What “Head of Household” Really Means!
Long ago, a woman I was dating said, obviously very frustrated with me, “You the man! You decide!” I was clueless as to what she meant. Fast forward about three and a half decades: it’s crazy to me realizing, especially at this age, just how insular my life has been, living in the U.S.; the bubble as I’ve come to see it. How the safety nets, the anti-socialists seem to decry, buffer millions from the kind of lives others lead taking care of themselves and their families. How what has come to be known as “traditional family values” gets shaped by religious doctrine. And how that doctrine has been unfairly tied to religious zealots, often with supremacist motivations.
In fact, being the man, head of household, is more than another battlefront in the culture wars being raged around the planet. It’s, quite simply, how families are ordered, without fanfare or colorization around the world.
However, this is a more personal story. In less than a month, I’m having cancer surgery. And no matter how many people tell me that the cancer I have is not life threatening, death and dying is more on my mind than it’s ever been. I guess people are right; there’s no better teacher than experience. Because, more than my worries being about me, though that also, the future of my wife and young children weigh heavier upon my consciousness because of the traditional values held high by wife and the culture, the Philippines, in which we live.
And it took a dear friend to get me to really see it. “You have to take care of yourself.” she said. “Whatever you need to do, do! Don’t worry about the bills! About needing to have people around you! About people who you ask to take care of you.! Do what you feel like you need to do, to take care of you. Be selfish, so you can come back home and take care of your family!” My guides, my angels! I am blessed by their counsel.
What she sees is their loss would be more than emotional. That it will not be solely what many women who lose their husbands go through. Something she went through it herself. She gets how my wife’s culture, one that promotes dependence, is so very different from that in the U.S. That being head of household means something very different than it means inside the bubble.
How the family functions, how the bills get paid, our quality of life, our standard of living, is all on me. It’s not only that my wife does not work outside of the house, she sees her role, her reward so to speak, in taking care of the house and our five-year old twins. I am the one that makes our lives possible. And she trusts, perhaps blindly, that I know how to make sure things are taken get done.
For whatever reason, my friend’s words amplified words I heard on Netflix’s “Ozark.” (The show’s kind of like a white people’s New Jack City: modern family turns cartel ganstas in redneck heaven.) In one scene the gangsta father and his gansta family are stuffing millions into the hollowed out walls of a cabin. And yet, during another scene, he’s saying, “It’s not okay to die.” What a metaphor, I thought, using much stronger language: life in the U.S. vs the real world.
Seeing, and experiencing, the lives of others in Central and South America and Southeast Asia has made my cancer battle way more that it would have been had I not known what being the head of your family, the bread winner, truly means. The economic underpinnings of being a husband and father are so much more profound when there are no safety nets. No workman’s comp! No unemployment insurance or public assistance! No financial aid for college or worker retraining programs! And certainly not the myriad of support services that are taken for granted in the U.S.
“There go I, but by the grace of God.” often comes to my mind when I’m in other parts of the world. The disparities I encounter often have me wondering why they exist. Knowing at least some of the answers does not shut down my sadness.
My wife is Filipino. Her father died when she was seven. There were five of them: three older brothers and her sister. She was raised in the country, the province they call it here in the Philippines. A country where eating is a day-to-day struggle for too many! Where no real safety nets exist when crisis strikes! They, my wife’s family, were doing okay though. They owned farm land that yielded enough copra (coconut) to take care of their needs. A small store at the front of their house gave them extra income. They even were able to save some money for the older daughter to go to college. The goal being she would help my wife when she graduated from high school.
His early death brought their lives to a screeching halt, however. Without his guidance and drive, their small business failed. And their farm needed backs stronger than her young brothers could provide by themselves. At various times they all had to quit school. There was no money for the required uniforms or mandatory fees or lunch. Her older brothers scavenged, as best they could, for what the family would eat that day. Going to the river often for to catch fish. To escape the days where there was no food, my wife’s older sister married young.
My father also died when I was young, a senior in high school. And though we were poor, there were no days when we did not eat. There were no days when bills could not be stretched to time payments or even forgiveness until death benefits began. Because my dad died of black lung disease, common for coal miners in those early days, there was compensation for that. There was even a little insurance money to bury him. Public assistance, welfare some called it, was granted until social security survivor benefits began. Point is — there was help.
Now I see that being head of household truly means way more than that box to be checked at tax filing time. In the U.S. relationship duality. power sharing between spouses, is a way of being that gets heavily propagandized. As does depicting men who are care takers, decision makers and bread winners as extensions of patriarchy and misogyny. Inside the bubble, the U.S., societal values support what seems to be unbridled capitalism. In many other parts of the world families live their lives consuming less; sustenance defined more by earning and sharing than accumulation.
In many ways having cancer has been another kind of awakening to the world around me. What I’ve learned is that many parts of the world, many cultures, do not follow the good vs evil gender story lines that gets proselytized in the U.S. Much of the world, for that matter, does not function like that at all. And there’s no argument that will make those cultural systems and their values change. Nor should they!
Where we live, men are head of household. Making sure the standard of living exists I want my family to have is my responsibility. No one else’s! There will be no government assistance. That’s how life is organized for most families around the world, I’ve discovered. This is how my family is organized.
Sometimes I feel like I should call the woman I use to date and say, “Ok, I get it now.”
