I think I was born too late. I just don’t understand what a man’s role is anymore. I was raised to believe in theory that a man is the head of household. This came to me from the the unquestionable trinity of the Bible, Grandma and the Cosby Show. A woman was a rib taken from Adam to be his helpmate. She is supposed to be loyal, subservient and eternally loving. In return, the man is supposed to protect her, provide for her and cherish her above all things.
Could it be that it was all so simple…
Trinity aside, though, what I saw growing up was my mom working from sun-up to way past sun-down for minimum wage. I saw a parade of bad men with names like Leroy, Earl and Biggs. Big black men, the kind my mom had a festish for. The more ghetto the better, anything not like my light-skinned, well-spoken and totally domineering father.
The only functional nuclear families I saw were white ones where everyone ate at the table, you could only have one glass of juice a day, and dad was the uncontested ruler of all he surveyed from the bbq grill to the cat litter. The thing I loved about these families was how everyone seemed to know their place. At dinner time, no matter where everyone was, they came downstairs and assembled around the table where the plates were already laid out, ready to be heaped with food. Everyone bowed their heads and Dad said grace before we ate. It was all so orderly and right.
Now that I am a father and husband myself, I want to be the man my wife and son can look up to for perfect leadership. I want to be a source of comfort and stability. What I find more often though is that my need for unqualified respect often pushes my wife away, as if respect itself were a form of distance.
She is not my mother and definitely not her mother’s mother. She doesn’t think she has to bite her tongue not to offend me. She has no sense of a double-standard between us, that she should be satisfied with unconditional love while I require unconditional subservience. I sound like a caveman to her. I sound like the Patriarchy itself trying to hold her down and restrict her natural goddess-ness.
Yeah, I hear ya.
I may be the last of my kind for all I know. I doubt it though. I think men of my generation, having grown up largely without intact homes, have come to the realization of how important a man in the house can be. A good man that is. The absence of a father figure for so many of us has produced either a sense of impossible masculinity or defined clearly the impossible role we so eagerly wish to fill. We are essentially stepping into a job we have never seen performed except on television and in the movies. It is a legendary calling like being a dragon slayer, this rearing of family and devotion to household.
Women cannot understand it anymore than we can understand their occult mysteries. We belong to different religious orders, coming together in a sacred drama to create new life, but we are not the same. At our cores, our souls are, but our paths have been pre-ordained.
Or have they?
In a world where its ok to be gay (and it is), and okay to change your gender (why not) – where identity itself is fluid and subject to whim – what does it mean to be something as antiquated as a “man” or a “woman?” I understand profoundly the fears of social conservatives who lament the seeming destruction of all that is right and orderly. They are right (no pun intended) and they are tragic.
As am I, longing to embody an ideal that not even my wife seems to desire.
A man’s world indeed.
