The Weaker Sex a Dying Breed

The other day I was washing my hands in the restroom at work.  A lady I know ran a comb through her hair and said to me, “Doesn’t thin hair suck?”  I agreed and started telling her about how mine started falling out a few years ago.  She informed me (though I already knew) that it was stress and nerves.
I’ve come to find out that there are a number of men at my place of work who have wives struggling with one or more ailments.  It used to be that women almost always out-lived their husbands.  It’s not that way anymore.  And my feeling about it is that it’s largely because women are now forced to work harder than they were created to, and they cannot stop even when they become old.  They care for their own children, then possibly their grand children.  Before they die, they care for their ailing parents.  And many hold down a full time job while doing all of these things.  Add on the stress of the money problems many of us face these days.
As a kid, back in the 1970’s and ‘80’s, I remember instances of middle-aged women having “nervous breakdowns.”  They would be sent to some nut house for observation and be released in a couple of weeks with a prescription for lithium.  It was always hush-hush stories whispered over tea or backyard fences: a taboo subject, and a shameful, embarrassing thing--though everyone seemed to know about it.  I’m pretty sure that the nervous breakdown of the 70’s is the panic disorder of today.  And it was just the beginning of women being bent and mangled into the new-fangled super women of today. 

 I know some older women who love working and who have endless energy to go and go and go.  But that is not me, and I feel every bit of my 47 years.  I’m not ready for a rocking chair, but I am also doing more than feels good or natural to me.  There must be others who feel the same way.  We are dying sooner.  We have cancer, anxiety, heart attacks, weight problems, etc.  We are hoarders, cutters, and alcoholics.  Something is wrong.  What sucks is being a man--especially when you’re a woman.

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