ReportFromTheFront's Blog

             Sometimes I wish I had been born a girl.

            No, really.

            Mothers and daughters develop special relationships beginning at the moment of birth that dissolve the mists of years between them and allows them to evolve from teacher and student to friends. There are exceptions of course, but by and large, mothers and their female offspring become friends and members of the same club with parallel goals. They always seem to understand each other somehow, even when not a word passes between them. They talk to each other; more importantly, they talk with each other with a complete understanding, and in a way that men just can’t seem to achieve. They do things together. They share. They feel. And when they feel, they are able to express those feelings openly and without shame or embarassment of any kind. When a woman feels, everyone – especially other women (members of the same club, remember?) - understands.

            It’s not the same way with men. With few and very rare exceptions, fathers and sons don’t develop friendships with each other. We remain friendly adversaries and competitors to the very end. We don’t talk much and instead of including them in everything we do, we show them only what we think they need to know and only on a need-to-know basis. I’m not certain whether it’s nurture or nature, but when we feel, we aren’t able to express those feelings. We hold them inside and deal with them on our own hidden away from the scrutiny of others. It’s a ‘man thing’ we reason, something that no one else will understand…..Maybe not even other men.

            When both of my kids were little, I rough-housed with both of them and loved it. I even started to teach them some martial arts. Our brand of horsing around usually consisted of wrestling with Dad making the requisite sounds of a TV grunt n’ groaner and of course, lot’s of tickling. Eventually, we’d all be exhausted – at least I was – and we’d fall together in a heap laughing until we couldn’t laugh anymore.

            My son was about 11, maybe 12, when he came up to me one day and started giving me jabs in my shoulder. He said “Hey, Dad – Guess what? I’m as big as you are now and one of these days, I’m gonna be bigger than you and you’re gonna be the one on the bottom of the pile.” Well, I suppose I hadn’t noticed it before, but he was right. He was now big enough to look me straight level in the eye ( For the record, I’m only about 5’6” at the height of my powers and he was growing at an incredible rate). Now, I could see where this conversation was going and decided that the best thing to do would be to stop it dead in its tracks right then and there. “Well, Buckaroo (he liked to be called that),” I said. "You’re right. You’re as big as me. But before you go getting any ideas, there are a few things you oughta know: 1) No matter how big you get, I’ll always know more than you. 2) I’ll always be sneakier and meaner than you and 3) I don’t fight fair.”  “Oh”, he said. And with that, he walked away rubbing his chin with a quizzical look on his face that seemed to say “Hmmmm……I think I better give this little more thought before I challenge him for leadership of the pride.” 

            About eight months later, he got my attention again with the old shoulder jab routine (harmless but effective) and informed me that one day he’d win our little sparring matches. “Now why would you say that?”, I asked. His response: “Well Dad, you taught me everything you know.” “What a silly thing to sayl”, I replied as I reached out, grabbed his hand and gently applied a wrist lock (again, harmless but effective). “I taught you everything you know.”

            Now can you imagine this exchange taking place between any mother and her daughter? I can’t. Such a thing would just never be possible within the realm of their universe. The fact that in reality, they are mother and daughter is irrelevant. They’ve evolved and now they're sisters. On the other hand, ask any father of a son and you’ll find that almost all of them have had the same experience in one way or another as I did. Daughters, you see, grow up with only one goal in mind: To attain full membership in that exclusive club I talked about along with all of the appertaining rights and privileges thereof. Sons, on the other hand, grow up looking to prove to themselves and everyone else at one point or another that they are bigger, faster, smarter, stronger and more capable than their fathers or – at a minimum – at least as good, thus enabling them (they think) to establish themselves as the dominant male of the group as their genes are telling them to do. It is when they are just reaching the apogee of their powers that our own begin to slowly diminish, just when it seems, that we are going to need them the most. Sounds like something straight off of  the Discovery Channel doesn’t it? Well, maybe. The truth is that perhaps we’re not as far removed from the rest of the animal kingdom as we’d like to believe.

            The problem, I think, is that men don’t talk. We grunt, we nod our heads, but we don’t talk. Not really. I think it’s a rule of some kind. Whether it’s self imposed as a gender or societal I cannot say. Whatever the root reason, we don’t talk because somewhere along the line we learn that this is something we are just not supposed to do. Talking, we are taught, equals betrayal – betrayal of others, of our group, but most importantly, betrayal of ourselves. Maybe this is why in most animal species, the males always lead a solitary existence. Because of this ‘rule’ we can’t tell our sons after they reach a certain age or level of maturity, how much we truly love them, how awfully proud we are of their accomplishments and of the young men they are growing up to be. Rightly or wrongly, we think that though unspoken, they’ll just intuitively know without having to be told. “Of course, I love him. Of course, I’m proud of him”, we say. “I shouldn’t have to tell him.”  Yes, we should.

           Maybe this is why depression runs rampant throughout the male gender. Time magazine wrote extensively a couple of years back citing male depression – if I recall correctly – as the unseen epidemic. We don’t seek help – we can’t – because to do so would involve, well, talking. Common sense should tell us that it’s impossible to keep all those feelings continually bottled up without it affecting other aspects of our lives, sometimes with grave consequences. All feelings (especially deep rooted ones) need an outlet and sadly we men just don’t seem to have one. Yet somehow, some way, our subconscious will tirelessly work like a team of trapped miners to dig and claw its way to the surface in order to give them an escape route.

            Right now, men are only permitted to express themselves on practical matters. We’re problem solvers. That’s what we do. All the other stuff, we leave to women because in this area, they alone are empowered to do things that we, as men, are not able or not allowed to do. But if we men could talk – I mean really talk, to each other and to our sons - if we could be as open as women are allowed, even encouraged to be, then perhaps fathers and sons could grow up to be friends and form an exclusive club of our own.

            After all, as American Express says, “Membership has its privileges”.