You're Doing That Wrong

In  my post of a few days ago, I did all this bragging about how competent women are; about how we women GET THE JOB DONE.This  Harry Bliss cartoon shows the flip side of that in that it illustrates our need to control and/or comment upon just about every aspect of life around the house.Maybe that's a human thing more than s a gender thing though, because in truth we all have our domains.My husband's domain is Pantry Management. Every three or four months he takes every single item off the pantry shelves and lines them all up on the kitchen counter according to category. That way, when I note an absence of, say, cornstarch, and go to the store and buy some, he can do what he always does: With neither fanfare or remark, he walks over to those many shelves  and take out all three, or four, or five of the boxes of cornstarch that I somehow didn't see.Come to think of it, I guess I should count myself lucky that he never, in our many years together, has said I was doing the shopping wrong. (It's true he never buys the food or helps me bring  it in from the car - "I have no shoes on!" - but he does put it all away God bless him, and that's a job I hate even more than. emptying the dishwasher!  

More Maya Angelou, on Men

She also had this to say, Ms. Maya Angelou, when that same interviewer from TIME magazine asked “Did you inherit your mother’s fondness for guns?”“I like to have guns around. I don’t like to carry them," said Maya.“Have you ever fired a weapon?” asked the person from TIME.“I was in my house in North Carolina. It was fall. I heard someone walking on the leaves. And somebody actually turned the knob. So I said 'Stand four feet back because I’m going to shoot now! Boom! Boom! The police came by and said ‘Ms. Angelou, the shots came from inside the house.’ I said ‘Well, I don’t know how that happened.’Well now we know that It’s wrong to feed falsehoods to  cops - of course! -  but  the way I look at it, those two cops were probably guys and it's really is never a mistake to  keep a pretty tight hold on how you communicate  things to a guy. “You want to control the information when it comes to your man,” said  my very own mother-in-law regarding my relations with her own darling boy.  “Timing is everything,” she added, nodding her head in emphasis.I believed her. Hadn’t she just recently told me about the time when, driving home from HER mother-in-law’s house carrying on her lap the  extra platter of the eggplant parmesan that she'd made for the family, her own young husband patted her knee and said while it had tasted perfectly fine, really it just wasn’t QUITE as good as the way his mother made it? And hadn't she in response and on the spot opened the car window and tipped the whole drooly platter out into the street?Yes she had, indeed she had.I love stories like these two, told by Ruth Payne Marotta and the wonderful Marguerite Johnson AKA our Miz Maya Angelou. They inspire me and make me want to also say to any men who mess with me: Stand back four feet now.Son.And get ready for what’s comin’ at you now - and you'd best HOPE it's just a platter of eggplant. :-)

maya angelou

“You endured some really horrible things, mostly at the hands of men,” somebody at AARP ‘s Monthly magazine said to Maya Angelou in a 10 question Q & A  last spring. “Have gender relations improved?Here’s how she  responded:"No, I think men are as crazy as they were and women are as crazy as they were."I think it’s wise when women say what they like and don’t like and will and won’t take. Men ought to do the same. I've never had a dislike for men. I’ve been badly treated by some but I’ve been loved greatly by some. I married quite a lot of them."As I say, gotta love her!