and the results are in…

Wow, what a prick I was.

That’s my first thought. I feel embarrassed by my childishness, even as I demanded to be treated as a man. The first letter was a follow up to a ruined vacation (I was 22) in which I felt like I was being coddled and not given opportunities to do grown up things like drive a boat. In the letter I called him out for that and not treating me with the respect he’d afford a random 22 year old. My tone was petulant. That doesn’t mean what I said was untrue, but it certainly didn’t come from the place of respect I was complaining about not getting, if you follow.

My dad gave me another gift – some notes he jotted down after he read that first letter. The first note was how he was feeling. Hurt, angry, resentful, betrayed, guilty, afraid, vengeful. The second note was some thoughts. The first thought came down to “when you act like an adult you get treated like one” and was followed by a list of the ways I approached the trip without helping to plan it, or on the trip, helping to cook, clean, and so on. Then as another item under that heading, was the observation that I don’t pay back my debts. That was true. I pissed off a lot of friends by not returning money, tools, movies, and so on. I was too self-absorbed to make that important, too involved with myself to care about things like “doing right by others”. I recognize that now, but seeing that written as a thought as my dad prepared a response – it made me cry. I don’t know why exactly – partly, I think, out of guilt that I really did hurt him with that letter, where my tone of self-righteousness was betrayed by my behaviors I wasn’t even aware of.  I know guilt isn’t useful here. How could I be aware of things I wasn’t aware of?  But still, I felt the pain I inflicted on him.

He also asked, what kind of initiation had I undergone that made me a man? And wryly asked, “want to be man? pay for your health insurance”

Of course, none of those thoughts or feelings made it directly into the response he sent me, which he also included in a draft form. His response was measured, acknowledging his being hurt by my letter, but also the truth of my observations, and praising the adultness of sending a letter (rather than doing nothing, or forcing some sort of damaging face to face confrontation). He related my observations about how he treated me to his own relationship with his parents at that age, where his actions were more damaging and he spent a lot of time beating himself up for that. In that way, he was able to direct his “real” responses – those in the notes mentioned above – at himself, putting himself in my shoes. It was a remarkably mature and sensitive way to be true to his own thoughts and feelings without undermining or dismissing mine. Wow.

Finally, he included a follow up letter I had written to him. This letter was written following an intensely powerful introspective experience I’d had with the aid of psilocybin mushrooms. During the trip I’d connected with what it felt like to be masculine, and it was a new feeling. I finally understood what it was like to meet the world head on, without fear. I rocked out with my cock out. I wanted to get into a fight – something I’d never done before. I was a big pussy growing up, and now I had felt what it was like to not be a pussy.

Of course, after the euphoria of the experience, I felt resentment. Resentment that it had taken 22 years to know what it feels like to have balls. And that resentment was aimed directly at my dad. So, full of the cockiness one might expect after a night like that, I penned a letter to my poor dad. I am way more embarrassed by this letter than the first, mostly because of the cockiness. But as with the first letter, there was truth in there.

I said that our family had made it a tradition of losing touch with what it means to be a man, because the fathers were all unavailable and the sons were raised by the mothers. I said that I wished he had taken the time to teach me self respect, how to stand up for myself. I wrote “All throughout school, it seemed normal to be the target of humiliation.”  This is something I had “discovered” recently so to read it from my 22 year old self was surprising.

I went on a diatribe about what it means to be masculine, to establish turf, protect it, to be competitive, to prove oneself, to act without deference or accomodation. It was what I had connected with earlier. In retrospect, it was a narrow definition of being a man. The ‘toughness’ angle. There’s a lot more to it than that. Yes, being a man means being tough-minded (toughness is mostly mental). It also means paying the bills and taking responsibility for your actions. It means having maturity and character – being willing and able to delay gratification, and doing right by yourself, those you love, and others, simply because it’s the right thing to do. A lot of that applies in general to women too. But those are the things that stand out today, when I think about manhood, who I am, and who I still aspire to be.

My dad did respond to that letter but didn’t save it, and though I may have it somewhere in the attic, I doubt it. I don’t remember what his response was but something tells me he answered it in a way similar to the first response.

The bottom line is that I had a lot of pent up resentment for my upbringing and I used those letters to try to hold him accountable. The way he handled it was all about being a man. He accepted and acknowledged what I needed him to, and he held true to his own feelings without diminishing me. I love him for that.