What kind of man? A note to some of my school-teachers

You told me, Miss Teacher, that I needed to be a man. But what kind of man did you want me to be?  You mocked and humiliated me at six years old, because men play rugby, and I refused.  Did you want me to be a humiliated man? 

Maybe you wanted a man compliant, who would cram himself into your narrow ideal: A rugby playing man.  Not the moffie* you named me in front of the kindergarten class.

Stop crying, you said. You can’t be a man if you cry.  What kind of man would that be?  A man who denies his sadness and his fears?  A man ashamed of his own tears?  A small man, emotionally stunted like the rest.  Incapable of expressing anything but gruff stoicism, the unacknowledged suffering – even to himself – poisoning his life in so many unconscious ways.

Mr Teacher, you caned me when I did something you thought was wrong.   Did you want me to grow up like you, with the view that beating a child is a good way to impress your views on him?  I would check the welts and bruises to see how long they would stay.  Up to three weeks I discovered.  If a parent beat a child like that today, they would in court charged with child abuse, for assault.  What would that teach me about being a man?  That if we disagree on how things are done then physical violence is a good way to solve the dispute.  I didn’t know it then, but I know it now, that your definition of manhood was narrow in the extreme.  Physical power trumps all: in the classroom, on the rugby field.  On the battlefield.  Institutionalised violence started early back in the 1970’s.

And what of you Miss Teacher?  You were very young and still a Miss.  I wonder now what kind of man you chose to share your life with.  I hope a man who is caring, a man who holds you when you cry, a man who can share his sadness and his fears;  his tears.  A man, I hope, who was strong enough to rise above the narrow band of being you tried to instil into the young boys in your care.  A man who solves his disputes by listening and sharing, not shouting and beating.  For if the latter is the case, you might be as miserable as I was when you and your kind tried to beat me into your constricted mould.

There was some value to all of this.  I was able to take the bullying of army life:  by suppressing who I was and what I felt and by keeping my thoughts in check.  I’d learned to tough it out and take the pain, all the way to the battlefields and back again.  Then I spent the rest of my life learning that I am much more than all that.  That the beating, fighting, killing and pretending to be ok with it all kind of man is not the only way.  There is a fuller, more whole kind of masculinity, I discovered, which requires me to be stronger, but in a different more compassionate way.

Replanted in the fertile soil of the freedom I created for myself, I grew beyond what Miss and Mr Teacher had in mind.  In spite of you I grew into a man.

*Moffie – derogatory word similar to “queer”