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.