and logistical labor, feeling afraid and confused and yet grateful that my roommate was picking up the tab for our rent. I was secretary, cleaning lady, and soother of wounds. He lashed out when he was drunk and I remained effusively appreciative. He made increasingly risky financial decisions and I was silent. Who was I to expect to be considered let alone consulted?
I was stranded and we both knew it.
As I write, I have eight weeks to extricate myself from this space without the means to do so.
My cognition is returning, but my body remains severely incapacitated. It will take time I don’t have for my system to recover from the severe weight loss, malnourishment, and neglect of 2020-2023.
I clawed my way to answers over the course of 2023, but course corrections take time I don’t have. I’m perhaps halfway there, recovering ahead of the schedule I offered my roommate a year ago when they promised not to withdraw their support until my assessments finished and I could apply for other resources. They had inherited a windfall, in their words, and would be happy to continue helping. No, I was repeatedly assured as I sobbed at their feet, I was not a burden.
I recognized this dynamic was unhealthy and untenable, but remained stuck without options. I beat myself up over having allowed this to happen. Over welcoming it somehow. Surely this was my fault.
But as my pattern recognition skills returned these past 14 months, I began to see that my perception of this person was colored with 25 years of lies and presumptions. I had seen them as An Adult – a coveted status in my mind. I eventually realized that his gender had played a large role from the beginning.
He was so much like my adoptive father I could suddenly hear my mother’s words echoing in my mind as she coached me through how to preclude his explosive emotional reactions to me voicing my basic needs.
Jesus fucking Christ.
The dissociation of my developmental years and their trauma had absolutely kept me alive through my college years. It had also kept me vulnerable to repeatedly taking on the role of managing emotionally immature caretakers.
We do a disservice to women and girls by pretending that it is only within career and romantic spaces that these dangerous dynamics play out.
If we look closely, all of us socialized as girls growing up or inhabiting female or feminine-presenting bodies as adults must navigate the expectations of men. Bosses and coworkers, partners and roommates, siblings and parents. Men think nothing of presuming our labor should come with them picking up the tab now and then.
We owe male strangers our smiles our phone numbers our sex.
I don’t have the answers to how we dismantle this millenia-old problem. If my circumstances have any wisdom to offer it’s only in my willingness to admit that they exist. To admit that I have wound up in the very situation I have feared all my life: in need of help I still feel I have no right to expect or ask for.
Help I have been taught I do not deserve.
“On my hopeful days, I ruminate on the emergence of those being raised right now by GenXers and Millennials who are offering a refusal to adhere to the rules and presumptions of their grandparents.” Solidarity. Thanks for spilling your heart onto this essay. Painful, but relatable read. ❤️