What American Men Get Wrong About Resilience
In the days leading up to her death, my strength failed.
It’s always been there—our fixation with being tough. It was present in my childhood (I’m almost 60 now), and now it’s at the fore of self-help-YouTube-blogger-alpha-male mythology more than ever. To be sure, there are genuinely heroic expressions of masculine strength and perseverance to be found and admired, usually in the quiet men who hold the world on their shoulders for the rest of us. Sadly, they are obscured by the hordes of boys in men's bodies strutting around today, treating women like trinkets, scarfing down steroids, and attending over-priced, self-abusing boot camp retreats. They want more than anything to embody the strength and easy masculine grace they see in their heroes. I can understand that desire.
They just don’t seem to understand that the journey to becoming a man is an inner journey, and it’s one of self-acceptance.
This piece was inspired by the Substack posts of a fellow widower. He’s faced the double tragedy of having lost not only his wife but also one of his children. It is a unique and challenging life to live in our culture—a widower with kids. We are often invisible, an odd species of man nobody really has a model for how to relate to. He writes for men struggling with grief and loss. I think virtually all of his advice is dead-on. He has real tools to offer men, and I applaud his work.
But he is still protecting men’s need to hold onto their manly persona. This is grieving for real men, with other men, preserving their masculinity through the process of grief. We in the West always seem to find a way to put the brakes on grief. We need to say to grief, “Here and no further. I will surrender to your onslaught, but there are parts of my identity I just can’t give up.” Masculinity, as we’ve defined it in America, is one of those things many of us men just don’t want to toss into grief's fire.
I was never a candidate for the “most macho” boy growing up. I was tiny for most of my childhood, my body hid my growth hormones away until I was well into high school, when I shot up like new bamboo. I was terrified of my Dad for many of my younger years. He didn’t backhand me and my brother too much, but when he did, he knew how to make it stick. He called it the “Irish Way,” which basically meant if you’re not knocking your sons around every once in a while, you’re not doing your job. I spent a good deal of my youth avoiding his anger. I’m at peace with his child-rearing techniques. It took a while, but my dad and I are good. He’s passed on but always in my life in ways that are more profound than ever. I can happily say I love my Dad and admire many of his accomplishments in life (and there are quite a few). But I’m not trying to be the man he was—I’m trying to be the man I am.
Masculinity can be complicated, especially when you’re in grief.
Big grief, the kind that swallows you whole, takes us to places we never knew we could go. My grief was coupled with the exhaustion of caregiving for my wife, as well as taking care of our kids and holding down a job. There were several times over her 14 months of illness when I knew I had pushed myself so far I’d wind up in the hospital myself in a week or two. On top of that, the sheer terror of the idea of losing her—the mother of our children and my life partner—brought to the surface deeply buried trauma in me. There were days when I had to step outside, away from her and the kids, take off my shoes to stand barefoot in the dirt, calming myself as best I could as waves of childhood terror roiled through me. Big grief is a master at showing us what we’ve spent our lives hiding in the shadows.
In the days leading up to her death, my strength failed. I knew I couldn’t leave—this was where our walk together was leading, and I had to be there for her and the kids… every final bit of it. I went to bed that night knowing that all of my strength was gone. I didn’t know what I’d do when morning came. I didn’t think I would be able to get out of bed.
The next day, morning came, and my body got up and did what had to be done. I didn’t know where that strength came from—it was something deeper than I had ever felt. It was a weird experience that lasted several weeks. I could barely feel anything physically, but I could lift her body and carry her into the room we’d prepared for her viewing. I made it through the burial and attended to her family that stayed with us then.
After everyone left, and it was just me and the kids starting the journey of building a new life, I asked myself, “Where did that strength come from? Where do I get my resilience?” I went through the catalogue of default answers to that question. Was it my spirituality? I have a very strong spiritual practice going back decades. It’s experiential, drawing on meditation, shamanism, Celtic spirituality, and the inevitable influences from our Christian culture. I really wanted that to be the answer, but I had to be honest with myself. I just knew this came from someplace else.
Was it the model of my father? Dad was a very philosophical man and exemplified many of the traits of stoic philosophy. He once confided in me that he admired Humphrey Bogart—that was the man’s man he felt most like. But Dad also had a quick temper and wasn’t always honest with himself about how much some things got to him. As a university professor, we often had his male colleagues over from other disciplines. By comparison, many of those men were emotionally ebullient, even tender in ways I had never seen my father act. There was a flexibility and vitality that wasn’t as accessible in Dad.
If I wasn’t gifted my resilience by Dad, that left me with the only other person: my Mother. Mom is still alive—I don’t know if her resilience will ever let her die. Nobody would ever accuse her of being especially emotionally healthy. The only filters she knows about are for coffee (she quit smoking years ago), and her boundaries are as steady and constant as a beachball in a hurricane. She had a really rough childhood, with parents whose alcoholism were from a time in which public drunkenness, even at work, was much more common. They were the Olympic athletes of alcoholism.
I can’t say my mother took all of that in stride. She went through periods of serious depression. There were many years in my childhood when her anger at life colored almost every day. But she loved us and lived with a fierceness that could not be controlled or dismissed. As intellectually honed and brilliant as my father was, my mother was a perfect contrast. She was all heart—a crazy, beautiful, amazing, titanic hot mess of a heart.
Weeks after my wife passed I realized that this deep strength was a gift that came entirely from my Mother. Her ungovernable fierceness ran through me. It could not be stopped. It would do what life required of me, whether I showed up for that or not.
I’ll never forget that moment of realization—it fell through me to the center of my being with a thump.
It brought me back to a moment when I overheard a very private conversation between my parents. In my twenties, back home from college, I was stretched out on a couch in our living room reading. I’d been so quiet they didn’t realize I was there. Mom walked from the kitchen into the den, a path well worn by her.
As she passed Dad he said to her with great tenderness “Sheila, you know you taught me how to love.”
Mom was surprised but quickly brushed him aside in her usual manner, “Oh, John!”
“No really, you really taught me how to love.” He stated it as a simple fact.
He was absolutely right. The conversation didn’t go any further, I never let them know I’d overheard that keepsake moment, but the truth of my Fathers realization never left me. Though she was often the most chaotic, angry expression of the feminine, she had also loved with a relentlessness that matched his intellect and then some. She was not the sweet, wilting flower of the 1950’s housewife, she was a true Mother—strong, powerful and deeply loving.
It was her resilience, her strength that spoke through me time and time again. “I will get up, I will face the day. I will take care of my children and make sure their own lives continue to unfold with grace, love and opportunity. I simply will not fail.”
Carl Jung understood the need for the masculine to reconcile itself with the feminine and visa versa. He understood that without the resilience of the feminine within him, man’s strength would falter. He also understood that without the focus and assertiveness of the masculine, women would be lost in an ocean of feelings and intuitions. My parents' marriage was modeled on fulfilling those gender role strengths and vulnerabilities for each other, but that's not enough. We must bring forth from the shadows the qualities of gender we’re not ready to embody in ourselves and welcome them home.
Grief is one of the most powerful opportunities we men have to embrace the feminine.
My Father’s learning from my Mother was the best expression of achieving balance with the feminine a man of his generation could hope for. Dad evolved. At some point in the late 70’s he became a hugger. Before that, men only shook hands with other adults. He reveled in the joys of being a grandfather, smiling and relaxing in ways I hadn’t seen him do since I was very young. I think he gained his own deeper resilience from those lessons learned.
In this age of performative identity, where we’re judged on how we dress, how big the flag is we wave, what our gender presentation is, I hope men can find a pathway to the inner and especially the inner-feminine. I don’t know if men really need an elder to find it, a guide on that journey (as so many think is necessary and so many are exploiting). We just need to trust the journey and be willing to accept all that lives within us, even if it doesn’t seem to match what the world wants to see.
I suppose I did have a mentor in the form of Fred Astaire. One day I saw him dancing on TV. I thought he was the happiest man I’d ever seen, I wanted to be that happy. Upon my Mothers advice I started taking dance after that, courting the feminine and her many gifts early on. Though I was regularly harassed by my peers for being a dancer, I’ve never regretted it for one minute. Despite having to give up on dance as a career because of injuries, it has fed me endless joy and resilience. I have never had a problem inviting the feminine into my world, and I have always been the richer for it.
I am the man I am today because I stood by my wife as she slowly died of cancer. I am the man I am today because I protected, cared for and nurtured my kids throughout her illness, death and beyond. What makes the man I am today is never dropping the ball for my family. In that way, I am like my Dad. His devotion and perseverance were his best qualities in my book. But without my resilience, I wouldn’t even be able to show up for the tasks at hand.
There are many men like me in our culture, and we need to start speaking up more loudly as the pariah of toxic masculinity (which is really just masculinity not fully realized) runs rampant through our culture. You’ll be able to pick us out because we’re not threatened by angry, strong women. We don’t care if other men are especially feminine or masculine. We welcome whatever gender people choose to express, we just want everyone to have the chance to be their full selves. We trust that. That, after all, is the privilege of being a man—listening to your own heart and acting accordingly. A real man wants to extend that privilege to all others.