EndoDad76

10/25/2026

She should not have to prove her pain to the person who promised to love her.

That sentence is the whole book for some of us.
https://www.mikebakerhq.com/books/believe-her-the-first-time/

10/24/2026

There is a real difference between paying attention and running surveillance, and most men cannot feel it from the inside. Monitoring is checking whether the story adds up. Attention is learning how this works so the help gets better. The same gap shows up in “tell me what to do,” which sounds generous and lands as a request for her to stop surviving long enough to supervise you. Dinner still needs to happen. The dog still needs feeding. And most of the energy women spend on chronic pain goes into making it acceptable to everyone else, softening it, hiding it, joking about it so nobody gets uncomfortable. Seven cards from chapter four of Believe Her the First Time. Tell me which one landed hardest.

10/23/2026

Cold silence is still pressure. It just has better manners.

Chapter 18 of Man vs. Menopause is about what men do after a no. He says he is fine and goes cold. He says he is giving her space and the whole house feels penalized. He stops flirting, stops complimenting, stops trying, and then decides she was the one who pulled away. Most of us read posture faster than words, so a man saying the right sentence while his body files a complaint is fooling nobody. Feelings are worth having. Making them her workload is the part that does damage.

If your house has gone quiet in that specific way, leave this open on the counter and go do something else.

10/23/2026

Different stage of life, same first rule: believe her.

Man vs. Menopause is now an audiobook on Spotify. It's for husbands and partners who love a woman moving through perimenopause or menopause and want to understand what's happening without making her teach every lesson. It isn't a medical textbook, and it isn't permission to diagnose from the couch.

https://open.spotify.com/show/7LX4M7xCM96ErJb49tlQyo

10/22/2026

Most of the men shaping her week are the boss who has quietly decided she is unreliable, the brother who makes the joke, the coach who tells her to push through, the friend who says nothing when the joke lands. None of them owe her a relationship, and every one of them affects what her week costs. This set includes the three short sentences that change a room: don’t joke about that, that’s private, you don’t know what she’s dealing with. They work because they are small enough for anyone to say. From chapter nineteen of Believe Her the First Time. Send this to a man in her life who is not her partner and has never once thought of himself as part of this.

10/22/2026

Men tend to fail advocacy in two directions. We disappear when it gets hard, or we take over when fear wants control.

Am I helping her voice carry farther, or am I making my voice louder?

10/21/2026

Reliability. Accountability. Toughness. Team player.

Good words. Also the exact words used to quietly punish people whose bodies are not predictable.

Somebody on your team is scheduling infusions around your meetings and burning PTO on appointments so nobody asks questions. You have probably praised them for being dependable, without ever knowing what dependable is costing them.

Four questions for anyone who runs a team, a classroom, a shift, or a roster.

Part sixteen of nineteen.

10/20/2026

Some apologies leave the other person carrying more than they walked in with.

Chapter 8 of The Better Man Field Guide takes apart the ones men are best at. The one that apologizes for her interpretation. The one that gets to the words while skipping the ownership. The collapse, where he falls apart so completely that she ends up comforting him about the thing he did to her. All of them have the shape of accountability and none of the weight, and people get tired of believing the same apology long before they get tired of the original injury.

If someone apologized to you recently and you somehow ended up doing the reassuring, send them this one without comment.

10/20/2026

A dad note, a little off our usual topic. I have ADHD, and I wrote a song called ADHD Kid for the kid who got called disruptive and sent outside every day.

If you're raising one of those kids, or you were one, I'd love to hear from you. What did people call you, or your kid, growing up?

That's me in the giant helmet. My first hockey shots, caught on fil...

10/19/2026

This one is for the people in scrubs and the people in the budget meeting.

I have run a community health center for seventeen years, so I am asking myself these before I ask anyone else. Do I know enough about chronic pelvic pain, adolescent period pain and referral pathways to avoid becoming another delay?

Another delay. That is usually what we are.

And the harder one underneath it: do my systems make belief more likely, or does a woman still need to get lucky with which provider she draws?

Part fifteen of nineteen.