“The Fine Print”, by M.H. Schrader
Another Hallmark Moment
Well,
I’ve made it through another Hallmark Holiday.
I firmly believe that Mother’s Day, like Valentine’s Day, was the
creation of some sadistic women at Hallmark Cards as a way to not only sell
oodles and oodles of fine Hallmark cards and gifts (a given) but also to punish
all of those of the male gender for their maleness (and the inherent
thoughtlessness that goes with being male).
The
difference between Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day is that the Mother’s Day
guilt net catches many more fish. You
see, on Valentine’s Day, “single men need not apply”--not true for Mother’s
Day. All men, whether single or
married, have a Mother. Yes, even a
five year old boy cannot escape the Mother’s Day guilt.
That’s
not fair, you say. Women and girls are
just as susceptible to the guilt, you say.
I’ll give you the single women.
But I will not give you the married women, because for a married woman,
Mother’s Day involves merely the transfer of guilt. Who is the ultimate receiver?
You guessed it! A man.
How’s
that, you say? Take Mrs. Schrader, for
example. (Well, don’t really take
her--after nine years I’ve grown rather accustomed to her face.) Now it may appear to the untrained eye that
she feels the same guilt/responsibility on Mother’s Day that, say, I do. But, it’s just an illusion; just smoke and
mirrors. After all, Mother’s Day is her
day, too. So, unlike me, and millions
of men throughout the world, she can negate her guilt by making someone else
feel guilty. Namely me.
Fortunately
for me, we had to go to St. Louis for a wedding this Mother’s Day, so things
haven’t been too bad for me, from either angle. I got to see my mother on Mother’s Day, so I don’t have to worry
about calling her up or sending her a card (or forgetting to, as the case
usually is) because--I was there! And
for extra shock value, I brought not only a card, but also a present! Of course, when your mother is of retirement
age, you really have to be careful about providing too big of a shock--you
know, the health thing and all. Talk
about guilt! You shock your mother so
much by being nice to her that she has a heart attack and winds up in the
hospital. Because of this fear, I made
sure it was just a SMALL present.
Of
course, this is an honest to goodness legitimate fear. Mothers do not expect their boys to be nice
just to be nice. Men are not nice just
for the sake of being nice--there’s always an ulterior motive.
Mrs.
Schrader greets my niceness with the standard female rhetorical
question--”Okay, what do you want?”
(When you’re a boy, the standard rhetorical question is “Okay, what did
you do?”, but that changes when you take the leap from childhood to
adulthood.) When I tell her that I am
being nice just to be nice, she responds with either skepticism (“uh huh, yeah
right!”), uncontrollable laughter, or both.
After all, I am a man, and men are inherently incapable of
niceness. We are, after all, just
thoughtless clods (except when it comes to our vehicles, buddies, and football
games.)
For
a married man, Mother’s Day is the worst day of the year. Valentine’s Day is really bad--you know,
spousal expectations and all that hooey.
but that is only one person. On
Mother’s Day, a married man gets the guilt trip from two different sources--his
spouse and his mother.
After
Mrs. Schrader and I got married, and before daughter Jacqueline came into this
world, Mrs. Schrader embraced Mother’s Day as her own, even though she was not
technically a mother, as I fruitlessly pointed out. It didn’t matter--Mother’s Day, I was told, applied to spouses,
too. Thus, she was to receive the royal
treatment; you know, I was supposed to be really really nice to her. Of course, being a man, and thus a
thoughtless clod, I did not know this until she told me. And, as women like to
do to psychologically torture men by really piling on the guilt, she didn’t
tell me until after Mother’s Day was over.
Thus, I had to live with a sizable mantle of guilt until the next
year. Of course, wouldn’t you know it,
being a man I forgot what I was supposed to feel guilty about; I just knew I
felt guilty about SOMETHING.
I
wonder if it has something to do with the lack of a Y chromosome, because
mothers are also effective in piling on the guilt. So effective, that they can get men to do it for them. Male bonding, generally considered by most
women the most unbreakable bond of all, is utterly destroyed (to the point that
men fight among themselves) when guilt is effectively supplied by a woman. This is, of course, the approach my mother
uses. If she is upset with me because
of something that I inevitably forgot to do on Mother’s Day, she gives my guilt
to my father, who then proceeds to give the guilt to me.
It’s
one thing to get guilt from a woman--after all, that’s expected. It’s quite another to get guilt indirectly
through another man. By golly, men are
just not equipped to accept guilt from another member of the male
fraternity--our guilt blockers don’t kick in when they detect the presence of
another Y chromosome. When it comes
form a man, we actually feel guilty.
The
next Hallmark Holiday is Father’s Day.
Men all over the globe should revel in the opportunity to make women
feel guilty. Except--we can’t. We don’t know how to. Let’s face it--to many men, the ideal
Father’s Day is to be off in the country fishing with one’s buddies and showing
off the new truck, with the Missus at home taking care of the kids. That’s paradise.
I
guess it must be a Y chromosome kind of thing.