I guess we all have different nostalgia thresholds for our childhood. My nostalgia threshold is pretty low. I miss swimming through teen years filled with lovely lasses, each of which had something to teach me about women. I miss having a different girlfriend every month.

Past that… Nyah. I hated being broke all the time. I hated the soul-crushing lust I had to own a computer in the age before the PC as we know it. I hated having to wear polyester pants and polyester shirts to church. Gawd, I hated polyester. I hated the way it felt on my skin. I cringed. I like the orderliness of church, but despised having to wear polyester as a precursor to attend.

I hated the feel of smooth, untextured concrete on my bare feet; I could feel it in my inner ears. I’ve never heard anybody else mention this quirk, so I guess I’m just nuts.

But most of all I hated eating shit. And I ate a lot of shit. All the kids of my generation ate a lot of shit.

My dad would come home from work, walk into the living room and change the channel on the television from cartoons to David Brinkley. No negotiations. No explanations. It was as if I didn’t exist. In the context of the two generations, I didn’t. Again, this is not unique to my household.

The McPeak Brothers and I played either baseball (if we could get to the diamond at the elementary school) or Wiffleball (if we couldn’t) or football constantly. The concept of “hydration” was as foreign to us as the Internet. We’d play until 5:22. Dad would be pulling back his chair at the dinner table at 5:25, so I’d come from a sandlot baseball game straight to the dinner table on a dead run. Parched, the first thing I’d do is suck down whatever was in the glass next to my place setting, whether it was water or Kool-Aid… Which at my house was not much of a difference. (Mom swore that the sugar was in the Kool-Aid packet and she wasn’t supposed to add extra.) Invariably, mom would wrench the glass from my hand and set it two feet into the table so I couldn’t reach it.

Uh, gee. Thanks, mom. Stupid hypothalamus told me I was thirsty, but I guess you knew better.

And AGAIN, this wasn’t unrepresentative of any childhood of the early 1970s. A kid ate shit. That’s the way it was. If Social Services came to a house after a parental beat-down, it was because the kid still had an eyelid twitching in a non-supplicant manner and they were going to strap him down and haul him to Juvie.

That was the Social Contract. “You’re a kid. You eat shit. That’s what you do. When you are a parent, you get to be king of your house. Until then, shut your pie hole, kid.”  And so I did. And so I waited for the terms of the Social Contract to swing my way.

Yeaaaaah. Didn’t work out that way, did it? Did anybody who grew up in the 70s and hatched a kid in the 90s get to be master of their domain? Do we get to walk in the room and change the channel without negotiation? Hell, with my step daughters, I couldn’t even modify the frickin’ cable package I paid for without a protracted arbitrage. What the hell happened to my turn as King, huh? What happened to the Social Contract? I was force-fed shit with the same funnel they use to fatten a pâté goose. When was I supposed to get my turn on top of the pony? Anybody? Bueller? Anybody?

My mom thinks I’m a chauvinist. I understand why she thinks this. I grew up without sisters. As a matter of fact, there were a dozen boys and brothers in my neighborhood, but only two sisters remotely within my age bracket. My only interaction with the fairer sex was my mother. And my mother had grown up holding her own against two rowdy brothers and an asshole chauvinist father, so she was pretty tough as mothers go.

The legacy of being downriver from all that testosterone was that I learned to find people’s buttons and press them without empathy. I imitated Mom’s father because for a time I worshipped her father. But mostly I did it because I knew all the machismo bravado was a callback to her childhood issues.

Once I found Mom’s  button, I pressed it like a Skinner rat.

I’m really not a chauvinist. I’m a traditionalist. I believe in gender roles, and I believe in gender roles entirely because I’m lazy and I don’t want to be responsible for everything that needs to get done around the house. Not because I’m lazy and I expect a woman to do all the hard stuff that sucks. I can-and-will do laundry. I can-and-will clean a toilet. I can-and-will scrub and mop a floor.  I can-and-will scrub a tub with Comet cleanser. I’m not sure MBW could tell you where the vacuum cleaner in our house is stored if you offered her a Benjamin.  I was a bachelor for a decade. Whatever shit job there is to do for the household, I’ll do it. I don’t prioritize/love/hate one shit job over another shit job.

Although… About the twentieth time I plunged a toilet to clear somebody else’s log jam…  Let’s just say I’ve taken enough turns at that particular churn for this lifetime and the next.

Now that I’m married, I don’t expect my wife to do the wifey stuff. I just expect her to do a fair share of whatever. She hates yardwork. Me? I hate yardwork too. I’d rather do laundry than yardwork. But… Somebody has to do yardwork, so things revert to gender roles. Given the size of our yard and the smallness of our mower, we probably put in equal hours and burn equal calories on yardwork and laundry.

My idea of gender roles is this: Tell me the half of the chores you want to do and I’ll handle the rest.

I cook. I try to cook half the time. Honestly, the reason I don’t cook more than half the time is because I’m not a good cook. God knows I try, but My Beautiful Wife will tell you when I’m out of earshot… The best I do is “meh.” MBW is a crazy-good cook. It takes her the lifespan of a Galapagos Tortoise to get the food on the table, but when it finally makes it to a plate, Hory Sheet! Delish! That woman is a great cook. In fourteen years she’s clunked on three entrees. I can actually remember them to count them because their failure was such an event. Me, I bjork three dishes in any given fortnight.

Mom went back to work when I was twelve. Before that, she was a housewife of her era. The house was immaculate. My brother and I didn’t clean the house per se, but we had to clean up after ourselves. We were expected to make our bed every day and keep our toys in a toy box. She once called Keith McPeak’s mother and had her send me home to straighten the floor rug in my room. She ran a tight ship.

Around the time The Adams Family transitioned to The Brady Bunch, my mother had the first phase of dinner on the stovetop or in the oven. She opened the front door and sat on the floor inside the storm door. Using natural light and a mirror, she’d perfect her eyebrows with tweezers and put on her makeup in preparation for my dad coming home. When he walked through the door, no matter how bad the day had been with us children, he was treated like a Crusader home from Palestine.

Even as a little kid, I understood the dance. My dad had his own stories of being a kid in the 1950s. He ate plenty of shit in his day. He got his turn to be king of his house. He got his turn to reap the dividends of the Social Contract.

Yeaaaaaaaaah. Uhm, on behalf of men of my generation, what happened to that part of the Social Contract? Huh?

I’ve mentioned that before My Beautiful Wife, I was in a long-term on again/off again relationship with a girl named Missy. Missy lived with me for a couple long stretches.

Missy was a lovely, funny girl. A great friend.

Missy didn’t do a goddamned thing around the house except make a mess. She didn’t work. She didn’t clean anything. Ever. She didn’t cook. She smoked and watched TV and started craft projects that I paid for but she never finished. Ever.

I tried to explain my frustration to my mother, but she went right back to “You’re a chauvinist. You expect a woman to take care of you the way I waited on dad. Women today don’t think that way.”

Yes and no. I didn’t expect to “be waited on.” Not by that point of my life. I just wanted her to do something. Contribute something. Or, at the very least, clean up after herself. Missy was eight years of karma payback for the eighteen months that I was married to my first wife. I’d say Missy was my second child, but Ian actually picked up after himself and did his own laundry from the time he was seven.  Missy was somebody else Ian had to take turns cleaning up after until he was twelve.

One day I laid down the law with Missy. I had enough of getting screwed over on my end of the Social Contract.

“If you aren’t going to work, then I want a hot meal when I walk through the door,” I said.

She looked shocked. She thought about how to respond for an uncomfortably long beat. She sighed. “No problem,” she said. “I can do that.”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“Tomorrow,” she nodded.

“I’m serious,” I said. “This is important to me.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” she rolled her eyes. “Tarzan want food. Jane understand.  We’re good. I understand. You’re old skool. I’ll play along.”

The next evening I arrived home to find an unopened can of Chef Boyardee ravioli sitting in a pot on top of a cold stove.

Now… Seriously… I didn’t lose my frickin’ mind because my girlfriend didn’t have a hot meal waiting for me when I got home. I lost my frickin’ mind because I felt like a chauvinist douchebag to have spelled it out for her and she ignored me anyway. For the entire drive home from work I was thinking “She’s not going to do it. You know she’s not going to do it. [Yes, she knows it’s important] No, she’s watching Oprah. You’re going to walk through the door and she’s going to offer to go pick up a sack from a drive through. [No, she knows it’s important. You told her it was important.]”

Yeaaaaaaah. So much for the Social Contract.

Missy was a lot younger than I was. My Beautiful Wife is my age. She gets it. She rarely arrives home before I do, but when I walk through the door, she puts down what she’s doing and comes to hug my neck and kiss me the June Cleaver Way that my mom kissed my dad. I notice. I appreciate. I’m getting a scrap of the Social Contract, at least.

I feel a tinge of guilt for loving the antiquated patriarchal schtick as much as I do. But I can’t help it. There’s nothing like the feeling of being appreciated by a spouse I treasure.

And then I look over at the empty stove.

“What were you thinking about making for dinner?” asks MBW.

Whichever lawyer wrote this Social Contract needs to be disbarred and feathered.