High School - Belonging - Love - Betrayal: An unrequited journey

Moving from grade school to middle school (grades 7 & 8) began the dissolution of my relationships with 'immigrant' tribe of close friends. The process lasted till the end of grade 9, where an even smaller group of friends became my tribe. In grade 9, I hung onto my neighbourhood tribe and in this way was motivated by the competitive belonging of tribes to be an A student. It was all downhill from there though. I eventually failed grade 12, shifted to night school and then dropped out, without completing grade 12 requirement.

While I was always attracted to girls - even at six years old, I found a girl friend, until she moved away. From grade four onward, I would fantasize the girls in my classes walking around naked. This despite not having any idea what 'sex' really was.

It was the summer after grade 9 - waiting for 10 that  fell in love. Of course, by then I had no confidence and little charm - other than my own sort of innocent earnestness. Let me quote McLuhan here, from his essay "The Mechanical Bride" in his book of the same name:

To the mind of the modern girl, legs, like busts, are power points which she has been taught to tailor but as parts of the success kit rather than erotically or sensuously.  … They are date-baited power levers for the management of the male audience.

On the male, this display of power to which he is expected to respond with cars and dates has various effects. The display of current feminine sex power seems to many males to demand an impossible virility of assertion.

To this current exaggeration of date-bait some people reply that the glamour business, like the entertainment world, is crammed with both women-haters and men-haters of dubious sex polarity. Hence the malicious insistence on a sort of abstract sex.

This was written in 1951 - it was still relevant to my experience as a male in high school in the 60s and for much of my life. Up until my 30s, I wished for the old days of knights and chivalry where what a male had to do to be worthy of female desire/attention was 'simply' kill the dragon. :) It is difficult to attain that requisite glamour-worthiness with which I felt I could earn love. 

So the short sad story. I fell in love with a girl during the summer holidays, we became friends, I introduced her to my very best friend, my hero (he was silent, talented, handsome) - I was his Pancho Villa, his side-kick. We all became friends, although I confided my love for her to him. Sometime during grade 11, I found out that - he had moved where I couldn't - and was now her 'boyfriend'. 

This was a truly dark time - one of the darkest of my life - as he was central to my 'tribe' and now I was now unrequited, betrayed and exiled from my closest and only friends. 

My fear of my own impossible virility of assertion - unworthiness of love - plus the betrayal of my friend and my hero - had led me to choose a paralysis of lack of confidence. Fear and doubt of my own power had contributed to a projection of my own desire of the girl I love (and her desirability) onto my friend. 

As it turned out - he later betrayed this girl for another which he ultimately married and again later betrayed. I never have really analyzed his baggage. What I did do, eventually is realize how I had made my own castles in the sand (I know this is trite - but the metaphor enabled me to have a real revelation about the power of my own contribution to this sad tale). 

Referring to McLuhan again:

This organic character of the machines, he saw, was more than matched by the speed with which people who minded them were taking on the rigidity and thoughtless behaviorism of the machine. In a pre-industrial world a great swordsman, horseman, or animal-breeder was expected to take on some of the character of his interests.

Many of the Frankenstein fantasies depend on the horror of a synthetic robot running amok in revenge for its lack of a ‘soul.’ Is this not merely a symbolic way of expressing the actual fact that many people have become so mechanized that they feel a dim resentment at being deprived of full human status?

This quote makes me think of masculinity as a mask of machine-like power, reducing a male to the strong-silent machine (even the dildo). The lack of a full humanity is so much of the masculine - a fear of men.

Stepping into the world

When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other worlds, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.

G. K. Chesterton

In addition to an anxiety engendered by a parental love award on a basis of competitive merit - Margaret Mead points out, the American child is typically limited to the affection of two parents. The very housing condition nowadays forbid the regular presence of numerous relatives and generalized presence of the whole community in the form of adopted 'uncles' and 'aunts'.

So the young American starts life with a tremendous impetus towards success. Hies family, his little slender family, just a couple of parents alone in the world, are the narrow platform on which he stands.

...Success consists not only in winning the approval of parents but in surpassing them. On that premise rests the American way of life, Mead says. We must, in the most signal way, show our superiority to our parents in every department, or we have failed to give meaning to their efforts and our own selves.

In a social and economic sense, success, it would appear, means the virtual rejection of the parents, so that in a symbolic way the child bitten with the success spirit is already an orphan. A Lincoln could stimulate himself with a belief that he was the illegitimate child of an aristocrat, but the child of today, says Mead, nurses the feeling of being only adopted.

Marshall McLuhan,  The Mechanical Bride, 1951.

I've been reading McLuhan this week - his autobiography by Douglas Coupland (of Generation X fame) and his first published book, The Mechanical Bride, published the year I was born (also the year Harold Innes published The Bias of Communication.. 

These two quotes seemed to resonate with me and this blog - gave me a deeper less personal sense of context - a sense of touching the human condition. A sense of my own children and their inevitable experience - how family patterns are more than memetic, but phenotypically embodied in culture.

I have spoken about how community - my eventual community was my salvation - despite being an 'immigrant'. I don't remember how long it took me to learn English, and to make contact with my immediate neighbours. I remember, many trips to the Salvation Army store with my grandmother, and when I began school - grade 1 at the local Catholic school. It was run by Nuns and affiliate with a middle school run by priests. There was a local Catholic orphanage, and the orphans went to the same school as I did. I went there till grade 3. I was regularly in fights with the orphanage kids, and regularly got in trouble with the teachers - getting the 'strap' (corporal punishment) very regularly.

During this time I learnt English and became friends with the neighbour kids. Maybe I was accepted by them because they were different as well - two families being German and one family being Jewish.  Maybe we were all 'immigrants' and the community was a fairy-tale of immigrants, finding success.

I think the way I met my first friends - twins (Jim and John) was through encounters on our tricycles and meeting at the local park (a block away). My tricycle as so small but I was way faster then they were.

The three families were very kind to me, including me on regular outings to the beach and to their cottages - like an adopted pet. I don't mean this term to be derogatory, I was the mutt the kids brought home and I was loved in many ways as such. I would have been grateful, but I didn't really feel that sort of emotion, I just felt included.

I experienced a recurring nightmare in those days - on my tricycle, but everything was white, and trying to move seemed impossibly slow. Looming was this terrible sense that approaching me fast was a dragon - a Chinese-like red dragon.

My mother had me transferred to the local public school, were my friends went when I entered grade 4. However, my friends were still in grade 3 and I felt very out of place in grade 4. I think, in many ways I was still learning English - I never could recite the alphabet in English until high school. Within a few months I was 'put back' to grade 3, as it was deemed that I wasn't ready (mostly emotionally, but probably also academically) for grade 4. I think I was happy to be with my friends (even though I was older). At some point, I think they gave us all some sort of IQ test and I was deemed appropriate for the 'enrichment' stream - but I never did homework and my parents (mother/grandmother) never monitored, insisted or seemed to be aware that I should be doing homework. So after consistently not completing work, I was put back into the regular stream. I think I was somewhat upset/embarrassed by this - but I don't remember any counselling or discussion with my mother about it. Certainly, my teachers didn't seem to appreciate my situation.

And yet with my friends - I was definitely a leader, I was the strongest (probably because I was a bit older) and tended to see myself as their protector. However, there was a nightmare that I have remembered my whole life - very vivid. In the public school we had a number of 'air-raid' drills (I remember the where the local air-raid siren was). In the nightmare, the air-raid siren goes off, and I know that this means we have a very short time before the nuclear missiles arrives, so I rush outside of my house to warn everyone - to make sure they know. But no one is on the streets, and when I knock on doors, no one opens them and suddenly I realize that I'm alone - on the streets and I'm locked out, alone.

The other singular memory, relates to my sense of leadership. I always felt that I was the natural leader, somehow, because I was older, stronger, and was maybe was more comfortable with being different. So when ever the idea arose about forming a club, or a group, I always assumed leadership. Well finally, one day I found my friends had formed a club, and they wouldn't let me join. I was shocked. They were adamant and unified that I could not join their, club. This felt almost like they had decided to banish me. I pleaded for an explanation. They relented, finally - letting me join the club on one condition - that I would not become the leader.

As trivial as that seems - this has been a life-long memory - and sometimes I feel this remains a root of fear about responsibility and leadership - that somehow I will become isolated, exiled - if I assert myself to strongly. That somehow, no matter how comfortable I am - banishment vulnerability is ever present. A fear on one's own power?

This fear, plagues me to this day, and probably is the foundation for my countless apologies when I unleash my passions. A fear of that my own talents will be conditions for exile.

In some ways this resonates with the classic feminist thought about the fear of success, especially if success if define in classic male terms (e.g. as Gilligan as documented). Being the boy raised by women - it is likely that some of that contributed to my own fear of myself, and subliminally incorporating their fear of men. If rejecting parents is essential to achieving success, the son of a single mother may be burdened with a double need to reject parent, but without a male model is doubly vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the fear of banishment that success may threaten - the fear of fatherless men?

A different reflection

In the first decade (1-10 yrs) of my life, I was an abandoned child and an immigrant to normality. In the second decade (11-20 yrs) I found my tribes and unrequited love. In the third decade (21-30 yrs) I was a wanderer - looking for my destiny, my passion. In the fourth decade (31-40 yrs) I was a student quenching a deep thirst for learning. In the fifth decade (41-50 yrs) I was a family man and a beginning careerist, finding roots and a formal place in the world. In the sixth decade (51-60 yrs) I was a divorced single dad, who lost and then found in a deeper way his family and built my true calling.

I wonder now what my seventh decade will bring?

If becoming 30 represents the real entry into adulthood - then turning 60 represents a traditional entry in elderhood, becoming an elder - a new stage of life. I've become a grandparent, something I struggled with that also represents official entry into the world as an elder. I wasn't ready for this, I was and am still an active parent and more saliently, my inner age remains in my late 40s.

In this last year I have been like a dog going round and round until it settles and lies down - I'm am coming to terms with being sixty, coming close to accepting the idea of being an elder in this decade of my life. We are living longer and healthier, so maybe I'm an explorer in emerging elderhood. Five more years and I will be eligible for senior discounts.

My thirties was my decade of student-hood - the first stage of my first Saturn return (it takes Saturn about 29 years to complete an orbit around the sun). My sixties represent the first stage of my second Saturn return.

But what is relevant to this blog, my reflections of being male and understanding my particular masculinity, is that my thirties were a burning intellectual journey to understand the fear of men. I've posted both my M.A. Thesis An Epistemology of Gender and my B.A. Hon Thesis The Influence of Feminism and the Observed Crisis of the Present Day Male’s PassageInto Manhood. 

These work were and are a major accomplishment of my intellectual search. They are dated and limited (written before the Web and the vast sea of accessible research)- yet as I re-read them, to post them, I am still proud of their basic ideas. Today there is so much more literature out there, yet in their essence I think they still stand. 

It was in my thirties, through the relationships, experiences and intellectual journey of those years, that I feel I became a man and entered manhood. Where I face the fear of men. 

Perhaps in my sixties - I will be able to dissolve those fears.

The Comfort of our Own Narratives

It's been awhile since my last episode. I've been reflecting on my postings thus far. What I've realized is that our early experiences do create fundamental frames - narratives - stories around which we continue to shape the deep sense of who we are. Our identity - myself - who I really am. Therapies such as cognitive therapy can really help us to find broad stories - schemas. It was no surprise to find that a fundamental story around which I organized my senses of self was the 'abandoned child'.

Finding this out in my adult life was indeed a revelation and has since been a key source of my own healing. But... change, deeper change is much harder. One would think that trauma, disturbing experiences would not be places of comfort, and of course they are not in any conventional sense.

We all know about the idea of imprinting - a baby duck imprint the idea of 'mother' on the first moving object/being it sees. That become its mother and it follows it everywhere. In the same way early experiences become 'organized' as a story - a narrative that becomes our context. It's as if our narrative is a dynamic all surrounding film in which we are always the focal point - the star, even if we are a type of marginal or supporting character actor.

Finding out how how early experiences shape a story that we used to solidify or form a centre of gravity that is our sense of self. And as traumatic and distressing as that narrative is - it becomes the sense of self with which we are 'comfortable'. This doesn't mean it is a pleasant sort of comfort, instead it's like a sense of where we are our 'authentic or true' self. It it familiar territory where we feel like a native.

There is a paradox. The motivation to undertake the process of exploring ways to change or heal ourselves arises becomes for reasons our life as we make it and as we experience it is not just working but somehow keeps recreating some sort of suffering. But the core of the paradox is the deep discomfort with stepping outside of that strange attractor of our patterns constructed by our narrative self. To truly change involves becoming an alien to ourselves for long enough, intense enough to replace our 'imprinted' narrative patterns.

As an example, think about how hard it is for us to break bad habits and how easy it is to fall back into them. It is as if the is a type of comfort, familiarity that re-minds us about who we are.

To entrench good habits means we must make them who we are on an unconscious level - where our body and unthinkingness feels native.

When I began my job in the government I was thrilled and filled with anxiety. It was the first job where I felt I had been hired because I was smart - and I was completely fearful about 'when they would find out' - that I wasn't the person/capability they had hired - that I would fail to meet their expectations. Maybe on a deeper level I was fearful that I would be abandoned. Now I think this was the discomfort of having moved into 'alien territory' - a territory where I was expected to be a native while I really felt I was an immigrant.

This September, I will have worked for the government for 24 years - in many ways I am more comfortable with being a 'smart person' but I still feel deeply like an immigrant - still an alien in a strange land. I have become a 'known alien' one that has been able to form some sort of comfortable habitat in this environment. But I still struggle with the 'imposter syndrome' in the sense that I feel I'm unlike the other. Then again, I think everyone is also a curious anomaly.

I have for a while described myself as 'organizationally disabled' as a way to explain myself - to justify myself or to excuse my weirdness. Today, walking home I realized that in the context of bureaucracy (as a Kafka-esque arcaneness) - the context of being a 'scientist in a science organization' with the expectation of having achieved a sort of basic mastery of administrative competence - that I am suffer something that is more like organizational autism. That I am 'unable to see' (not individual emotional signals) but the political signals of bureaucratic life. What I have recreated in my career is a sort of 'abandoned child career' within the bureaucracy. I have never been able to lose that abandonment 'accent'.

However, what I have done is transform this narrative into a more useful and healthy form. By becoming a 'futurist' a 'foresight' research/expert I remain totally 'outside the box' - in fact I have been introduced as - 'here's John, you've heard of someone thinks outside the box - John doesn't know where the box is'. Many people have remarked that they are 'happy' that someone like me is part of the organization. This truly is a compliment - a real acknowledgement of my uniqueness and the importance of the different contribution that I make to the 'whole'. Yet - I continue to feel that I've never been understood - that I anyone has grasped how best to 'use me and my particular intelligence/capability/skills'.

The metaphor of my career is the David Bowie song with the line, "Ground control to Major Thom". I have always felt like Major Thom at the very end of a very fragile tether, a ethereal connection to the broader purposes of everyone around me. And in a very complex way - this is where I have been comfortable - where I've felt I am my 'authentic self'. What I have done in my career is transform the narrative 'abandoned child' (conflated with the isolated male archetype) into a more positive and 'comforting' strange attractor that - gravitates around this alien uniqueness - this 'high performing' organizational autism.

In the end - I know I have to continue on this path of self-transformation. And in some way I have to step up to and embrace the expectations of some sort of organizational competence. This is deeply uncomfortable. But that is the whole point - real change of self - can never be an experience of comfort - an experience where we feel that we are in our 'native territory'. Real change of self must always be an experience of immigration to new territories of self. Is it a surprise - that one of the most popular lines of the 20th century - anticipating a future that is everpresent is  "to boldly go, where no man has gone before". This is line is a paradox as well - highlighting in its word a truth - yet comforting in its stories - for Kirk always remained Kirk. The truth of change is the experience of emigration from the known territories of self and immigration into alien unknown territories of possible new selves. Selves that we are not comfortable with or even can know before we learn to inhabit.

This is what the modern man fears - this is deeply part of the the fear of men.

Episode 5 - A Landed Immigration

Sometime around five years old, I came to live with my grandmother and her new husband, my step-grandfather. I came to know him as my grandfather until his death. In becoming an adult I have emphasized that he was my step-grandfather.

A timeless period later my mother came to live with us. This moment of landing was confusing with very vague memories. I did not really know I had landed, that I now had a 'home', parents.

There were rules and they were my grandfather's, he seemed like a bear, silent, distant. Always to be placated.

I don't really remember 'moving in' nor my mother moving in. But like being born full-blown from the forehead of Zeus - I remember my mother and I were sleeping in the same small room.

I don't remember how long I lived in the house before I was playing outside. The regime was that my mother and I spent our time pretty much in our room and we mostly ate on a separate rhythm. I remember watching TV - Hockey Night in Canada with my grandfather - funny I don't remember his favourite team - but eventually I imprinted on the Montreal Canadiens and of course Rocket Richard.

I remember my grandfather would go off on a walk to a local wooded area. One day he had just left and my grandmother - probably thinking that it would be some sort of nice bonding experience told me to join him - to catch up to him and go for a walk. I was probably timid and still shy, but off I went. As I turn the corner I could see him in the distance and called, but he never turned around or slowed down.

I never did catch up to him but was able to keep him in sight until he disappeared into the wood. I kept following him hoping I could catch up. I never did, but I did get lost. This is a woods that is now one of the local 'off-leash' areas for dogs and one that I've so frequently brought Patches too with G and C and their friends. It seems so domesticated, with a clear path that is simply a circle. But I did get lost and wandered for what seemed like quite a long time, but I eventually found my way back. I never knew whether he really had not heard me or had purposely left me behind. But this was to be the prototypical frame of our relationship.

When I was allowed to watch TV with him it was always like a visit into his domain.

A key threshold, something I only remembered again in the last decade was an occasion where for some reason we were alone - my grandmother and mother were out (this was very rare I think) and we were watching hockey. Sometimes, during watching TV a very normal sort of adult-child play happened - the type of wrestling where that child gets that adult to grab a hand, then both hands and for the child to struggle against the strength. I've played this with my kids and other people's kids and it fun, for everyone.

But on this night, my grandfather threw a blanket over me and what I remember is feeling his hand over me. I don't really remember if he fondled me, or if I became distraught because I was covered in a blanket. Somehow, I pulled away or got him to stop. I don't remember if I went to my room after or sat farther away. I'm not even sure if I later told my mother, or hinted or simply indicated being scared by being covered by the blanket - I seem to have an image of a later fight between my mother and my grandfather. Maybe this was not a 'fondling' maybe it was a moment where he let down his defences and let himself go in an act of play. Maybe, my reaction made him retreat even harder into his own coldness.

In any case the distance, fear, coldness between us never changed. And maybe, he consolidated my fear of men, of authority, of father figures.

While he was alive, I always felt an immigrant in what was the only real home I ever had.

Episode 4 - remembered frames

I seem to be impatient to finish with the very early parts of my life. I don't want to feel like I dwelling in a maudlin pit. But, then while I already know the end of this blog - me as I am as a man, I don't really know where this written journey will take me or how I will get there.

Tonight, speaking with Gabriel about the 'temporal experience' of life. How sometime life seems to be like a series of bubbles. I recounted the insight I had just before he was born as Zoe was living with his mother and I in our house on Louisa St. I was still a new public servant, still excited about being paid to be 'smart'. I was walking home from work and realized that while we seemed to feel like we experienced life as a continuous flow, we are so rarely present in that flow, so overwhelmingly remembering a past, re-imagining endless possible permutations of what could have been. Or equally projecting imagined future permutations. All sparked/sparking in non-sequiturial strings. Objectively, life is a long movie (especially as we begin to be able to record every second). In experience life is more like the frames of a movie - only we don't remember all the frame - only some key strings. And more, each frame is a different experience of time. I think our memories are actually more like dream sequences that seem seamless but are really time-dimensional jumps. I wonder what the 'recorded life' that is soon to arrive will do to the remembered self?

And this detour, is less a detour than a pre-amble. What I want to relate are the 'dream-like' moments of my first five years that I can remember. They are 'video images' that have been with me my whole life - like the archaeological findings of the years of unconscious childhood.

I remember being alone in a crib. The only thing I have is a coin - a nickel or a quarter. It is my only toy. Of course I'm also continually putting it in my mouth. At some point I swallow it. I begin crying and who ever is taking care of me comes in. In this memory I understand language (must have been French) and my care-taker in asking what is wrong figures out that I've swallowed my coin. I seem to remember being told to wait. What I remember is eventually my care-taker coming back (she must have come to change my diaper) and shortly after - giving me my coin back. Maybe, this a foundation of my positive attitude toward bodily products - my sense that movements of elimination are peristaltic orgasms. But maybe I'm just an earthy sensualist. Milan Kundera would say that this was my personal core experience for the myth of the eternal return.

The rest of my primal frames of memory as more related to masculinity.

One home I remember was with a family who had a boy just a bit older than me. In the early 50s until the seventies many many people had nicotine stained fingers. They were a sign of adulthood - positive for males/masculinity more negative implications for females/femininity. As well, iodine was used frequently to sterilize cuts, burns, etc. Iodine when it was used would leave a stain the same colour as a nicotine stain.

I remember the boy (I forget everyone's names) had cut his finger and his mother wanted to put iodine on the cut. He cried and didn't want the iodine. She tried to convince him that it would make him look like an adult - like his father (I have absolutely no memory of him as a physical presence). He did not want this. So next she said that she would put the iodine on my finger too. I started to cry because I did not want this on two counts - the iodine and the appearance of a nicotine stain. I was told I had no choice and the iodine was applied to my finger. This memory combines that sense of linkage to a 'distant adult male quasi-father' and fraternal competition. The competition I lost and the unwanted linkage to the adult was enforced. As a result there was a helplessness and anger - there was one that I felt was willing to connect to me - no one to protect/save me. I was not 'man' enough to save myself - to assert my self and my feelings as they became subsumed to those of the other boy.

On another occasion, in the time frame with the same family. It may have been in same house - I don't remember. For some reason both myself and the other boy were given an opportunity to choose a toy. One of the toys was a doll and for some reason that was the toy I wanted. I pointed and asked for it. I don't remember shock, but the clear unequivocal response was no and a suggestion that I take a toy like the other boy chose. In the end I was given a toy - I think it was a truck. I think I remember crying and being upset - I'm not sure. But  was disappointed and confused about why I couldn't get my choice. I don't think I was aware that a doll is not a 'masculine' toy or that I was 'transgressing' in making such a choice. But it was another occasion where I could assert my choice as valid, as worthy. Where another male's choice was right, right enough to over-ride mine. That sense of not having worthy 'wants/needs'. I don't know if I internalized this experience as one of masculinity or something deeper of simple unworthiness. But it reflects a sense of not measuring up to a standard expectation related to being a male.

In the same house/family with the same boy. It is a moment where the boy's father is (although I have no sense of what he looks like - just a presence). The occasion is having us learn about boxing. I am asked to wear boxing gloves and both of us are asked/expected to box with each other. I remember not wanting to do this and saying so. But somehow I end up with the gloves on and having to box. I remember getting hit on the nose and it hurt and I cried and then refusing to box any more. A pattern seems consistent. I find it interesting as I write this that have not even a vague sense of what the other boy's father looked like. This event seems like a classic moment of masculine formation, the stuff of movies, the overcoming of fear and standing up for oneself. But I did not do this. Could I have beaten the other boy and remained safe, continued to 'belong' somewhere? I certainly did not do this type of calculus consciously but maybe these where imbued in my situation.

One last memory remains from these years and is again from the same house and family.

There is a neighbour to this family - what I remember is an old man. There was me, the other boy (maybe he had a sister as well) and some other kids. I think we had some story of him, some grudge, some prejudice that came from the neighbourhood or the boys parents. We decided to knock his garbage can over, and we did. I think I played a leadership or bolder role in this. We laughed about it and felt strong and brave. Later at home, the boys mother is angry because the old man has called her and told her of what we did. All that I can remember is that I am the focus of the mother's anger. I remember that I am in a high chair, and she is angry and grabs my hair and knocks my head back against the back of the chair. I'm pretty sure I had tried to lie about my involvement. I don't remember what the others have said. But I seem to remember that I'm the only one she vents against.   This is another occasion where I am in an experience of less worth. I can't remember if my role - the eagerness of my participation came because of a desire to belong or of a natural desire to take charge. I certainly have that desire and it comes out in the next stage of my life - after I move into Lindenlea. It is the consequence of my action as a masculine force that seems to suggest a pattern of fear toward my own nature.

These core memories seem to be all that I can remember consciously of those years as an abandoned child. They have lived with me my whole life and I'm sure they form a substantial part of my sense of self and maleness.

Reflection on second post - elements of my narrative

I've only made two posts in this potential saga of my account of my personal realization of boyhood to manhood. The boy-ness however has never left me, I think it is a vital part of being a man, perhaps though it remain too dominant in many men

It has been interesting the thoughts that have permeated my thinking since that last post and since the conversation with my eldest daughter. What I realized is my sense of abandonment was not really conscious. In essence my life - all of our early lives - just are. They are the only lives we know - they are what reality is, and no matter who one is, who we are - reality is flawed.

I have only one very concrete images of abandonment in my life. I think it may have been the second foster home. My mother had brought me to this house of a elderly couple (older than my mother). There is some vague sense that I was aware of the discussion. I was in their living room and they had this amazing (to me) ceramic/porcelain figurine of a dog that was big enough for me to sit on. The memory is that I was left alone in the living room, that my mother was going to talk to this couple in the other room and I was to be a 'good boy'. I sat on the couch and the dog was a huge temptation calling me to sit and play on it. I waited for my mother to return and I tried to resist the ceramic dog inviting me to play. I played, and I waited. Then I waited and eventually the woman return and offered to let me sleep in a bed, telling me that my mother would return later.

It was this moment that is the seed crystal to my sense of abandonment - something that I only really became aware of in my late 30s. The time with others to whom I was a 'visitor' rather than loved one was simply what reality was.

Finally at the age of five my grandmother had me move in with her and my step-grandfather. In my 40 I found out that my grandmother had remarried with the condition that with the insurance money that came with the death of my grandfather she would buy out the remaining mortgage my step-grandfather had on his house and I (and later my mother) would move in. I still don't know what my mother did in those years.

By the time I did move in with my grandmother - they were simply another 'home'. I don't know how many months/weeks it was before my mother moved in - but by then I was incapable of overcoming the 'stranging' that kids will enact when separated for a time from the parents. Stranging was what reality was.

But this house, which I live in now, which my youngest two kids grew up in became home. But more than the house, it was the community where I finally experienced some sense of rootedness.

These first years are a blur. I only knew French and my step-grandfather was English as was the neighbourhood. I don't remember how I learned English - how I made friends with the local kids. I had my father's name - Monette, my mother used her maiden name - Verdon and my grandmother had my step-grandfather's name - Comrie. In the 50s in the neighbourhood I now lived in - it was like I was from Mars. There was absolutely no other family like mine.

I remember eventually in making friends and meeting local families I initially identified as John Monette. At some point I told people that my real name was real name was Comrie and later that it was really and truly Verdon. I knew somehow this must have been confusing to others and that somehow I was - not lying but denying something about myself. That I was somehow wanting to construct myself as  'more normal'.

As I write this, what comes to mind is that the few friends and families that I became close with - whom became part of my 'tribe'. They must have reached out to me - seeing the strangeness of the family that had moved in - knowing the history of my grandfather's past in that house, they reached out with care and compassion. These were the days where I was Johnny.

Also it must have been confusing and strange to have this household of only four people with three different family names and single mother. I now remember how very confusing this was in the school system. Teachers would be asked what my name was and where I lived. It was not just that I had no father but that my mother had a different name as well. My first three years were in a Catholic school run by nuns an to be a son of a divorced mother must have created 'attitudes' that I did not understand but nonetheless ended up internalizing.

My step-grandfather was cold and distant and although we shared the same house my mother and I were required to have our own schedule and I was never allowed to have my friends come to my house to play or have a birthday party. Yet the families in my community made me an adopted friend, and brought me with them on so many summer outing to swim or to their cottage, to their houses to play.  I think this is the root of my obsessive focus on the importance of community. While always an 'alien' I was still able find some sense of belonging in this community who had the few families that reached out and let me in.

Some elements of my narrative

I am not sure exactly how I will unfold this exploration - other than let it unfold as it arises.

I have been an abandoned child, a long lost child, I have been the apple of my grandmother's eye. I have been a distant father, a long lost father, and a totally engaged father. I have abandoned my children, I have sacrificed myself for my children. I have been a scared and lonely boy, I have been 'Major Thom on an ethereal tether from ground control'. I have hidden in fear and run from responsibility (of all sorts), I have reached beyond my capability and volunteered to face an unknown. In all of these experiences and more - fear is ever present, fear of not doing and/or being; fear of doing and being.

Certainly my early infant and childhood have a lot to do with the pervasiveness of fear. My parents separated (later divorced) by the time I was six months. From that time, until I was five years old, I lived in a series of foster homes, some were relatives - the others I don't really remember or know. This period shaped the concrete sense of abandonment. There were incidences of physical abuse that I remember - but they were 'conventional' in that, in the context of the times, many parents could have been more violent with their own children and remained within the bound of normality. What made it especially violent for me - was the experience of 'orphanhood' that came with the always temporary fostering arrangements. However, the physical attention - whether physically violent or loving only came from women. I can remember only a distant type of silent attention from men during this stage of my life. What men were present - were distant and disengaged. I was not their child, or relation.

This was during the 50s. I don't know if the men had served in the war or not. The story of my father, that I later learned from my mother - was one of severe violence - that he had tried to kill both my mother and me. That  he suffered from 'schizophrenia'. I eventually made contact with my father (after the death of my mother) and while there had been violence, which he freely admitted - the intentions to kill and mental conditions were my mother's narrative creation. I don't know how much those very early conditions affected my orientation of fear.

What I do know, is that I don't remember any sort of positive contact with a male figure during the first five years of my life.

Why Fear of Men?

This blog like many important changes in my life has arisen from a conversation with one of my children - in this case my oldest daughter who has recently made me into a grandfather. In particular, producing two wonderful grandsons.

The conversation related to my grandsons, to myself as a father, as a common-father-in-law, and as a grandfather. It was not just about the roles I play but about what also ties them together, the cultural shaping and grappling with being a male and with what being a man entails.

What does fear have to do with this? It's true, fear is a primal common denominator with all humans. But I think each sex and all genders have, and are in some aspects, unique 'flavours' and dimensions of fear that shape our other primal emotions. I think fear is a good candidate as an exploratory lens because we so willingly flee and deny its influence in constructing our personal narratives and the social-cultural constructions with which we also shape our identity.

The fear of other men and the fear related to becoming and being a man - what that entails - the expectations from myself, my social-cultural others, will be the theme, the strange attractor, for the explorations, musings, reflections and re-accounting of this strange journey through maleness, boyhood and manhood (all wrapped with dimensions of individual personhood).