On November 22, 1963 - 50 years ago today - my mother and father, Betty Joan and Jack DeWitt finally realized their biggest dream: having a child. It was an adoption, as they had found out several years earlier that they could not get pregnant. They picked me up from the adoption agency and drove home with me. When they arrived home they heard the big news of the day.
John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
People around the country reacted with shock and horror at the murder of their President. My birth mother (who I found in 2009) said that it was one of the first events she remembered from the year 1963. She had ended her alcoholism when she found out she was pregnant with me by entering A.A. and gave birth to me on October 27. She asked not to see me so she could stay strong, and I was in foster care for the next four weeks. Kennedy's assassination was the first clear image she has from her life at that point. She said she remembers walking through downtown Denver and seeing grown men walking down the street, sobbing out loud in public. She remembers the underlying sense of fear that everyone shared, wondering how the nation would survive. "Would we be all right?", she recalled to me recently.
When I think about what my parents emotions must have been that day, it is almost incomprehensible. The joy of finally having a child of their own juxtaposed against the horror of the day's event playing out before their eyes on television - the first televised assassination. What could they have been feeling? No one would have faulted them if they chose to turn off the TV and cocoon themselves, ignoring the mayhem.
My adoptive mother was not an easy person to grow up with, but when the chips were down, she always made the right parenting decision, every time. I think this was the first chance she had to do that, and she did it right. Years later, she would tell me that she felt a sense that it would somehow be my legacy to fill JFK's shoes. Not literally, of course; not to be President. But certainly figuratively, to be a good man (at least she thought JFK was) and to fulfill whatever promise I had for my life.
When I was a kid, that was hard to listen to at times. The last thing you want to hear when you are 12 years old and just want to go out and ride a skateboard with your buddy is some hoohaw about how you have a legacy to fulfill. But I do think that single decision on her part, to accept the assassination and make it into a positive for my life, affected all of the other decisions she made as I grew up which were right. Stan wants to play music? Support him. Stan gets busted shoplifting with some friends? Ground him quietly and make it into a teaching moment. Stan hangs out with the wrong friends? (See above.) Find new outlets for him to make new ones. Stan drank some of my wine and thinks he won't get caught? Just quietly let him know he got caught. Somehow the idea that I had a 'legacy' to fulfill animated her parenting.
Oh, to be sure, she made some bad choices. Throwing the frying pan at me one time was not a great one. The occasional blind rages fueled by menopause? Not good. Trying to scare me out of having sex with a girl by saying she'd "kill me" if I ever got a girl pregnant? Yeah, that one messed with me for a long time. She was a human with deep anxieties and fears of her own. But those were all excusable mistakes that didn't really matter. When it mattered, when the time came to really do the right thing, she did, every time.
As I said, today is the 50th anniversary of that day. I celebrated my 50th birthday a few weeks ago, and my thoughts on that day were with my birth mother. But on this day, they are with my adoptive mother and father, who brought me home on one of the worst days in American history.
In some sense, John F. Kennedy has kind of always hung around the edges of my life. We share that one day of horror/joy, of course. When I was in high school, the conspiracy stories were continuing, and my American History teacher devoted a whole unit to JFK's assassination. There have been countless movies, docudramas, books, magazine articles and TV shows devoted to him and Nov. 22. And they all make me think of my mother.
How many people can say that? "I say 'JFK assassinated', what's the first thing you think of?"
"Mom."
Well, Mom and Dad. I am thinking of you this day. For all intents and purposes to you, this was my birthday. Happy birthday to me. And thank you.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Saturday, November 9, 2013
On Being a "Good Man"
Ta-Nehisi Coates recently wrote a post about football hall-of-gamer Tony Dorsett's announcement that he was suffering from CTE, due to years of concussions. In it, TNC writes this:
Reading that last sentence helped crystallize something for me that has been rolling around in my head the last few months.
I turned 50 two weeks ago, and for whatever reason, the universe decided it was a perfect time to bring some of my emotional trigger points around for a good dust-off. Family members who I haven't spoken to in years, family members going through divorce, friends going through divorce, my ex-wife popping back up with a flash drive of pictures for me, most of which I had completely forgotten about. All of this happened within weeks of my birthday, and forced me to deal with some emotional baggage I would have preferred to ignore. But I've dealt.
Where it has taken me is to the question "what does it mean to be a 'good man'?"
I felt a lot of love at my birthday party, and from my friends, family and members of the church where I work. So I'm not really debating whether or not I am a good man; I tend to believe that, by and large, I am. But I have been wondering about what truly defines a good man. Is it honesty? Virility? Kindness? Some combination of things?
The reason TNC's post helped crystallize it for me is twofold: First, I think men often mistake 'manhood' or 'strength' with being a good man. Our culture rewards men who are individualistic and rugged, and often penalizes men who are soft or emotional. (As much as I hate John Boehner, I think the political left's mockery of his crying jags is pretty repulsive.) And I think that is wrong.
To be sure, part of being a good man is having strength, but I think that emotional strength is as important as physical or mental strength. But the key, as I see it, is balance: balance between a developed sense of the typically masculine attributes of strength, sexuality, and emotional toughness and a sense of the typically feminine attributes of kindness, sensuality and emotional openness.
But as my wife, Lynda, pointed out to me, the same thing can be said of women. It's the balance for both sexes that makes a good human. Perhaps the balance is harder for men in 2013, I don't really know. My parents' generation was definitely patriarchal; my generation is perhaps one of the first that has been able to embrace gender equality. This also means the men in my generation have been the first to have to figure out their roles in a balanced society. All of this is probably much more personal than universal. Having had no significant male role models growing up, how to be a 'man' has been a struggle for me my whole life. But it has certainly made me more open to the feminine attributes in the balance scheme.
Of course, there is one key trait to being a good man (or human, really) that applies here, too: honesty. By that, I mean both honesty with others and honesty with yourself. My friends and family who are going through the divorces right now are reeling from the repercussions of dishonesty. In the case of my friends, it is ultimately his lying that is unforgivable, more so than his infidelity. He was seeking out an outlet for what he felt would make him a better man: tapping into his idea of sexual virility and power. But through his lies, he has completely come undone and recast himself as the lowliest caricature of human frailty and hubris. If I could see him today, I truly would want to beat the shit out of him, and I have never said that about another man, ever.
…but that takes me right back to TNC's post, and the whole point of this ramble. Beating the crap out of a man, regardless of how ugly and horrible his actions have been, and how much damage he has done to people I love, would dishonor the balance that I so seek to find. It would feel good, for a few minutes. But it would ultimately only serve to prove to him that his way of finding himself through power and strength and virility is the right path.
And there it is. The self-awareness to understand that the person I am now is not the person I want to be should lead me to be willing and able to accept change inside myself. I cannot change what he did, nor can I help him change; that is up to him. I can only work on changing myself. So for me, for today, being a 'good man' means being balanced and restrained, being completely honest with myself and others, and always striving for change inside myself. I may not end up getting somewhere when my days are done. I may look back and see that my mistakes outnumber my triumphs. The world may or may not be a better place when I leave it, and it may or may not have anything to do with me.
But I will know that I changed. And that will be enough.
"It's getting harder, the more I read, to find any valor in violence. Even self defense is a kind of failure, a breakdown, a submission. Perhaps this is our world and the job of a moral human is just to try to, somehow, live honorably in it. It's been two seasons, now, since I gave up my religion. Everything I have seen since has confirmed my feeling. I did not want the world to change. I would settle for myself."
Reading that last sentence helped crystallize something for me that has been rolling around in my head the last few months.
I turned 50 two weeks ago, and for whatever reason, the universe decided it was a perfect time to bring some of my emotional trigger points around for a good dust-off. Family members who I haven't spoken to in years, family members going through divorce, friends going through divorce, my ex-wife popping back up with a flash drive of pictures for me, most of which I had completely forgotten about. All of this happened within weeks of my birthday, and forced me to deal with some emotional baggage I would have preferred to ignore. But I've dealt.
Where it has taken me is to the question "what does it mean to be a 'good man'?"
I felt a lot of love at my birthday party, and from my friends, family and members of the church where I work. So I'm not really debating whether or not I am a good man; I tend to believe that, by and large, I am. But I have been wondering about what truly defines a good man. Is it honesty? Virility? Kindness? Some combination of things?
The reason TNC's post helped crystallize it for me is twofold: First, I think men often mistake 'manhood' or 'strength' with being a good man. Our culture rewards men who are individualistic and rugged, and often penalizes men who are soft or emotional. (As much as I hate John Boehner, I think the political left's mockery of his crying jags is pretty repulsive.) And I think that is wrong.
To be sure, part of being a good man is having strength, but I think that emotional strength is as important as physical or mental strength. But the key, as I see it, is balance: balance between a developed sense of the typically masculine attributes of strength, sexuality, and emotional toughness and a sense of the typically feminine attributes of kindness, sensuality and emotional openness.
But as my wife, Lynda, pointed out to me, the same thing can be said of women. It's the balance for both sexes that makes a good human. Perhaps the balance is harder for men in 2013, I don't really know. My parents' generation was definitely patriarchal; my generation is perhaps one of the first that has been able to embrace gender equality. This also means the men in my generation have been the first to have to figure out their roles in a balanced society. All of this is probably much more personal than universal. Having had no significant male role models growing up, how to be a 'man' has been a struggle for me my whole life. But it has certainly made me more open to the feminine attributes in the balance scheme.
Of course, there is one key trait to being a good man (or human, really) that applies here, too: honesty. By that, I mean both honesty with others and honesty with yourself. My friends and family who are going through the divorces right now are reeling from the repercussions of dishonesty. In the case of my friends, it is ultimately his lying that is unforgivable, more so than his infidelity. He was seeking out an outlet for what he felt would make him a better man: tapping into his idea of sexual virility and power. But through his lies, he has completely come undone and recast himself as the lowliest caricature of human frailty and hubris. If I could see him today, I truly would want to beat the shit out of him, and I have never said that about another man, ever.
…but that takes me right back to TNC's post, and the whole point of this ramble. Beating the crap out of a man, regardless of how ugly and horrible his actions have been, and how much damage he has done to people I love, would dishonor the balance that I so seek to find. It would feel good, for a few minutes. But it would ultimately only serve to prove to him that his way of finding himself through power and strength and virility is the right path.
"I would settle for myself."
And there it is. The self-awareness to understand that the person I am now is not the person I want to be should lead me to be willing and able to accept change inside myself. I cannot change what he did, nor can I help him change; that is up to him. I can only work on changing myself. So for me, for today, being a 'good man' means being balanced and restrained, being completely honest with myself and others, and always striving for change inside myself. I may not end up getting somewhere when my days are done. I may look back and see that my mistakes outnumber my triumphs. The world may or may not be a better place when I leave it, and it may or may not have anything to do with me.
But I will know that I changed. And that will be enough.
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