To the men who struggle : I’m with you

While I am not a fan of misogyny I also feel for men raised in this toxic culture that denies them any fear, sadness, or vulnerability leading them to see emotions as a weakness or just feel unnecessary shame. I think lately a lot about my Dad in this regard. Growing up as man during the depression (born 1920) and losing his Dad at 12 years of age, I feel he had to toughen up and knew poverty and so much insecurity.. Unwittingly with the conditioning he may have striven to make us tougher than we were. If ever Mum got injured he denied it.. When my sister got pushed into a cupboard and broke both wrists she was told nothing was wrong (this was more down to my Mum being in an OCD frenzy or overtired and over run from over work) until a glass dropped and shattered when she tried to pick it up. There were other things we had to do around body boundaries.. Be seen NOT HEART. having to hold in pee, being left in the car for ages alone while all the adults were at the Golf club drinking (and a lot of this was down to the times now as a lot of time there are play rooms for kids in clubs.) and being tickled to the point it honestly felt too much and nothing I could do would make him stop.

Lately I think of how many emotions or other pain my own father possibly bore in silence (his spirit came to me in the garden a lot after Mum died telling me he was sorry, he did not have an avenue to express it, so he had to hold it in.) He then could not put the stops o my oldest sibling, my brother and the borrowed money offshore to help advance their construction business and things went into a recession and Dad started to get very sick from then on in. I can see it in a photo that sits on the white side board at my Mum’s old unit that my sister inherited and moved out of when she had the last collapse into breakdown around September last year (which would have been Dad’s 101th birthday, had he lived, he died in 1985.)

I see this aspect in my brother who is a very hard worker and never stops designing things and freaks out when my sister and I struggle are emotional or angry calling it ‘irrational’ and claiming at one point I was dangerous when I tried to confront him over not helping my sister’s second son when he badly wanted to come back here to be close to his Mum who, at that point, was very sick in a home. Even at the weekend when I ask what my brother has done it is some kind of work task he had to do alone even being pulled in to do the work in his oldest son;s garden, which makes me wonder sometimes if sons see fathers at all.

My heart aches at times when I consider him injuring himself skiing on the mountain and having to put his own shoulder back in its socket when he hit himself against a tree……. There was the 360 spin out he did in his car on a wet road after having a few too many drinks and the fall from a stool when overtired and having had one too many scotches.

I do not demonize my family for drinking but the fact we were plied with alcohol from a young age had something to do with numbing.. The only time I saw my father shed a tear was when he told me he had cancer and I crossed the room to hug him, he virtually collapsed in my arms.

I think of the years after Dad died, of how Mum had go on alone, then lose her own mother two years later and out of desperation get involved with a man she did not love just so she would not be alone.. My Mum chose life then and I did not get upset even when she told me only a few hours after I returned from overseas that she was remarrying and out of a feeling of terrible loneliness and loss (Dad had only died 2 years earlier) I took myself off to Sydney and luckily had my God parents for a time.

My God father was a softie and I loved him, he validated me and my pain and my reasons for becoming an alcoholic in the years after I chose sobriety and opened up to him about things and sought a clarity about who my father was having lost him years before, He and my Godfather Piet became friends when they both joined the Dutch East Indies Airforce and moved to their deployment in Indonesia together in around 1938. Later my beautiful God Dad got anger attacks, for most of his life he was soft and kind, it was claimed it was dementia when he was angry but really it was frustration. Later in life he often shared about his own mother wound with me.. She died when he was young and he was raised by other family.

This has turned into more of a personal post (and a bit of an unraveling exploration of male influence in my life and a quest to understand some inner workings.. Also I wanted to say to all of my lovely male followers when I post angry things about men its not aimed at the entire male species. It is aimed at the cultural bias that makes you men and boys shut down and turn controlling out of anger or fear. It can also happen to hyper masculinized women who have a hatred of men due to how their fathers may have been or struggle to be close due to fraught relationships with fathers and brothers.

As someone who grapples with fear and anxious attachment too I am far from perfect, these days I would rather seek to understand than judge. At the same it is taking strength to find my own voice to stand up to and voice out about what, at times, needs to be called out as toxic. I also want to stand with men and not against them.. even though at times my relationships with them have been a source of great pain (and misunderstanding) to me.