Somebody Ought to Tell Him He’s a Man
When did you first get the idea that the men around you counted you as one of them?
Maybe your dad said something you can still hear in his voice. Maybe an older guy at work handed you the keys, said, “You can lock up tonight,” and went home. He’d spent six months checking everything you did, and then on a perfectly ordinary Thursday, he trusted you to close the place.
Or maybe you moved your stuff into an apartment, got an electric bill with your name on it, and figured that must have been the ceremony.
For a lot of guys, I suspect it was the electric bill.
When Don Ross and I talked about helping boys become men, we got into what a rite of passage can mean for a son. I like the idea of giving a young man a day he’ll remember. I also think there’s a lot a dad can say on the ride home from work on a Thursday.
I’ve raised four kids. They’re all adults now, which is a strange thing to say about people whose shoes I used to tie. One of the odd things about being a dad is that you can carry around a whole head full of things you admire about your kids and somehow assume they know. Meanwhile, they can tell you exactly how you like the dishwasher loaded. You’ve been pretty clear on that subject.
Years ago, I wrote about thanking my kids because I’d noticed how often I asked them to do something and how easily I forgot to say thanks when they did it. I could see it in their faces when I remembered. Makes me wonder what else they would’ve liked to hear me say out loud.
I wonder how many sons know what their dads think about the way they back a trailer but have no idea whether Dad thinks they’re good men.
If you’ve got a son, a nephew, a young guy on your crew, pay attention to him for a while. Sooner or later you’ll see him do something decent that he could have gotten away with skipping. Maybe he goes back to tell the boss about a mistake after somebody else has already taken the heat for it. That conversation costs him something. You know it does because you’ve stood outside that same office trying to work up the nerve to walk in.
Tell him that part.
“I saw you go back in there. I’ve had to make that walk myself, and I know you had a pretty good idea what was waiting for you on the other side of that door. I respect the way you handled it.”
A young man can do something with that. The next time his stomach drops because he’s screwed something up, he’s got a little evidence about himself. He’s told the truth under pressure before. A man he respects saw him do it.
And if you’re reading this thinking, I would’ve given about anything to hear that from my dad, I wish you’d heard it, too. There’s a particular ache in being old enough to have kids of your own and realizing some part of you is still waiting for your old man to say he’s proud of you.
You’ve probably got a young man in your life who feels about you the way you felt about him. The next time you catch yourself telling somebody else what a fine man he’s turning out to be, pick up the phone and tell him, too. He deserves to hear what you sound like when you talk about him.
If you’ve got a young man in mind, pick up a copy of my book, Manlihood: The 12 Pillars of Masculinity, and write him a note inside the cover. Tell him about the day you saw him own a mistake, keep his word, or look out for somebody who needed him. Sign your name. Years from now, that’ll probably be the most dog-eared page in the book. I’d be pretty happy about that.
