Diary of a Working Married Mother: Goose and gander...

What is good for the goose is not always good for the gander. The truth is we are different really, not intellectually. But physically, emotionally and psychologically, there are major differences between men and women you cannot afford to ignore. So not everything that is good for me is good for him and vice versa.

For starters, most men get an ego boost from fixing and solving complex situations. The plumbing in the house is a mess? Well, he might take two days to fix it but once it is done, you will never hear the end of his heroic deeds. A couple of fuses have blown? He will get out all his tools and pore over an electrical map of the house for hours and ensure the fuses are set right and when it is done, if he were a peacock, you would be able to count all the feathers sticking out. To be honest, sometimes it does irritate me when Mr does a peacock thing after doing one of those jobs. I mean, if he hadn’t fixed it or wasn’t around, I would have called the plumber of electrician and it would be worked on, right? Right!

That was my thinking until Mr had to go away for a bit and I found myself stuck with little things that needed working on and yet I had no clue where to begin from. It was exhausting, especially with the car. A part would break, a fuse blow, another part stop working and I had no clue where to begin. Of course I called the mechanic and he helped but I knew that if Mr were around, first I would not have to worry about the car stalling in the middle of a traffic-laden roundabout. Secondly, we would have paid much less I am sure, because he would have been able to tell the problem straight away, do “first aid” and then bargain to pay less.

So back to the goose and gander. Sometimes what makes gander happy is not what makes me happy, in fact, sometimes it annoys me. But, gander does not get a kick from watching highly emotional movies and sniffing away and sighing and thinking about it so much, the way I do, that I even change the way I do things in my relationships – for the better. To each, his/her own.

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