Sometimes talking about our emotions isn’t all we think it’s cracked up to be.
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In 2014, after eight years blogging about gender stereotypes and my experiences within my own family I published my book Reservoir Dad.
It’s been marketed mostly as a funny book – and it is that – but what makes me most proud about it, when looking back, and what didn’t get publicity as often, is that right beside all the humour is the most honest account I could possibly give of how my role as the main carer of my children affected me and opened me up emotionally.
During the writing process I half remembered, half discovered feelings of insecurity, overwhelming levels of love and affection, and moments of deep despair. Among other things, I wrote about my long drawn-out grieving after a miscarriage and how I even tried to keep the depth of my grief from my wife Tania. I opened up on the giddy kind of love that rolled in and out of all the domestic drudgery to keep me pumping and optimistic, and about how it was me – not Tania – who got ‘clucky’ as each of our boys outgrew their baby-ness.
It wasn’t an easy thing to be so open and I think some of the humour may have been there as a coping mechanism and as a way of deflecting and it helped that I wrote at night, alone and unobserved. But Iwas conscious of the fact that there weren’t many men writing so honestly about their interior lives, and especially from the vantage point of what many people would call a ‘role reversal’.
I knew revealing my inner workings like that would be a great thing for my boys. To see a man being emotional and open would deliver all the right messages to help them to rebel and reject the male stereotypes that had infused a fear of emotion and intimacy into their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
I was also aware that it would be a good thing for my own emotional growth and that it might even be of benefit to other men because despite all the positives happening in terms of men being involved in pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and child rearing, I still knew of men who boasted of never changing a nappy, or never spoke of their own experience in a birthing ward. I knew men who talked of the struggle their wives were having adjusting to life with a new baby, without any mention of how they were feeling themselves, despite the hunched shoulders, the dark eyes, the clear signs of struggle and stress. And I knew men who decided to keep working at a job they disliked, despite the potential for their wives to earn more than them, simply because of the way they assumed society would perceive them.
What’s keeping these poor men back, I thought, so full of myself. What can be done to encourage them out of the man box?
Not too long after that my smug little self was hit hard with a surprising moment of self-awareness. I was cutting some carrots for dinner while Tania and I were discussing the approach of Tyson’s first year at primary school when I started feeling the constriction in my throat as I imagined him wandering in to class with his backpack on and dressed in his tiny uniform. And then I remembered how four years ago, after taking Lewis to his first day at school, that I’d clamped up as best I could and only just managed to get to the car before a few tears appeared.
I remembered being at the birth of our first son Archie and making a few jokes right at moments when I was genuinely scared. And when I was at my most fearful, with Tania and Archie’s life completely out of my hands, with no control on my immediate future, I swallowed my panic, fell quiet, and diverted my desire to ask for reassurance because there was the very likely possibility that I might break down and cry.
When we went in excitedly for the scan of our fourth baby several years later, only to find out that it had died, I was devastated and attempted to withdraw again. If Tania hadn’t come to find me distraught and inconsolable in the garage/gym, and if I hadn’t gone on to write about that experience later, she may never have known how deeply I was affected.
And then it happened, as I was staring at half a cut carrot thinking about another significant milestone for our family, as I imagined Tyson running across the school quadrangle and waving goodbye from his place on the classroom mat, I realized I was already planning ahead to make sure I didn’t take my completely normal and natural emotional self out into a public place. I was going to wear sunglasses. I was going to distract myself by talking to the teachers about practical things. I was going to crack some jokes with Tania and keep my mind on tasks I had to do later in the day. Whatever I had to do to hold the emotion down and hide it away.
I’ve always been aware of this on some level of course but it was only right at that moment that the full significance of it hit me and I was gob-smacked by the fact that I’d been running and hiding from emotion my entire life.
For the first time in my life, at forty-one years of age, I was struck by this very obvious question: Why am I so scared of emotion?
This is Part 2 of a 3 Part Series. Please read part one here.
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Originally posted on Reservoir Dad.com
Photo: Flickr/Patrick Q