Why can’t my mechanic be more like a woman???

Josh’s car broke down last Friday afternoon and we had it towed off to the mechanic.  I really expected to hear something sometime Monday, and had braced myself for bad car news.  Instead, I heard…absolutely nothing.

Finally on Tuesday in the midst of my frantic cleaning and packing and painting (last minute preparation for the realtor’s visit on Wednesday) I texted Russ and asked him to please call the mechanic—I just couldn’t deal with one more thing.  And he did.  And he has every day since, including today when he told me that the problem appears not to have been a major disaster and that the car would be ready tomorrow evening.

And then, when I was complaining about this mechanic never calling to give us any information, he pointed out that he’d always had to call our previous mechanic too to find out what was going on. 

At which point I said, why can’t the mechanic be a little more like a woman???

Have you ever been in church when a bishopric member announces the birth of so & so’s baby?  He says, “we’d like to congratulate the Smith family on the birth of their baby.”  Period.  Seriously.  Sometimes he’ll include the gender of the baby, but that’s really it.  Now on the other hand when you hear this announcement in Relief Society it is usually quite a different announcement. 

“We’d like to congratulate Molly Smith on the birth of her bouncing baby boy yesterday morning at 8:11.  He is named Joe Henry, was 19” long, weighed 13 lbs and from the sounds of it everyone is doing great.  They’ll be coming home from the hospital tomorrow night and we’re going to be arranging dinners for 3 nights.”

You see my point, right?

But this is making me wonder—how often am I upset at someone because I am wanting something from them that is actually completely foreign to them?  How often do I want the men in my life to function just a little bit like the women in my life?  On the flip side, I’m sure I annoy plenty of people with my definitely-female-responses to life’s situations.  But if I want them to be ok dealing with me as-I-am, perhaps I need to do a better job of not expecting them to be different than they naturally are.

Just a thought…