Bea V. Larsen . . . .Commentaries |
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Bea V. Larsen is a Senior Mediator at the Center for Resolution of Disputes in |
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To Be A Man This entry was posted on 6/13/2009 6:06 AM and is filed under Generally Speaking. As Father’s Day approaches, a story I heard on the radio comes to mind. It was told by a listener in California who called the station when this question was posed: What does it mean to be manly today? The caller was a Mexican American who had come to this country at the age of seven, and was now in his thirties. He told of a family gathering with several generations in attendance. As evening approached, his wife rose and called to him across the room: honey, it's time to leave. He joined her and they said their goodbyes. The next day he was confronted by his father who disdainfully questioned the son for allowing his wife to tell him when to leave, reminding him that it was the man's place to make decisions, not to take orders from a woman. In advance of the family gathering that followed, the caller asked his wife to silently signal him when she wished to go home. So, on that occasion, as the evening waned she glanced at him and arched her brows, and he announced that they must depart. His father smiled. I love this story. The intimate complicity between husband and wife, just as it should be, not an inter-generational triangle lessening the strength of their connection. Yet, even though the son was not willing to accept what was for him an outdated standard, his father's allegiance to his own code of conduct was not disparaged. Secure, the younger man had no need to return to adolescent push-back. Over time there were shifts in the concept of manliness in my family. My father, and my husband, Len, though of different generations were similarly self-assured in their masculinity, gentle and respectful. No machismo, although they both assumed the traditional roles of their time. My mother loved to tell of my father's prideful insistence, at the time of their marriage in 1922, that his wife would never go to work (meaning: for money). Laughing, she said she ignored this edict, already having been the sole support of her widowed mother for a number of years. And once the Depression hit, the point was moot and ignored by my father as well. Len and I, married even before our college graduation, were members of the post-war “silent generation”. He began graduate school and I, with zeal, entered my first career: motherhood. Our division of responsibility was unexamined and unremarkable, he preparing to become the breadwinner and I the family caretaker. Then the tide turned and in the 1960s, I attended law school three nights a week for four years. On those evenings, Len returned from work at day's end to feed, bathe and put our three young children to bed. Was he exhibiting his feminine side? Actually, that's not how we thought of it. He was just helping out. We didn't characterize these tasks as unmanly. Nor do most men today, and the constraints of sexual stereotypes continue to loosen. In later life, Len was grateful for having been cast into the richness of the caretaker role, commenting to friends that the woman's movement was the best thing that ever happened to men. I suspect the California caller, my father and our sons would agree. |
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