Not So Macho Man

Do you ever wonder if being married and being the father of daughters has stolen some, most, or all of your masculinity? Being a macho man sometimes might not go over too well with with daughters. Our wives can ignore our macho traits, as our spouses are experts at ignoring most of what we do and say. Unless she wants the gutters cleaned out, the oil changed in the minivan or the grass mowed and the flower beds weeded.

But daughters are often too young and too inexperienced to distinguish between our macho bluster and the real you.

That's why I've been purchasing feminine products for all four women under my roof for the past six years. First of all, I do the grocery shopping and have don so for my entire marriage. The women I bump into in the grocery store want to induct me into sainthood and they implore me to 'please' speak to their husbands about the grocery shopping or doing laundry. My wife would prefer that I knew how to rewire every electrical circuit in the house or be able to build an edition onto the house with my own two hands. Which is why I do the grocery shopping. I actually chose to do the grocery shopping, and there are two important reasons: One, I stick to the budget. If my wife shopped for groceries, we'd end up spending a couple hundred dollars more per trip and have less food to show for it. The second reason is that I enjoy cooking, and I pack my girls' lunches for schools, so I have a vested interest in what's in the grocery cart. But I digress, slightly.

When I was purchasing feminine products for just my wife, I could bury the stuff in the grocery cart under the frozen vegetables and between cans of soup. The girl or lady at the register would barely notice as she was ringing items through the scanner with everything else.

Now, if I'm obligated to purchase feminine products for four different females, you can imagine the looks I get. You just can't hide that much stuff in one shopping cart. Because guess what? If you have multiple females in your house, they ALL want something different. They all use different stuff. You can't get away with buying one jumbo box or package of one thing that works for all of them. No! You have to buy one product for before, one for during, one for nighttime, and one for when it's over but not quite. Then multiply that by four! No way to hide it all in the cart. But since I do the shopping, that's a fate with which I'm stuck.

But the masculinity thing continues to bother me. I mean, a couple of weeks ago, one daughters had an immediate need for a particular feminine product. She was out of this particular item and had an urgent need. Does Mom get the request to go to the store for the emergency? No. Dad fields the request, and this one's bad. Because it's not a regular grocery shopping trip where I can hide the stuff in the shopping cart.

It's one item, in CVS. At least the checkout person was a female. Can't imagine what a moronic teenage boy would have thought or what lame joke he might've attempted to share with me.

So, I still don't know if this make me a renaissance man or a wimp. I don't know if it's good that that I've blurred the boundaries, in my daughters' eyes, of what a father and a mother are responsible for, or if they don't quite get it. One thing's for sure. I may have gotten the future males in their lives into something they never imagined doing. "Honey, can you run down to Rite Aid and get me some 'overnights'?" Poor guys, they'll never see it coming.

Thank goodness I've got the Steelers on Sunday afternoon, cold beer for one hand and a channel changer for the other. And no grocery shopping to do.