ALL BOOKED UP
Most married guys need some periodic unsupervised playtime. A good way to satisfy that need, I've discovered, is to get your ‘supervisor’ involved in a ladies’ book club.
Photo by Sonja PunzI suspect I’m like a lot of guys in search of increasingly rare periods of unsupervised time, particularly when we’ve reached retirement and suddenly find ourselves no longer able to flee to work to escape spousal control. I’m referring to those moments when I can do my own thing, as much or as little of it as I choose. Those off-the-leash periods of independence, I believe, can be as important to holding together a relationship as are the moments of conjugal togetherness.
Looking back over my years of married life, I discern three distinguishable periods in my personal quest for some periodic free time alone.
I call the first few years of my married life the “reboot-reset period,” when I could count on very little independent discretionary time. That was when my wife attempted to rework and remake me as her ideal mate, purging me of bad habits and plebian preferences instilled by my parents, particularly my mother. It was during this reboot-reset period that my wife also learned her limitations.
She did make some important course corrections in how I lived my life, and I grant that largely they were for the better. But I came through those early years of married life with much of my character traits and personal tastes intact. That’s largely because this first period of married life was relatively short.
The second “parenting period” of our married life began when we started our family, and her energy and attention shifted from reforming me to rearing kids. She no longer had the time nor stamina for parenting the ‘big kid’ in the family because our little ones usurped just about every waking minute.
Plus, she discovered a different side of me which had lain dormant beneath my ill-fitting tee shirts and my sloppy jeans that she had yearned to pitch in the garbage. It turned out, she discovered, I was an OK dad. So, during this second period her attention shifted to partnering together to raise our offspring to young adults.
During this second period of marriage, there were moments when I began to fade into the background, becoming a relatively invisible part of the family like the cameraman always taking pictures of her and the kids but whose image very infrequently made it into the family photo album. It would have been nice if that shift of her attention to our kids had given me some independent time alone, but alas, work commitments and parenting duties left me few unstructured moments to enjoy on my own. Parenting was a full-time two-person vocation. Unsupervised guy-time remained an elusive dream for the distant future.
My truly golden years of time free of adult supervision began when my mate and I became empty nesters, and they reached their zenith when I retired. At first, I feared that transition from structured nine-to-five work days would turn out to be replaced by twenty-four/seven home supervision. With the kids out of the house, the risk was there that I’d once again be an easy target of attention and handy subject to tie onto the now-loose apron strings from which our kids had cut themselves free.
In my case, I needn’t have worried. That’s because I’m fortunate to have stumbled onto a solution, for which I deserve no credit but am eternally grateful. I call this third and rapturous period in my life the “ladies’ book club years.”
Yes, the idyllic state of nirvana to which my married life has now arrived is due to the relatively modern institution of ladies’ book clubs. Thank you, Oprah Winfrey, for being our nation’s book-club high priestess!
Regular scenes in our empty-nester household now are the evenings and afternoons when she is absorbed in a novel and I’m free to watch a ball game, or to putter in the garage or the basement. I now live for and build my life around those quiet book-club moments when no words are spoken, or demands made!
However, those salient and cherished moments are not a given. They need to be sought out and cultivated. That’s because the risk in retirement for guys is that our wives have the opportunity to take up their reformation crusade from early marriage, and to reintroduce structure into our lives. In part, I suppose, they feel they’re doing us a favor by trying to fill the nine-to-five vacuum of our former work lives with chores to give us a sense of purpose and accomplishment at home. They often start by penning to-do lists that involve repairing this or running that errand.
That’s when a monthly ladies’ book club comes into play. My wife is a member of two. One is made up of a random collection of neighborhood ladies with whom she has little in common beyond her book club gatherings and an occasional greeting when strolling down the street. The other book club is made up of a closer-knit group of ladies from our church.
No matter, what’s important is that her monthly ladies’ book clubs provide me with regularly scheduled unsupervised time for which I’ve waited most of my adult life. The math is simple. A 300-page novel read at 200 words-per-minute with an average 360 words on a page, requires about 9 hours to finish. Add to that the time to prepare a cup of tea, find the book and reading glasses, and get into the story, you are up to 10 hours.
Throw in the up-front time to locate the book at the library, online or with a friend who’ll lend it, plus the actual book club meeting time, and you approach the equivalent of about 16 hours or two work-days a month of unsupervised time! In my wife’s case, I can double that to about four days a month for her two book clubs. That starts to become serious prime-time guy time!
At first, I was worried that book club meetings would provide time for ladies to talk about us guys and all our flaws and failings. The beauty of ladies’ book clubs, however, is that they seldom talk about us guys, if at all; certainly not as much as our egos would like us to believe.
We should be happy with that because, when they meet, the ladies’ apparently focus their attention on the defects, indulgences and conniving of the protagonists or the historical figures in that month’s novel or non-fiction book they’ve been reading. For once, the focus is not my flaws and failings; it’s on those of the story protagonists.
Occasionally I’ve overheard these ladies’ talking when it was my wife’s turn to host one of her book clubs at our home or online. Their conversations often become quite heated, their critiques of fictional or real-life protagonist’s deficiencies very barbed. Thank God, I’m not the target of their caustic condemnation!
I sense that no book club lady expects or wants her husband to match the absurdly unrealistic romantic prowess or peccadillos of a novel’s male protagonist or to engage in the excessive indulgences and machinations of non-fiction historical figures. I suspect also that just maybe after dissecting the flawed character of fictional protagonists and the failings of historical figures month after month with her book club friends, my wife begins to discover that she got a pretty good deal from my parents after all. I’ve even noticed lately that she’s gone a little lighter on me when I forget where I put her to-do list.
I can thank her ladies’ book clubs not only for my unsupervised time and but also for my wife’s greater indulgence with how I use it.
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