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).