Men Have Called Her Crazy: A Memoir

by Anna Marie Tendler

My reservations about motherhood have been shaped by my feelings about men, their general incompetence, their propensity toward selfishness, and their inability to empathize with the female experience. My obsession with equality in relationships restricts me from balancing the weight of what men put into child-rearing versus what women do. I wonder if it can ever be equal. I feel instinctually it can’t, while also recognizing that instinct might be wrong.

My reservations are not only tied to men, however. They’re also shaped by the particular ways I want my life and my time to be my own. I’ve never woken up at eight a.m. on a Saturday and thought, God, I’d love to take a kid to soccer practice right now.

“I’m terrified I won’t get all the air out of the syringe and will inadvertently kill myself. It would be so annoying to have gone to a psych hospital and done Intensive Outpatient only to inadvertently end my life doing IVF.”

The psychodynamic formulation section, written by Dr. Samuels, stirs my anger yet again—precisely because of how it focuses on my anger. HER AGGRESSION PARTICULARLY SEEMS TO BE MANAGED WITH DIFFICULTY. HER LIABILITY TO EXPLOSIVE OUTBURSTS IS LIKELY PARTLY DERIVATIVE OF DEFENSES INADEQUATE TO MANAGE THE AGGRESSION IN A USEFUL WAY. These statements lack any contextualization that my anger is largely directed at myself, or at larger social structures I find personally oppressive—misogyny, patriarchy, sexism. This makes it sound like I was freaking out and screaming at everyone. I was not. I

My anger toward male privilege is not confused or surface-level. It is cellular. I feel it in my body every day. It torments my thoughts. It has, for most of my life, dictated how I move through the world.

At the risk of sounding like a defensive narcissist, I would suggest the impulse to link my alleged demonization and rejection of men to an allegedly more real hatred of female figures is yet another example of a man’s inability, unwillingness, or fear to fully consider the harmful impact men can have on women. Though isn’t that the thing about pathology according to a system devised largely by men? To even suggest male fragility or male bias might be at play, I first must suggest my own defensiveness and narcissism.

Men have judged me and men have called me crazy, trusting in their own neutrality. But when neutrality is only accepted by the one who has created it, it is an illusion.

I am messier than I once was, emotionally speaking, but I’m a little messier in life too. I don’t always get everywhere exactly on time, I don’t always respond to an email in a timely fashion, I’m not as concerned with potting the plant perfectly. I get tired easily. I like a lot of alone time. I’m not married anymore. I don’t have a dog anymore. I won’t live my life only to make someone else happy.