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" After four years of bouncing around, living in different apartments, my wife, Karel, and I started house-hunting. Unfortunately, we discovered that houses in our price range often included extras like the aroma of cat urine or drug dealers on the front porch. Just when we were ready to put off the whole endeavor, we discovered our own little crudely wired piece of the American dream. The house was no beauty: Three narrow stories of awkward, the row house wore its 93 years with the grace of an elderly Chippendales dancer with a case of MRSA. But it had loads of (cough) potential and was in a neighborhood we loved.  So we moved in and did the renovations we could afford, or figured out how to fix stuff ourselves. But here&amp;#039;s the thing: I&amp;#039;m bad at fixing stuff. Very bad. A sufferer of a condition my wife calls &amp;quot;Hulk strength,&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m the guy who turns screws until their heads pop off. Still, Karel and I painted, scrubbed, added ceiling fans, replaced screen doors. The results were usually more weird than pretty, but I did my best. Try as we might, we could not keep up with new leaks, blown pipes, or broken stairs that were barely being held together by the 60-year-old carpet that covered them. During a mysterious three-room power outage, we called a Russian electrician recommended by friends. After emerging from our basement, he looked at me sadly and said, &amp;quot;Your electrical... how do you say? It burn house down now. Yes?&amp;quot; The house was a constant reminder of the money we didn&amp;#039;t have and the skills I&amp;#039;d never learned. Home ownership fed my masculine insecurities, highlighting my shortcomings as a handyman. While Karel denied having any sort of home-improvement expectations of me, in my mind, my identity was inexorably linked to my home-repair inabilities.  We muddled through, with the help of cheap wine and cheaper beer, which may explain how we entered our second year as homeowners pregnant. The baby was born, and after a year of the three of us sharing the same bedroom on the second floor, we decided it was time to regain some semblance of couple privacy and space. We expanded to the third floor, turning two adjoining attic rooms into bedrooms. The rooms were cramped by Smurf standards, but the third floor was quiet, it got great morning light, and it was in better shape than the rest of the house. It felt sturdy and peaceful \u2014 until we realized we were not alone. Soon after we moved into our new bedrooms, we began hearing an animal moving noisily over our heads in the crawl space between our ceiling and roof. Night after night, the animal would grunt, shuffle, hiss, chirp, and occasionally scream, which is how I figured out it was a raccoon. I had no idea what he was doing up there, but it sounded like he would crash through our ceiling at any moment. In an effort to soothe my son&amp;#039;s terror at the disturbing sounds coming from above his crib, I invented stories about the raccoon, turning him into a lovable Disney-esque woodland creature named Scrambles. But Scrambles was not lovable; he was a pestilential menace that would arrive home at 5 a.m., drunk on whatever fetid refuse he had consumed during his nocturnal ramblings. I have repressed the number of times my wife grabbed me out of fitful slumber to announce in a horrified whisper, &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s here!&amp;quot;  For almost eight months this ruckus went on, and the stress and sleeplessness began to undermine my marriage. My now-2-year-old son was afraid of his room, and for the first time during our homeowning odyssey, Karel was looking at me like I was doing something wrong, like I should know how to deal with a wild animal and his impenetrable bunker in our roof. Or at least I was convinced she was. Scrambles only increased my feelings of inadequacy, and yet somehow I blamed my wife. She, in turn, resented my inability to own my failure, and fumed about why I had to drag her into it. Scrambles was tearing our family apart. Why did we \u2014 did I \u2014 let it go on so long? Well, it&amp;#039;s hard to get a raccoon out of your roof. Exterminators couldn&amp;#039;t do much that we weren&amp;#039;t already trying. Patching the exterior hole in our roof where Scrambles entered was a gamble because we were never sure if he was inside. There were weeks when we heard nothing at all, but we could never really be sure.  Finally, I concocted a plan. Early one night, I used anchovies to lure Scrambles out and crudely patched the hole in our roof that he used as a front door with three layers of chicken wire and spray foam. We had saved up and the roofers were on hold, waiting for the all-clear call that the raccoon was out so they could come and fix our roof correctly. My patch just had to hold till morning. At 5 a.m., my wife heard Scrambles return and start tearing apart my patch job. I tore down the stairs and out my front door in the hopes that my mere presence would scare him away. It didn&amp;#039;t. I ran back through the house, grabbing a wrapping-paper tube for protection, before crawling onto my second-floor roof to face my fuzzy nemesis. Now an arm&amp;#039;s length away, I hoped that my proximity would be enough to make him flee. He could not have cared less.  He had already worked through the first layer of foam. If I didn&amp;#039;t act soon, my opportunity for a Scrambles-free life would be gone. I poked him with my cardboard tube. Nothing. He worked his way through the second layer of chicken wire \u2014 there was only one layer left. That&amp;#039;s when I began whacking him with the cardboard tubing. I thought of Karel trying to soothe our son into believing that Daddy was saving them from the animal that had haunted our dreams these many months. In that moment I knew why I was on that roof in my boxer shorts at dawn \u2014 I was doing this for my son, I was doing this for my wife. I was doing this for love. I felt all my anger at being bullied by Scrambles rise up from the depths of my being. In a voice loud enough to wake the neighbors I shouted, &amp;quot;This is my house, Scrambles! My house!&amp;quot; Right then, daylight broke over my rooftop. When it comes to the sun, raccoons are like vampires. Between the sunrise, the shouting, and the cardboard beating, Scrambles decided to cut his losses and scrambled off my roof. I had finally won. There had been times when I secretly wished we could have afforded an up-to-code house without worries. But in this moment, I knew that if I did own that perfect house, I&amp;#039;d have missed out on something: Scrambles. That animal challenged me in a way I had never been before. He forced me to find my inner caveman, a man willing to club an animal in order to protect his family&amp;#039;s well-being. Up until then, my house reminded me that there are some imperfections you have to learn to live with. But Scrambles taught me that sometimes you can&amp;#039;t compromise. Sometimes you have to fight to make something better \u2014 especially when it comes to your family.  What do you want to know about men? If you&amp;#039;re looking to figure out your guy&amp;#039;s mysterious or perplexing behavior, our columnist Aaron will try his hardest to explain the crazy things men do (but he makes no promises!). Email your questions to him at redbook@hearst.com (subject: Whys Guy). Be sure to include your name, city, state, and email address.  Aaron Traister lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two kids. His work has appeared on babble.com and salon.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/relationships/advice/a5887/inner-caveman/>