A proud member of Boris Zhukov Stand-ins Local 228 (P.S. - can attend meetings after I get my coconuts back from my wife)

Unfortunately, I am not blessed with a gorgeous shock of flowing brown hair. Every few months, I become vastly unhappy with the state of my hair – it ends up looking like three-quarters of a bird’s nest, a semi-circled mess of stems and debris - and buzz the whole thing off. My clippers gave out about a year ago, so whenever my hair gets to be the mess that it has been of late, I have to enlist the services of a third party. So …

On Mother’s Day, Wife and I treated ourselves to haircuts at the Wal-Mart salon. Wife reverted to what she calls “mom hair” – really short, off the shoulders, barely covering the neck, still kind of long in front, more difficult for Son to grab and pull – and to tell the truth, it’s kind of hot. Historically, I’ve never been into short, short hair on women – I tend to think, “OK, fine - are you going to be a boy or a girl?” - but in this case, it works.

(That reaction, incidentally, isn’t an original one. When I had hair that ran halfway down my back during the early-to-mid ‘90s, my dad would mockingly tell me, “I don’t care if you want to be a girl.” [i.e., “I am not particularly pleased with your choice of hairstyle, Son.”] Between that and the constant miscalls of “ma’am?” when a clerk would call out to me in a store, and the constant calls for security over the P.A. system in a store when I would walk in, which were surely not coincidental, I gave up and did away with the long hair.)

My haircut took all of three minutes; it doesn’t take much “styling” to pull the guard off the shears and shave it down to about an eighth of an inch off my head. Easiest $12.50 they’ve ever made, I’m sure.

Alas, they did not touch my facial hair; I didn’t ask, but thought maybe they would. I ended up looking like I was going to audition for the lead in The Boris Zhukov Story, or possibly a live-action Wooly Willy flick.

Anyway, I lopped all of my facial hair off later Sunday evening. Son didn’t freak out at Daddy’s drastic transformation, but stood transfixed, watching as I ran my electric shaver over my face. I gave him a reassuring smile every now and again, and he smiled back once he realized that the shaver wasn’t eating Daddy.



The weekend wasn’t a total loss, but it sure seemed to start out that way. Friday wasn’t completely awful; I received some good news related to work (no, not that Doom had been crushed by a falling airplane, but the next best thing – a raise and a bonus!). I made plans to buy a wooden swing-set kit for Son for his birthday, and imagined how proud I would be once I got the thing put together. I had a picture in my head of the halcyon times that would follow once Son’s play area – still in planning stages – came into existence, and my heart would swell with potential pride.

My dad put stuff together for me when I was little - a swing set, a bike, etc. - and he did it right; I imagine that he harbored illusions of passing his gift for handiwork on to me. After the divorce, though, my mom got custody of me, and any hope of me being able to do things with my hands went out the window. On the bright side, I can do and have done wonderful and creative things with my mind. On the down side, don’t ask me to change the oil in my vehicle or fix that leak in the sink or actually build anything. That’s just not how I was raised – I was protected from ever having to do any sort of strenuous labor. In my neck of the woods, this is akin to wearing a scarlet letter – “G” for “gay.”

But I’m trying to reverse that trend. I want to build things for my son also. I don't want him growing thinking that Daddy is totally useless with his hands.

I was very eager to go pick up a wooden swing-set kit for him, and the picture in my head I spoke of earlier only glowed further the more I thought about it. It made me smile.

I married into a family who is just the opposite of me: blue-collar, roughneck, salt-of-the-earth folks. Good people, really; I love them to death, though I wonder if they “get” me sometimes because we’re so opposite. My father-in-law is in the middle of building a new house for him and my mother-in-law. Two of the sons drive trucks for a living, and the third works in a factory. You get the picture.

Fast forward to Friday night. Wife was telling her mom on the phone about my bonus, and about our desire to purchase and assemble a swing set for Son. And then, as if I wasn’t there, as if she assumed I would not be interested in doing or could not be able to do such a thing, she said, “Can Dad and the boys come out and put it together?”

I was furious.

I stormed out of the house, grabbed a chair and chain-smoked for about 20 minutes.

By the time I went back in the house, she hadn’t moved from the couch: “I just meant that maybe we could use their tools to put it together?”

“That’s not what I heard,” I shot back. “Why don’t you just say, ‘My useless husband is too much of a wuss to do it, so we need some actual men to come out and put it together’? Because that’s what I hear every time you say that. It’s really quite emasculating.”

“What?”

“I said, it’s really quite emasculating.”

And it is. Every time there is something around the house that requires any sort of manual labor, she’s on the phone to her dad or her brothers in about three seconds. Yeah, OK, I’m a wussy, ineffectual sissy boy. I get it.

I just wish she wasn’t so blatant about saying so (in, admittedly, not so many words).



A few minutes passed, and I think she thought the storm had passed as well.

“I had an affair at work today,” she said, trying to lighten the mood. (She didn’t really have one, but at that point, I didn’t really care.)

“I hope it was with someone who knows how to use tools,” I said, still in no mood. (I suppose that was kind of a womanly thing to say, wasn’t it?)

We didn’t say anything to each other the rest of the night. She’s one of those people – and we all know one – who gets mad at a person for being mad at them, who almost seems to thrive on being pissed off at someone. That’s something that I’ll never get.

She fell asleep on the couch almost immediately thereafter, and I played with Son the rest of the evening. We had a good time, me and him. For his birthday, Sitter got him one of those plastic cars with a spot cut out of the bottom of it for his feet to go through, like a Fred Flintstone car, and he drove that around the biggest part of the night.



We eventually made up, and the weekend was saved. I just hope it stops raining soon, because we'll probably end up killing each other before it's all said and done. Figuratively speaking, of course.

Incidentally, after all that, we still haven’t bought the swing set.