Here’s the scenario: husband, 31, and wife, 29, find out they are expecting their first child.
Soon after, they learn his mother is severely ill and near death.
They plan to visit his mother in Morocco.
Five hours before the plane is to take off, the wife experiences a miscarriage and is rushed to the hospital. The husband wanted desperately to see his mother for likely the last time before she died. His wife was adamant that he not go.
He left for Morocco and arrived 48 hours before his mother died. After the funeral he went back home to his wife, who now refuses to talk to him even though he said he was sorry to disappoint her.
She won’t even talk about it. This is truly a "rock and a hard place" scenario.
If he stayed with his wife, he would forever bear the guilt and pain of not being there to hold his mother’s hand while she passed. In going to be with his mother, he could not grieve the loss of his baby with his also suffering wife, and that also brought him grief and regret.
There was no right decision. Or was there?
I recently opened my radio program by explaining the situation, and then spent an hour getting feedback from listeners. Of the 23 callers, three disagreed with the husband while the rest wholeheartedly approved his choice to visit his dying mother.
The three all said he took vows to love/honor/cherish and put no one before his wife.
They said a husband should never make his mother the priority.
I pointed out it was not that simple. There are over 600 "laws" in Judaism, and every one of them can be completely ignored in situations where a life is at stake because life itself is the priority.
A caller said the death of their fetus was such a life/death situation.
I suggested that was not a fair analysis as the baby had already passed and his mother was still alive. Several women said they would have urged their husbands to go to their mothers.
They described it as a gift of love for a husband to be at his mother’s deathbed as she was the first woman in his life, and he would suffer greatly if he couldn’t say goodbye and tell her he loved her.
Others went further, saying this husband has learned about his wife’s self-centered lack of compassion, and he should think twice about having babies or even staying married to her.
One woman said she would have had friends and family put arms around her until he got back to put his arms around her. A man said, "He [the husband] lost a child and a mother.
The wife lost a child — which is terrible — but she didn’t consider his loss and pain at all."
The truth is there is very little respect, much less activism, about the nature, needs, and feelings of men. Shameless plug: I wrote the book "The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands" and have an entire chapter devoted to "Men Have Feelings."
Our culture considers men the evil empire and unworthy of respect and understanding.
This divisiveness of the "sexes" is even political.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently put out a priority list for COVID-19 treatment. Men are 60% more likely to die of COVID-19, yet the FDA does not consider gender a priority!
Political? It rates "race and ethnicity" as the number one priority.
The bottom line here is that the husband was going to Morocco to say goodbye and bury his mother while suffering over the loss of his child.
After burying his mother, he was coming home to share grief with his wife over the loss of their child. She could not, would not, see past herself and her pain to have compassion for her husband, twice hit with grief.
He did the right thing visiting his mother.
He’s doing the wrong thing staying married to such a woman.
Dr. Laura (Laura Schlessinger) is a well-known radio personality and best-selling author. She appears regularly on many television shows and in many publications. Read Dr. Laura's Reports — More Here.
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