Let Me Explain Something To You...
If her job was homemaker, and she raised your children to the point of leaving the house for college, that was her career. Don't make me tell you why you'll shut the fuck up about it.
Today, I am on the hotline. As usual, yes, but I need to take a moment and break something down for these assholes who seem to believe that back in 1977 when their wife became pregnant, and y’all sat down and agreed that she would stay home and raise y’alls babies instead of using that shiny new degree that she just earned, Y’ALL decided upon that.
No woman in her right mind would trade her pretty pinstripes and patent stilettos for burp cloths and baggy sweats. Yet, because she wanted you to be a proud husband and father, that’s what she resigned herself to. No spa days, little league games instead. No pedicures, no Frye bags, just Hanes granny panties and chipped nail polish her daughter did for her last week while she tried to watch the news.
And it seems now that your children are grown and gone, you have no use for her. She is no longer doing something you know you cannot do, so she has no value to you. Except you don’t want her to get half of your pension, so you would rather stress her and worry her and verbally abuse her to death, naturally or otherwise. Listen, asshole, all of those years you were out at the plant putting in your 10, she was home with those screaming, sick, snotty kids that are healthy and educated because she handled all of the appointments, homework, extracurriculars, detention, field trips and SAT prep that you never once took part in.
Now, I could give a rats ass less if you don’t want to be married to her any longer. That’s neither here nor there to me. What I do care about is the fact that you have the audacity to say she won’t get half of what is YOURS. Listen carefully- Nothing is YOURS. When you told her to basically hang her life on the coat rack, you agreed that 50% of what you earned on the production line was her salary for raising those children and washing your nasty ass drawers for 30 years.
This is the exact reason that I tell every woman I know to get her degrees, keep her own accounts, and never give a man the power to put you out of your home with nothing. You don’t think he will? Ask my reader who would have said the same thing, 30 years ago. Now, at 63, she has to figure out how to house and feed herself.
Ladies, I better never hear the words “joint account” come out of y’alls damned mouths again.
Although my mother didn't have a degree, what she did have was smarts. She never wanted to be one of those wives who had to stay with an abusive husband because they had no way out. She put every annual farm dividend she received into an individual account, in her name only. It wasn't a secret to my father, he thought it was a good idea.
For over sixty years, she has known (and he has known!) she is there by her choice; nobody ever made her. I think it's one of the myriad of things that has made their marriage a success.