Why don’t you grow up and be a man. If I had a penny for every time I have been told to do just that I would be retired and living the dream. What I have discovered about the people who would make that statement to your face is they are usually only trying to manipulate you into pursuing a course of action that would benefit them more so than yourself. It’s an attack on ego, and male self identity meant to humiliate, and demean you at your core to force an unintended response, very much in line with an ex lover publicly decrying your sexual skill and powers. It is done to show you up as being somehow less than a real man. I have never once been told by anyone who has uttered those very words how. How exactly do I grow up and become this real man of which you speak. What does that mean anyway most of the men I know I do not wish to be like them at all? Yet in spite of this every thing I have ever learned about being a man I have learned on my own while observing these very men. So my own understanding of manhood has been imprinted with both the bad and the good, and it is difficult at times to choose one over the other. I sometimes wish there was a college of manhood somewhere a sort of finishing school as it were for male teenage hood. The only real thing I have learned in all my years of trying to become a man is that manhood is nothing if not complicated and elusive. A man must be a provider, husband, father, faithful lover, and loyal friend. A man must be all of these manhood entities at the same time and he must not falter, no not once for to do so will render him less than a real man.By far the most difficult thing for any aspiring man to do is to also develop a code of moral values, and principles with which to live by, and which must inform the decisions that each of these manhood entities must make either singularly or combined. Just imagine how difficult it is at times to make a decision as a husband alone, now try to imagine how much more difficult that same decision will become when the role of husband is placed in direct conflict with that of loyal friend .It is the subtle nuances of the context within which a man makes a decision as it relates to these entities that determines just what kind of man he truly is.
When I was a young man of eighteen I met the thirty eight year old wife of a family acquaintance for the first time, and felt an instant attraction. Her husband it seems was kept busy and away from home working a second job at night to better support his family. From the moment I found out his wife was lonely for nightly companionship, and had a secret fancy for me I began my campaign to encourage her to invite me into her bed. After much silver tongued persuasion and fake romantic gestures I finally convinced her to do just that. So twisted was my ego back then that not even almost getting caught by her husband would keep me away. I can still remember that night running down the short street from their home after hastily jumping through an open bedroom window with my pants and shoes in my hands heart pounding with fear and excitement, and thinking not that I had done something despicable but rather next week when I visit I must remember not to fall asleep.
Several days later while speaking to one of my father’s friends who had taken me under his wing, and was something of a mentor to me I mentioned what had happened and stated that I had began to feel uncomfortable about sleeping with this particular mans wife. I was surprised at his hash rebuke. Burton he said I will not deny you the opportunity to get some worldly experience but a real man does not spit on the sacrifices another man must make to support his family. You are tearing down the very thing he is struggling to build, and if you are found out you will destroy his life, her life, their marriage, and if they have children their lives too, and for what, your not even man enough or for that matter ready or willing to take his place. Remember you will be a man one day and you will have to make those same sacrifices. Maybe then you will understand just how much faith a man will place into a woman keeping when at last he gives his love to her completely. It is only a man’s dignity that prevents him from doing the sort of thing that you are now taking pride in, and a man without dignity is worse than an a dog. What you’re feeling, that uncomfortable knot in the pit of your stomach is guilt and shame.This man deserves to be treated with the utmost respect for he is killing himself trying to support the very person whom you have already convinced should betray not only his love, but the trust he has placed in her as well to believe in his ability to create a better life for both of them and their children. This thing that is a game to you, this is his blood, sweat, and tears willingly given so as to build a better future for a women whom you will most certainly discard as some piece of unwanted food scrap once you have had you fill of her in another week or two.You won’t even think twice about doing it. And for what, for something you could easily get from any of the single young ladies that are even now throwing themselves at you,yes and to feed your own ego. look at me I’m a man doing a manly thing. Tell me what is so manly about taking advantage of a lonely woman. Don’t ever let me know that you have disrespected another man like that ever again. As I have told you before any man who is persistent, persuasive, intelligent, and knows what to say and when to say it can make any woman sleep with him once, but that does not mean just because you can do something you somehow have a right to do it. You think this is only about you getting between a woman’s legs, no this is about you becoming a man with a conscience, and a heart. As a man you must always put principles first. Honor boy honor, that is the only thing that separates you from those men who have no morals and would sleep with members of their own family or worse. Those words have stayed with me to this day. A man, a real man is nothing if he does not have a set of moral values and principals to live by.
From my father I learned to be fierce provider. Whatever memories I have of my father is inexplicably linked to the song Cats in the cradle. Cat Stevens must have been singing about my dad. To my dad being a husband and father meant an unrelenting twenty four hour a day battle to meet the needs of his family a duty and a responsibility not to be shirked. Whatever time there was to be set aside for love and guidance was all used up by the time I came along. In the end it all but killed him. Oftentimes as a teenager when we butted heads my mother would take me aside afterwards and scold me further, sometimes with tears in her eyes saying you don’t understand, you don’t know him, what he was like when he was younger. This is how I came to the understanding that my mother was not only in love with my father as a physical person, and in spite of what he was forced to become because of us. She was in love with the very memory of him of who he was when their love was new and filled with passion. She was always very aware of just how much their love for each other had tempered and even altered the opportunities he would have pursued without that love to bind him or the dreams he let die so he could hold on to her love. My mother loved my father in part because she knew how deeply he loved her.She knew the things he had forsaken just so he could cling to her love. And his love was made manifest by the mountains he moved to provide for her.
I know now that my parents life was hard, there were no vacation trips, or holidays spent away. Very little time together alone, away from us kids, and the many sacrifices made for the children me included, that left them both a bit resentful of the other, of what they had asked of each other, compelled each other to give up for the sake of family. The relationship that they shared was a study in the triumph of loves’commitment over adversity, doubt, resentment, fear, or anything else that was thrown at it including the kitchen sink.
Pops… Now, there was a man.
