It's almost cliche now, but the cliche, in my case, is also the truth: I grew up without a father. I was raised by a single mother.
And I tried to forge a definition of manhood without a dictionary.
But I want to tell a different story. I want to tell the story of the man I am, not the man who wasn't there. I want to create a new narrative.
That narrative begins and ends with the last time I saw my father. In 2008, I was home for Thanksgiving and for some reason, my mother and I got on the subject of Dad. I think I asked her where he was and she somehow got the idea that we should look for him.
The next day we went to an uncle on his side of the family. He pointed us to some house where he rented a room.
He wasn't there when we first came by. We returned hours later and there he was. I had forgotten how he looked. He was about my size, except for a beer belly. He was taller and his face bore the ravages of time. He was old.
My mother sat, made small talk. A part of me didn't want small talk. I wanted a confrontation. I wanted to ask why he wasn't there to do all the things you think a father should show his son. I wanted to know why I had to figure out how to be a man all by myself.
I never had that conversation. I asked a few questions and we bounced, me shaking his hand as we left. I gave him my phone number and address with vague promises of getting back in touch.
But I knew that wasn't going to happen. We haven't talked since.
I realized later that I never needed that big confrontation, that moment where I aired all of my feelings out in dramatic fashion, like out of some movie. I just needed to see him.
And in seeing him, I saw that he could never have taught me how to be a man because he never learned himself.
He was broken in so many pieces that I wondered how he could have molded me into a man.
My motivation was that I was not going to be him. I searched for examples of other men in my life and found them.
I put them all together and here I am.
The biggest issue for me was trying to figure out where I fit in. I had to fight all these perceptions I had of what a man was supposed to be.
Pussies cry. Men fight. Strength was in how hard you were, how tough you could be, how long you stood in the face of battle.
Punks wimped out.
I was the nerd battling acne, my head in books, introverted. Not the all-star, muscular athlete kicking ass on the field.
But those are surface definitions. Stereotypes based on myth.
I had to write my own definition, one based on who I am and who I wanted to be. I find that strength lay in vulnerability, in taking responsibility for yourself and others and owning up to the mistakes you have made and moving on. Being a man is not about whether you can throw a football or if you like basketball. It's not about asserting your authority over the submissive wife.
It's about striving to be better, caring for those around you, in daring to be who you are without compromise, respecting the women in your life, enough to hear them, enough to recognize their humanity and not reduce them to sexual objects, to be comfortable in them walking in their power.
I learned all of that without my father. It was his absence that made me better and I only realized that after seeing him and thinking what kind of man I might have been if he had been in my life. Strange how that works.
Some of my friends tell me I'll make a great father, that I'll strive to not make the same mistakes my father did, that I'll be there for my kids.
One of my favorite episodes of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air is when Will meets his father, played by Ben Vereen. By the end of the episode, Will's father is gone, again, and Will wonders out loud why his father doesn't want him. And he tells Uncle Phil how he's going to have a bunch of children and take care of them and love them. It's a touching scene, heartbreaking in exposing a young man's simple desire for the love of his father.
But the truth is, I don't see myself having children. I don't know if that will change but that's how I feel right now, at this instant. And it's pretty definitive. I don't feel the need to have children and prove to myself that I can be the great father that my father wasn't to me.
I just want to be the best man I can be. I'm still learning what that means. Help me keep learning.
