Ben Shaberman shares how he became a man who cries. It was a surprise, beginning with a movie and an unexpected connection to his father.
My mother says she cried every morning when she dropped me off at a friend’s house or nursery school. It was never her plan to be a working single mother of three — of which I was the youngest — but as such in the 1960s, she was way ahead of her time. Most mothers were still staying at home to raise their children.
I don’t remember crying or being particularly sad back then — I was so young it was hard to recall much of anything — but I do vaguely recall feeling overwhelmed by the world as it presented itself to me. We moved around a lot, from one old apartment building to another. I was a small child, and shuffled around during the day between my mother’s friends, my older sister and brother, extended family, and neighbors. The driver of the nursery school bus that brought me home always had me sit in the front seat, so I didn’t get lost, the little pisher that I was.
I did have a memorable crying episode when I was 8-years old. I was part of a group of boys who were caught vandalizing our neighborhood elementary school. During our hearing in juvenile court, I bawled my brains out as the judge read the charges against me and my co-conspirators. My probation officer, a balding, no-nonsense guy named Mr. DiCillo, did an outstanding job convincing me that I was destined for indefinite incarceration in the county detention home if I didn’t get my act together. He pointed to the barred door of the DH outside his office and said, “That’s where they put juvenile delinquents. They won’t hesitate to lock you up and throw away the key. You don’t want to be a delinquent, do you?” Well, he scared me straight, for the most part, and I walked out of court with just a $25 trespassing fine, a wet shirtsleeve, and no hard time.
But I was ostensibly a non-crier as I moved through middle school, senior high, and college. Luckily, my family didn’t experience horrible tragedies during that time, though I did lose a grandfather, a grandmother, and a great aunt. But through all of those losses, I shed virtually no tears.
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In 1986, almost a year after I graduated college, my father lost a six-month battle with lung cancer at the age of 57. Actually, it wasn’t the cancer that killed him, but complications he struggled with after he had a lung removed. Because of congestive heart failure and other cardiac issues, he had very little energy and was never able to wean himself off oxygen.
The last time I saw my dad, he was on a ventilator in the intensive care unit at a hospital in Cincinnati. I had come down from Cleveland, 250 miles away, to visit him. Because he had been in and out of the hospital several times, I didn’t think his death was imminent. I knew he was weak, but no one indicated to me that he was on his way out. Through a series of hand motions and scribblings on a piece of paper, he was able to let me know that there was some cash in a drawer in his apartment that he wanted me to take. I found the money. He died a few days later.
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My mother divorced my father when I was barely a toddler, primarily because he didn’t keep a regular job. He was an extraordinarily intelligent guy, a talented photographer, opera aficionado, and a licensed plumber. He was best known for his ability to fix just about anything — washers, driers, toilets, furnaces, jack hammers, you name it. But apparently, when I was just a baby, he preferred to stay in the basement tinkering at his workbench all day, doing his own thing, rather than taking on an income-producing day job. That forced my mother back into the working world and divorce court.
Later in life, my dad worked more steadily, though moving from job to job. With his know-how, he was a highly valuable resource. I met a couple of his bosses, who absolutely loved him. They called him “Stan the Man,” because he was their go-to guy when they had a seemingly insurmountable challenge. I remember watching him as he spent an entire weekend in the engine compartment of his boss’s cabin cruiser, making all sorts of refurbishments and repairs. I am betting my dad didn’t know a bow from a stern before that job, but he figured out what he needed to and made his boss a happy guy.
When I was a kid, my father did his best to entertain me on the weekends, taking me to movies, bowling, and fishing. On Friday evenings, I’d sit on the couch in front of my living room window, waiting for him to pull up in his blue Chevy Biscayne. Happy to see me, he’d always say, “Benny old bean,” as I got into the car. On the way to his apartment, he’d sing old movie and show tunes in a deep voice, a toothpick dropping with his lower lip when he projected in lower ranges. He’d love to tell me stories about old-school actors like Alan Ladd and Edward G. Robinson. He knew I had no idea who he was talking about, but he just couldn’t hold back his enthusiasm for yammering on about all the trivia and memories stuffed away in his head.
During my junior year of high school, I tried living with him — an experiment that failed miserably after he figured out I was getting stoned all the time and cutting classes. As his only child — my siblings had a different dad — I had been his only hope for establishing any type of family legacy, and it broke his heart to see me going nowhere. After one occasion when he tried desperately to reprimand me for my behavior by grounding me and taking away driving privileges, I abruptly moved back with my mother. He and I didn’t talk again for seven years, only reestablishing communication just as I was graduating college, about a year before he was diagnosed with cancer.
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I didn’t cry at my dad’s funeral. No doubt I was sad. He was relatively young, and he had suffered for several months, constantly running to the ER with plummeting red and white cell counts. Furthermore, he never remarried and didn’t have many friends — he had been a loner most of his life — so except for my aunt and me, there weren’t many people to help him keep his spirits up while he was convalescing. He liked keeping to himself. And he ultimately died alone with no friends or family at his side.
But I had a hard time making sense of my feelings for him. He and I never really got to know one another, and I can’t say that we ever had a single intimate conversation. I felt guilty for not being more upset at his death, but deep feelings of loss were simply not there for me.
Back when I got busted for breaking into school, my dad really struggled with how to be a father. He feigned anger, and proceeded to make me explain every detail of the crime. We even drove over to the school so I could show him the window that the other perpetrators and I went through to get inside. But in the end, he was more frustrated than anything else because there was nothing he could do, and we both knew there would be never be any punishment. I had friends who would have had the shit beat out of them. Others whose dads would have grounded them or made them do yard work or clean the basement. But as an every-other-weekend father, he was both mystified and powerless. I even felt sorry for him because this was such unfamiliar territory, and at the same time, his hands were tied. That father-son moment seemed like a charade to me, and was indicative how much space was between us. Ultimately, it was a big gap that never went away.
After my father’s funeral, a small group of family sat shiva at my aunt’s house, telling stories about my dad’s love of music and opera, his talents as a fixer of all things mechanical, and how he and my aunt had had a hard time growing up with just their mom, my grandma Leah, who had divorced my grandfather and namesake, Benjamin Shaberman, because of his gambling problems. She, like my mother, struggled to make it financially. I learned a lot about family history during those few days — a history my father was probably ashamed or embarrassed to reveal to me. And it sounded like the next generation, my parents, was just repeating that history. For the first time, I began to get a real sense of why my father was so upset about my shortcomings as a teenager.
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Life moved on for me, and over the next three years, I moved to Washington, D.C., achieved some success in technology marketing, entered graduate school at the University of Maryland, and early in 1989, became engaged to an attractive and effervescent middle-school drama teacher. All was not perfect between Lori and me — we both harbored strong fears of marriage and commitment because of our family histories — and she was particularly upset at my tendency to withdraw when things didn’t go my way. We disagreed about a lot of things: when to have sex, when to have dinner, and when it was time to stop bitching about our troubles at work. I pouted like a three-year-old when I got frustrated or unhappy, and Lori went berserk when I didn’t respond well to her neuroses.
So, we entered couples therapy where Lori was tasked with chilling out while my mission was to learn to express my feelings better. Let’s just say I wasn’t exactly jazzed about the process. For novices like me, therapy can initially feel like a trap. You are encouraged to be open and honest, so you might say something like, “My fiancee is a real dipwad,” and through what seems like psychological prestidigitation, the therapist reveals that you are really the dipwad because of something your parents did (or didn’t do) to you when you were five. Given that our therapist was ultimately correct in her assessments about 75 percent of the time — batting .750 is pretty damn good no matter what your game is — I bought into the process and worked hard to be more open about my feelings. But my progress was slow.
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Speaking of batting averages, a few months after we started couples brainwashing — an exercise that ultimately did not save our relationship — Lori and I happened to see a Saturday afternoon matinee of “Field of Dreams” in a packed theater at a mall. On paper, the plot of the movie was rather hokey. A guy in Iowa builds a baseball field on his farm after hearing a voice of unknown origin imploring him to “build it and he will come.” Given that the movie plot involved baseball, I was willing to suspend disbelief about a voice from the heavens and major league ghosts. I even pretended to believe that Kevin Costner could act.
The movie starts with Costner bitching about his late father who desperately wanted young Kevin to be a ballplayer. Then Kevin hears the voice, and instead of more prudently seeking psychiatric help, he builds the ball field in about two minutes while draining the Costner family piggybank. As viewers learn, the voice’s ultimate agenda is to reunite Costner with his deceased father. And to no ones surprise, his dad shows up on the field at the end of the movie to play catch with Kevin.
Well, it was during the final scene that I completely and unequivocally lost it. Whatever dam or barrier had been holding back my feelings for my father suddenly gave way, and I was overcome by a veritable tsunami of emotion. Chock one up for therapy. For several minutes, I sat there with my hands in my face, bawling so much I was barely able to breathe. After the audience cleared, I continued sobbing on the way out to the parking lot.
Lori drove me to the track of a local high school where we walked laps as I continued to cry and talk about my father, primarily my sadness over his solitary life and the fact that he, and I missed the opportunity to develop a strong bond. Looking back years later, I have come to realize that at the age of 25, the age I was when he died, I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to even want more intimacy with him. And I will never know what he was capable of or wanted with me. I don’t cast blame on anyone for what we never had.
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But that moment in the spring of 1989 flipped the crying switch in me; I went from being rather emotionally shut down to a prolific crier, at least by guy standards. Now I can lose it during all sorts of songs, movies, and stories about animal rescues or people who have accomplished incredible feats or overcome adversities. I am a real sucker for this world’s underdogs. I even cried once while resigning from a job I hated.
I’ve also recently become somewhat of a morning crier. I’m not sure exactly why — I’ve never been much of a morning person or maybe it is a consequence of male menopause — but mornings can be all gloom and doom for me, when I feel like they should be filled with promise and excitement of the new day. I imagine mornings for me were like what Aprils were for T.S. Eliot.
The good news is: I feel better after I cry, and once I get into the office and work for a couple hours of work, I am back to my jovial self for the rest of the day.
I’ve wondered recently if my occasional morning crying episodes have anything to do with those early days when my mother handed me off to other people before heading into work. Maybe I am finally getting over all those separations from my mother? Maybe I harbored sadness for her tears and am just now getting in touch with it? Maybe I am in an emotional catch-up mode for all those years I didn’t cry about anything, and at the same time, just a sensitive guy?
Whatever the case, I have no doubt that I’ll forever be grieving the loss of my father — both for what we had and what were never able to build. It’s a huge hole I’ll never be able to fill as much as I might try. And while I have done some things differently from my father, perhaps what is most difficult for me is that now, every day, I understand a little better what it was like to be him.
Photo: Pat/Flickr