Will you be our mother?

Sound familiar? If you too have managed to attract enough Lost Boys to field a football team, we’re more similar than previously thought. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but over the last few years I’ve noticed a definite pattern present in the men who come a’knocking at my door. Either they are so old that they do it with a Parkinson’s tremor, need their food made denture friendly, and a microchip so they don’t wander off from the home again; or so young and miserable that they only want red wine, and will ask for the cork in order to plug their stigmata. Although a staple gun and a barcode can fix the elderlys without too much hassle, it is these guys my own age, these unhappy men, men with problems, men continually searching, that are tricky. It doesn’t seem to matter where I am or who I’m with, I always seem to find (or be found by, I’m not quite sure which) men who need someone to talk with, someone to lean on, someone to help them weather the storm. These are guys who don’t just have baggage; they have their own cargo hold.

Yet so many of the men I know have this fragility, a definite eggshell quality that lies beneath the occasionally-muscled façade. Perhaps that’s one of the joys of spending time with people who ‘think’ for a living, but I’m not entirely convinced that this is so. Rather, I wonder if it’s symptomatic of the general lack of communication and coping skills of so many men out there, something that is perhaps no great surprise to anyone who has a father, brother, husband, or boyfriend. Interestingly, men supposedly use (on average) less than two thirds of a woman’s spoken vocabulary. Thus they seem to be hardwired, or at the very least predestined, to work, play, and, of course, suffer in silence. In Australia, male suicides outnumber female by about 4-1.
A young Australian guy I met recently articulated this differences in a way both poignant and telling. We’d been discussing his family issues and relationships, when he said: “I don’t read, so when stuff happens or things go wrong, I want to talk about it, and, you know, express it, but when I really need to, I try and … I just don’t have … the words”. I knew he wasn’t the most ‘literary’ of my acquaintances, but he was clever and eloquent, and his confession left me genuinely floored. I tried to imagine a world in which my tools of self-expression—reading, writing, and talking—were either denied or out of reach, and simply couldn’t make it work. What would it feel like to look within and find a dyslexic game of Scrabble? How would you cope with a death, a break up, a friend’s betrayal, if all you had to work with was the equivalent of Pig Latin?

I listened to him continue with story, one not dissimilar from many men that I have known, and wondered again at what actually made him this time, and in this place, so haltingly spill it. Was it because we were both on our own? Was it the beer? Or was it just because I was female? And what was he looking for? Just the comfortable anonymity of a fellow country(wo)man who could understand right now but who would never turn up later in his ‘real’ life? Or was he seeking the opportunity to discuss and change the life that had led him thus far? Whatever it was, afterwards I began to ruminate on his admissions, and the strange fact that I often elicit such confessions from people, without ever been entirely sure why: I’m fairly sure that I wouldn’t go to me if I had a problem.

Unlike when I was younger, however, I’m also now more cautious of my entanglements with these people. I listen rather than expound, and facilitate rather than advise. After too many encounters with men on self-destructo, or those longing to be fixed, I find that I’m getting slightly wary of the Sati game, and approach such guys with an equal mixture of compassion and caution. It seems wrong sometimes to worry about how to extricate my own life from this unhappiness, and as I get older I wonder whether self-preservation is the aim of the game, no matter how uncharitable it makes me feel.

Perhaps it’s worth remembering who shoots the ´Wendy bird´.