Uncomfortable Male Moments: Those Awkward Days That Can Push Us To Change

In the face of a succession of apparently dissociated events, sometimes an invisible thread suddenly appears that connects them.

It’s as if I spent several days following rules that have not been revealed to me, and that’s why it takes me a while to understand what the relationship between these apparently unrelated things is:

1. something that Lorenzo (my eldest son, who is 5) says: “Why doesn’t that person have money?”;
2. something I do that is not good (imposing a wish without considering Irene, my partner);
3. what a stranger’s gaze generates in me from another car.

The facts remain just random occurrences until something clicks internally: “Aha! This is discomfort that I’m experiencing, isn’t it?” Then come more moments, and I confess to myself: “Yes, this is about discomfort.” That seems to have been the headline for the past few weeks, in which I paid attention to different moments that made me feel uneasy or uncomfortable.

Last Friday, Lorenzo and I sat down to eat a tiropita (cheese pie) and some dried fruit before going to soccer. “Poop!” he alerted me. I immediately gathered my belongings and we crossed over to a bar to use a bathroom. That was already uncomfortable, but I’m used to dealing with public restrooms that sometimes are quite disgusting.

What threw me off was Lorenzo’s comment: “Why don’t you leave anything on the table?” he asked as I hurried him to the toilet. It makes sense to an adult: our phone and wallet can be stolen. But it made me uncomfortable to feel that by admitting to a possible theft — perhaps out of a mixture of pragmatism and sincerity — his fragile, innocent and childlike world would clash against the hostility of reality.

For some time now, I have been in the habit of creating my own homemade statistics to check against academic studies, such as those that show that the greatest share of childcare, as well as the mental load, fall on women. So, if I go to a birthday party or a playground, I compare what is in front of my eyes against the data I have read.

The statistics that emerged from the latest party I attended (a fifth birthday party of one of my sons’ friends) was devastating: there were only four of us men — all with our female partners — and 20 women. That is to say: a great majority of mothers (and a couple of grandmothers) alone with children, and four fathers who went along with their partners.

Oh, it was after working hours (from 5 to 9 p.m.). What made matters even worse was that a mom created a WhatsApp group and asked Irene for her number. “Can I join the group too?” I asked. “No, I’ll include her, you already have your representative.”

In the car

While driving I experienced two different uncomfortable moments.

When the traffic light turned red, a person approached the window asking for money but I didn’t give him any. “Why don’t you give him a coin?”, asked Lorenzo, who had asked me similar questions before (“Why did you give him a coin?”, “Why doesn’t he have money?”, “Why doesn’t he have a job?”, “Won’t he ever have a job?”).

I also noticed something else that was making me uncomfortable: exchanging glances with strangers. So much so, that it was something I followed closely for several days. It happened to me that on a two-lane road I was going slowly on the right and, after receiving an unfair honk, a guy passed me on the left (as it should have been) not without first giving me a stare.

Then I realized that I had done the same thing more than once when passing another car, as if by looking into who was driving I could solve or justify something: What do you look for with that look that, unfailingly, is quite aggressive?

So, I did two things:

1) I tried not to look at anyone anymore when I overtook them (I failed a few times, it’s a habit more ingrained than I thought);

2) Every time a car overtook me, I checked to see if the person was looking at me, and put together another homemade statistic. Out of 70 people I counted who looked at me, there were 60 males (85.7%) and 10 females (14.3%). If you do the exercise, let me know how the numbers work out for you. In the meantime, I’d like to hear if you have any ideas about what those exchanges of glances may imply.

Uneven decisions

Through the randomness of social media, I discovered the Argentine podcast Decisiones desparejas (Uneven decisions). The six-chapter miniseries gripped me from the start and I simply loved it.

Using comedy, this audio fiction tells the story of a couple that has been together for almost two decades and whose marriage — and family stability — is threatened by the mined terrain of domestic daily life. At any moment, a bomb like Viandagate (chapter 4) can explode, because a simple-looking lunchbox can contain food for one’s child or hide years of accumulated conflicts and confusion of roles, genders, patriarchies and exaggerations.

The thing is that I started listening to the podcast alone and since I liked it so much I couldn’t stand it: I played the second chapter in the car while we were driving with Irene to pick up Lorenzo. It was awkward, because she would have preferred to start at the beginning — and I knew it — and it bothered her a little bit. But I imposed my will. Why did my individual desire override any agreement or common desire?, I asked myself later.

I realized that I wanted to convince her to listen to it because the podcast was also a way to tell her things that the podcast shows (and that I don’t know how to formulate so synthetically and, above all, with the gentle effectiveness of the humor of this fiction).

Since I thought that my recommendation might not be enough to get her to listen to the podcast, my strategy was: I’ll make her try it and at best she will reject it. Then, I will pause the audio; probably, snorting or raising my eyebrows, to express with some subtlety my discomfort but without enunciating it, which is also an extortive method that leaves her in an uncomfortable position. Yes, all wrong.

I say all this to mark a discomfort with the way I am (male) — however small an anecdote this may be, and even though my strategy actually paid off (the next day she listened to the first chapter and then to the whole podcast, and loved it). The point is in my tendency to impose my desire and, in a way, belittle hers. To top it all off, I did it with a comment that was misleading and that, above all, I would have hated to receive: “It’s the same if you start from the second chapter, you will understand it just the same, won’t you?”

It still makes me uncomfortable

Questioning myself further about what makes me feel uncomfortable, the first thing that comes to mind is that Irene is once again the main breadwinner at home. After a period in which I returned to the labor market, a long project came to an end last August.

Irene and I went over our domestic contract again and decided that I was going to prioritize childcare and the house again — it became a mess while we both worked, a snake appeared in the garden because the grass was too high, and so on.

It is still uncomfortable not to generate a salary every month but this time I am managing to enjoy León more compared to Lorenzo, who caught me somewhat off guard, innocent and very ignorant (and led me to the crisis that resulted in this newsletter).

It still makes me uncomfortable when Lorenzo asks me to play and I don’t feel like it. “Nacho, can we play?” he asks. What can I answer that isn’t awkward when I don’t feel like it? Because playing without feeling like it is as awkward as telling him I don’t feel like it, but not as ugly as it would be to tell him we’ll play later (unless it’s true).

It also still makes me uncomfortable when Lorenzo asks why he has to go to kindergarten if what he wants is to be home with his parents. “Why can’t I stay home with you or mamma?”. He doesn’t settle when I tell him that in kindergarten he learns or plays things that he couldn’t at home.

It still makes me uncomfortable when friends come over and it is almost impossible to talk because two children take turns interrupting permanently. In the end, out of necessity or desire, they always demand attention.

But it no longer bothers me that my sexual desire with Irene does not always coincide. Sometimes we are coordinated, sometimes on opposite sides. Yet it is not a conflict or a sign of decadence but, I think, a sign of our maturity as a couple.

Well, it also continues to bother me that León wakes up soon after falling asleep. It just confirms that for a long time it will remain a fantasy to carve out three solid hours in the evening for our relationship that struggles to reconfigure itself in a new scheme and bets on watching a series as a method to share something that does not require too much effort and that involves a common desire. But no, León wakes up just a few minutes after the fifth episode of Argentine comedy series Según Roxi begins.

It still makes me uncomfortable to say that I am writing this newsletter when I perceive that my audience may not be receptive. I am embarrassed but also angry because I am convinced that it is necessary to be writing Recalculating — and I love it too. Besides, I am very happy with the people who keep subscribing, reading and writing to me.

Now that I think about it, the discomfort is precisely a good reason to continue. At the birthday party with four men and 20 women, I had a brief conversation with another dad I had crossed paths with before.

I had already heard a good number of his comments (“women get nervous, we fix things”), when he asked me what I was writing about. By then I had labeled him, entirely based on prejudice, under the archetype of the machoman who considers feminism idiotic and women annoying or intense. So, I hid behind a vague answer, telling him about my freelance work but deliberately not mentioning this newsletter on fatherhood and masculinity.

As any average inhabitant of Buenos Aires, I have an easy tendency to self-psychoanalysis. So I think that in addition to feeling insecure about my work, what is behind that answer has to do with a form of self-boycott that is deeply connected to the spirit of this newsletter: to inquire about masculinity.

Honestly, I have already had ample proof that the conversations that arise here are necessary or interesting for many. And the writing itself is important for me too. Now that I’m wrapping this up, I think that I find uncomfortable what I cannot explain to my children, but also what I find difficult to understand, to change or to acknowledge. And none of that is wrong. There is nothing self-indulgent or self-complacent about questioning what we are uncomfortable about. On the contrary, we should be normalizing this attitude of questioning, recalculating and continuing to learn. Because without discomfort, there is no change.