Glennon Doyle - Untamed

Our boys are born with great potential for nurturing, caring, loving, and serving. Let’s stop training it out of them.

Years ago, my ex-husband went out to dinner with an old friend who had just had a baby. They stayed out for hours, and when Craig got home, I said, “Tell me everything! What’s the baby’s name?”

Craig said, “Hm. I don’t know.”

I said, “What? Okay. How’s it going at home? Are they exhausted? Is the baby sleeping? How’s Kim doing with it all?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Okay. How’s his mother? Is the cancer getting worse?”

“He didn’t mention it.”

“Wait. What did you talk about for two hours?”

“I don’t know. Work. Soccer?”

I remember looking at Craig and thinking: I wouldn’t trade places with him for all the money in the world. I would not have made it through early parenting without honest friends to talk through how hard it all was. It must be so lonely to be a man. It must be so difficult to carry by yourself all the things we were meant to help each other carry.

I don’t want my son to be tamed into loneliness. So when I get stuck carpooling Chase and his friends all over God’s green Earth, I turn down the radio and say:

What was your most embarrassing moment this week?

What’s your favorite thing about Jeff? Juan? Chase?

Hey, guys: Who do you imagine is the loneliest kid in your class?

How do you feel during those active-shooter drills when you’re hiding in the closet with your friends?

In the rearview mirror, I catch them rolling their eyes at each other. Then they start talking, and I marvel at how interesting their inner thoughts, feelings, and ideas are.

I remember once one of the boys said something particularly vulnerable and the other boys giggled uncomfortably. I said, “Hey. Just remember that when you laugh at something someone has said, it’s not about the person who spoke. It’s about you. He was brave enough to be honest; you be brave enough to handle it. Life is hard; friends need to be safe places for each other.”

Our boys are just as human as our girls are. They need permission, opportunities, and safe places to share their humanity. Let’s encourage real, vulnerable conversations among our sons and their friends. Let’s ask about their feelings, relationships, hopes, and dreams so they don’t become middle-aged men who feel permitted to discuss only sports, sex, news, and the weather. Let’s help our boys become adults who don’t have to carry life alone.

My friend Jason told me that for the entirety of his childhood, he had cried only in the bathroom because his tears would bother his father and mother. “Man up,” they’d say.

He told me that he and his wife, Natasha, were trying to raise their son differently. They want Tyler to be able to express all of his emotions safely, so Jason has been modeling vulnerability by expressing himself more openly in front of his son and his wife. After he told me that he said, “This might be in my head, but I feel like when I try to get vulnerable, Natasha gets uncomfortable. She says she wants me to be sensitive, but the two times I’ve cried in front of her or admitted that I was afraid, I’ve felt her pull back.”

Natasha is my dear friend, so I asked her about that. When I told her what Jason had said, she looked surprised: “I can’t believe he noticed that, but he’s right. When he cries, I feel weird. I am embarrassed to say that what I feel is kind of like disgust. Last month he admitted that he was afraid about money. I told him we would get through it together, but, on the inside, I felt myself thinking: Man up, dude. MAN UP? I’m a feminist, for God’s sake. It’s terrible. It doesn’t make any sense.”

It’s not terrible, and it makes perfect sense. Since women are equally poisoned by our culture’s standards of manhood, we panic when men venture out of their cages. Our panic shames them right back in. So we must decide whether we want our partners, our brothers, our sons to be strong and alone or free and held.

Perhaps part of a woman’s freeing herself is freeing her partner, her father, her brother, and her son. When our men and boys cry, let’s not say to them with our words or energy, “Don’t cry, honey.” Let’s get comfortable allowing our men to gently and consistently express the pain of being human, so that violent release isn’t their go-to option. Let’s embrace our strength so our men can take their turn being soft. Let us—men, women, and all those in between or beyond—reclaim our full humanity.

When Tish was nine, she and I went to our favorite bookstore together. As we walked inside, Tish stopped and stared at a magazine rack—a wall of cover models, each blonder, thinner, and more vacant than the last. All ghosts and dolls. Tish stared.

As usual, I was tempted to distract her, hurry her along, put it all behind us. But these messages cannot be put behind us, because they are everywhere. Either we leave our kids alone to make sense of them, or we wade in with them.

I put my arm around Tish, and we quietly looked at the covers together for a moment.

ME: Interesting, isn’t it? What story are they telling you about what it means to be a woman?

TISH: I guess that women are very skinny. And blond. And have white pale skin. And wear a lot of makeup and tall shoes and barely any clothes.

ME: What do you think about that story? Look around this store. Do the women in this store match the idea about women these magazines are selling?

Tish looked around. A gray-haired employee was straightening books near us. A Latina woman was flipping through a paperback on the memoir table. A very pregnant woman with blue punky hair was wrangling with a cookie-eating toddler.

TISH: No. Not at all.

We drove home, and Tish disappeared into her room. Fifteen minutes later, she opened her door and yelled down the stairs, “MOM! HOW DO YOU SPELL PETITION?”

I googled it. Hard word.

A little while later, she came downstairs to the kitchen holding a handmade poster. She cleared her throat and began to read: HELP SAVE HUMANITY

Dear world, this is a petition to show that I, Tish Melton, strongly feel that magazines should not show beauty is most important on the outside. It is not. I think magazines should show girls who are strong, kind, brave, thoughtful, unique, and show women of all different types of hair and bodies. ALL women should be treated EQUALLY.

I liked her idea so much. It wasn’t enough for women to have equality with men; they needed equality with each other.

I cannot rid my children’s air of all the lies they’ll be told about what it means to become a real woman or man. But I can teach them how to be critics of the culture instead of blind consumers of it. I can train my children to detect those lies and get angry instead of swallowing them and getting sick.

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD ME: That’s the truth about women. I will match it.

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: That’s a lie about women. I will challenge it.

TISH: Chase wants me to join the same club he joined in middle school. I don’t want to.

ME: So don’t.

TISH: But I don’t want to disappoint him.

ME: Listen. Every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your duty is to disappoint that someone else. Your job, throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.

TISH: Even you?

ME: Especially me.

EIGHT-YEAR-OLD TISH: Keri doesn’t like me.

THIRTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD ME: Why not? What happened? What can we do to make it better?

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD TISH: Sara doesn’t like me.

FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD ME: Okay. Just a fact, not a problem.