Dear Male Humans,

Ok, men. I’d like to paint a little picture for you. An analogy, if you will. Let’s compare family life to a box.

Everything is in the box – your house, your job, your wife’s job, your marriage, the kids, the dogs, the grocery shopping, school, church, your health, her health, the kids’ health, the neighbors’ health, the extended family, the cat, the cars, the broken toilet…all of it.

Every single thing the two of you have or do is in there.

Your wife pushes this box. Every day of her life, it’s a hustle to shove that box where it needs to go.

Sure, people help her. You probably help push quite a bit. At the end of the day though, she is the one responsible for that giant box and all its contents and making it move day in and day out, every single day.

She pushes it while you’re sleeping because there’s a puking kid in the box.

She pulls it while you’re at work.

She pushes it while she’s at work.

If she doesn’t work outside the home, she’s pulling double duty because she’s never, ever off duty. There’s always someone crying or pooping. Always.

She makes the box mobile all weekend when it’s everyone’s ‘days off’ and you want to tinker in the garage and catch up on projects you want to get done and then take a Sunday afternoon nap.

She hauls the box to all the birthday parties, all the vacations, the weddings and funerals, to church on Sunday and even that weekend away you set up for the two of you. She never leaves it.

It never leaves her alone.

She drags it while she’s sick and the whole family is sick and you’re laid up in bed with your man-cold.

She kicks it to the hospital when she gives birth.

She straps it on her back when her genitals open up and bleed for a week straight and she feels like she got hit by a Mack truck and was left for dead.

She fills it up and carries it around with poop and diapers and finances and worries about the kid that’s overweight and the one that needs more help in math and the one that thinks she might be a lesbian.

Just clipping everyone’s toenails makes the box so much heavier.

She carefully unpacks the weariness and concern for the child that cries all night and the one that has a rash between his toes and the one that chopped her eyelashes off.

What’s in the box changes from time to time, but it’s never any lighter. It only ever gets heavier. Piano lessons are exchanged for gymnastics and gymnastics turn into violin and violin is added to everyone needing new winter coats and two kids need shoes and the little one is constipated and someone needs braces and another has to have $500 for camp.

She rearranges all the contents everyday, just to put all the stuff back in, ordered by importance. She’s like a hoarder just rooting through and moving it from room to room on an endless loop until the end of time.

Until she dies boobless, toothless and hairless.

She pulls that sucker when it’s over-flowing with sadness and inadequacies and introversion and PMS and hormones and weakness and challenges she doesn’t think she can handle.

She even dreams about making that damn box move. She never stops thinking about it because it’s like a shark and it will die if it doesn’t stay active at all times.

You, husband, jump in and out of the box, as do the kids and the grandparents and siblings and friends. You can even take a trip overseas for work and funny thing is, the box does not follow you. It’s with your wife, being jerked around and happy as a clam.

You know you don’t have to worry because the cardboard pusher is always on duty.

The kids can leave to spend the night at grandma’s, or go to camp for a week, or anywhere really and…you guessed it- the box keeps on boxing.

Curious, however is the phenomena that occurs when mom tries to run to town to hunt for food to keep all the people alive. When she returns, the box looks like someone force-fed a 4 foot turd log into an industrial shop fan and let ‘er rip.

Because she left it unattended for a couple hours.

Anyway.

Her mom helps her push sometimes and then you’ll take over. Her friends occasionally do a little pushing and grandpa will entertain the kids and you’ll decide to do a good deed and get them out of her hair so she can have a few hours to really push the hell out of that box and get it somewhere good.

Because that’s exactly what she’ll do. She’ll get a break and be excited because she can push the box even harder and further, all alone because the kids are gone and they won’t mess up more than she cleans up.

You see, her identity and self-worth is all balled up inside this cube of recycled consumer waste, so she’ll fill up her ‘off time’ by shoving laundry folding and craft closet organizing and scrubbing the shower stall and scouring the oven into the box while you’re gone so “she can have a break”.

There are times you may even push it while she rides inside.

Like when she gives birth or has a paralyzing migraine or just gives up for half a day because she’s so weary.

But guess what? She sits inside that stupid cube and weeps because she’s not helping. She’s overcome with guilt and feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness because you’re doing a perfectly normal and expected thing by pushing the family storage unit when she can’t.

She beats herself up because you have to help.

Everyone is so accustomed to her relentlessly hustling away that its just become white noise. Mom does this stuff. No one has to worry because she’s always, always, always changing the toilet paper tubes when they’re empty.

She always knows when the ground beef is low and there’s only a little milk in the bottom of the jug and all the trash cans are full and there’s a ball of wet towels at the bottom of the hamper. She knows if the gift was bought for the friend’s birthday party and what you’re taking to the potluck on Sunday and what’s for dinner tomorrow before everyone has to leave for music lessons. She even knows when someone hasn’t pooped in a few days.

Because she shoves the brown rectangle that is life.

Sometimes, (ok, pretty often, if we’re honest) she daydreams about leaving the box and just putting her crap in a backpack and leaving to pursue whatever is for her alone.

She thinks maybe she’ll take up vodka or living on a commune or something cliche like backpacking across Europe to ‘find herself’ because she’s lost what was her inside that massive, cardboard box that consumes her.

Perhaps she’ll live in a VW bus on a pristine lake in Alaska with polka dot curtains and be a vagabond and eat pork and beans from cans and gaze as the stars orbit her campfire at night and the crickets sing her to sleep.

She knows that’s just the sorrow and the psycho making plans. She’d miss all the dummies in the box way too much and she knows that there’s no one out there on the entire planet that loves the Sunday napper with a man-cold and the overweight one and the constipated one and the might-be lesbian or the one who sucks at math more than the mother.

No one will ever fight for them or scurry on the wheel that makes the box move like she will because they mean everything to her. They are hers.

Nobody will work and sacrifice and cry and hurt and clean and push and pull and drag like she will for her family.

So the next time you’re irritated with your wife because she’s in a bad mood or sad or asking you to help with something you don’t want to do or on a rampage because the kids let the dog take a dump on the floor and just covered it with a paper towel all day, consider the box.

Maybe just hug her and validate her and thank her for your operational box which she manipulates around the clock every single day.

Be appreciative of the astronomical weight of the emotional labor involved in child-rearing and running a household.

Open your mouth and speak, man.

Say words to her.

“I see you.”

“I know what you do.”

“I know it’s hard.”

“ I am thankful for you.”

“You’re doing a great job.”

“You’re the only one who could or would do any of this.”

“You’re beautiful.”

“I love you.”

The end.