Gender Roles

I'm a newcomer to The Heart.

Writing that sentence, I realize that it's metaphorical. I am a newcomer to the heart, to my heart, to understanding and opening and sharing my heart.

But in this instance, I mean it literally. I'm a newcomer to The Heart, a Radiotopia podcast. I've filled my feed on the Podcast app on my phone with loads of podcasts to make my commute more pleasant and meaningful. Some of them I've gone back and listened to the back catalog of episodes and have an idea of how they developed over time, where they've been and where they may be going. With The Heart, I jumped right in and fell in love, which is not completely out of character for me.

I started with "Twirl," the first episode in their themed season "Pansy," described as "a season where masculinity and femininity meet." "Twirl" is in part described as exploring "what it means to be effeminate when you’re a straight cis-dude. Kaitlin talks to men who embrace and resist their femininity." The episode made me uncomfortable at the same time that I felt acknowledged and celebrated. I am not "effeminate." I've not been called a pansy. But it resonated like a bell rung deep in the cavernous depths of my soul and made me want to talk about it.

Cis is a relatively new concept for me. I first heard it last spring when I dove into the bizarre world of dating apps. I am cis. All these years, and I had no idea. It's hard for me to figure out how to talk about this. In the world I want to live in, it's meaningless. The moment of "Twirl" that I like best is the one in which the question is asked, if a man likes to twirl, why do we have to categorize that as effeminate, or feminine? Can someone who likes to twirl not be just someone who likes to twirl?

Culturally, we categorize and define. We want to make quick, broad judgments of ourselves and other people so that we can make predictions of behavior. Is this person us? Or is this person them? It is not practical or feasible to make meaningful interpersonal relationships with every human with whom we interact, so of course we make immediate judgments based on appearance, on voice, on mannerisms. Of course we do.

With so many differences among us because of differences in our cultures, histories, and upbringings, there is danger in applying those immediate judgments too broadly, in extrapolating too much information from them. What can one know, really know, about a man based on the observation that he gestures with his hands while talking, perhaps more than some others, or perhaps more grandiosely? Nothing meaningful.

For me, I have for most of my life felt a nagging, persistent sense of shame about the ways in which my personality, the true me that is born of so many different factors they cannot all be tracked, controlled, or even very deeply understood, does not mesh entirely with cultural norms for masculinity. When I was a child, my older brother wanted me to play a game with him in which we would take turns hitting each other with a broom stick until one of us quit. I did not want to play this game. To me, it seemed stupid and violent and pointless. Walking away, I felt weak and cowardly. To him, I suppose, that it was stupid and violent was the point. In the physicality lay the fun. He was more man than I.

I was on several sports teams in my youth, including soccer, baseball, and football. None of them were very successful, or successful at all really, and my enthusiasm and commitment were tepid. My 7th grade football team scored 2 points on a safety on the kick-off of the first game of the year and went scoreless the remainder of the season. I passed out one day running laps in the off season, and I was not terribly sad when that ended my football career. I did not live up to the manly potential of my large frame, and I always felt like I was a disappointment for that.

When I was 14, I spent the entire academic year avoiding a boy named David who wanted to fight me because of a selfish and thoughtless act I committed which wronged him. I was larger, but I knew nothing of fighting. As much as I didn't want to be physically hurt, I didn't want to embarrass myself with ineptitude, so I ducked and dodged and hid and avoided until he finally moved away the following summer.

Somewhere around the same time, I discovered that I liked helping my mother in the kitchen. I chopped vegetables for her, especially onions. I wore swim goggles while I did it to keep my eyes from burning. One day, I recall, she told me, "Some day you'll make someone a wonderful wife." I didn't take offense at the time, but the sentence has come back to me now and again in the years since. Though my marriage lasted 20 years, I was not, in fact, a wonderful wife. But I tried.

From the time that I was 6 until the time that I moved away to college at 19, my parents took in foster kids. In those 13 years, 38 children shared our home, one and two and three at a time, mostly babies under the age of two. I was by no means in charge of their welfare, or a nanny, or shared in a meaningful way any responsibility for their care. But! I did play with them sometimes. And feed them sometimes. And change a diaper or two now and again. And I enjoyed it.

So! Many years later, when my wife (or "future ex-wife" as my boss liked to accurately describe her in 1994 or so) and I decided we were ready to have a child, we discussed it. We agreed that it would be beneficial to that hypothetical child for one of his parents to stay home with him full-time. We could, of course, spend a lot of money on child care so that we could both continue to work after his birth, or we could take the huge cut in income that we were fortunate enough to be able to afford and commit to raising him entirely ourselves.

She (the future ex-wife) had a career, while I had a job. She expressed the belief that she would not enjoy full-time caretaking of a child. I expressed the belief that I would. I expressed the belief that my history with small children might have prepared me well for the experience (it didn't, but I learned on the job). So we agreed: I would become a full-time stay-at-home dad and find ways to supplement part-time her full-time salary.

So! All of that to say that this cis male with a history of failing to live up to the American cultural standard of masculinity became a stay-at-home parent, a man working in an industry dominated by women. It was, really, the beginning of me opening up my heart to who I really am, of opening up my heart to connecting with people. Austin Stay-at-Home Dads was the resource with which I connected because I had some fear of being shunned in public spaces for children, like playgrounds, of feeling like or being treated like a threat or a danger. I didn't know if men with children would be seen that way among women with children. The reality was that I was never treated that way at all. I was blessed with a son whose personality was innately sociable and outgoing. Usually, he would run ahead to the playground while I, his equipment manager, was still pulling the diaper bag and sand toys and tricycle out of the car. By the time I caught up with him, he would already be fully engaged in conversation with at least one mom. Spending my days with him was the first of several steps for me in connecting with people, which helped me be more comfortable with myself. Which helped me connect with people.

There were only a handful of times when I felt awkward about who I was and what I was doing, and only once that I can recall when I was dishonest about what that was. Each time, it was when interacting with men, not women. At my part-time job, which happened to be in the same building that my full-time employment had been, one of my male coworkers asked me not infrequently when I would be "coming back," by which he meant returning to full-time employment. At the time, I thought, "Would he be asking if I were a woman?" He often followed up the question with, "How old is your son now?" I understood the question to be an implication that beyond infancy, the value of a full-time stay-at-home parent decreases precipitously. He's three now? He's four? I was sure I detected a note of incredulity that I was still doing this. Now, looking back, I suspect that the question as it left his mouth did not mean the same to him as it did to me entering my ears. Perhaps rather than a judgment of my masculinity in choosing nurturing over providing, it was a reflection of his own values as they were developed over the course of his own history, such that the economic pressure of a single-income household would very quickly outpace the economic and other value of a full-time stay-at-home parent.

Most of the people who worked the same part-time job that I did also had full-time jobs, so when one of them asked me, "What's your other job?" I told him. My answer was met with awkward silence. After a moment, he asked, "How many kids do you have?" My answer of "one" was met with more awkward silence. Again, his awkwardness at how I spent my days may have had nothing to do with failing to understand why someone would choose to buck traditional gender roles. He may only have been wondering why anyone would do that full-time, especially when there was only one child. Maybe it just didn't sound like full-time work to him. Who knows? But at the time, I took it as judgment of my masculinity.

The only other time I felt uncomfortable, and the only time I wasn't honest about how I spent my days, was at a 5-year-old's birthday party. These were new acquaintances of ours, and I knew no one at the party other than the mother who had invited us. While my son was immediately and happily immersing himself into the new gang of friends, I was trying to fit in with the parents. The women were in the house, at the dining table and around the kitchen, talking about wine and homeschooling, and I had no knowledge or interest in either of those pursuits. The men were outside in the backyard around the grill, talking about golf and sports and beer and their professions. In their polo shirts and khakis (I may be misremembering these details), in the heart of the suburbs of a traditionally conservative county, segregated from the women and the children, talking about manly pursuits, I was not sure that they would be accepting of a man who cared not a rat's ass about sports, hadn't played golf well in his entire life and hadn't played at all in at least a decade, and who spent his days not furthering a lucrative career but playing villain to a miniature superhero, monster to a miniature monster hunter, planning snacks and playdates and naptimes. So when the inevitable, "What do you do?" came, I said I was a database developer. It was partially true. One of my part-time jobs involved maintaining a collection of FileMaker solutions that I had made during the course of my full-time employment, but it was hardly an accurate description of my life.

Would they have judged me negatively had I been honest? Maybe. Maybe not. I found out later that the husband of the mom who invited us, the man who was master of the grill and center of the professional and sports talk that day, expressed jealousy, when he eventually did find out what I did and how we met, that I had the opportunity to spend as much time with my son as I did. He wished that he had more time with his own kids and was nothing but positive about how I spent my time.

Through all of the years of that long story, I have been emotional. I am sensitive. In my relationships, I am at least as likely, and sometimes much more likely, to be the one who wants to talk about it. I take care of people. I hug. I talk. I listen. I bake cookies to say thank you. In the relationship before my current one, we sometimes joked that I was more of a woman than she was, and she more of a man. After meeting her father, to whom she was so similar in so many ways, I commented that I was dating an old fisherman from Minnesota, and it explained so much. I have, in the last decade become more and more comfortable with my feminine side. But must it be my feminine side? Can't it just be the nurturing side of me? Can't my masculinity be broad enough to include a love of talking and crying and nurturing? Yes. Yes it can.

So! The moral of this long story is: be yourself. I'm aware that it's easy and maybe flippant for me to say this. As a 45-year-old straight white man in middle class suburbia, there is no danger to me in being myself, even if that self is more and more unselfconsciously off-center from standard American cultural definitions of masculinity. To the degree that you can, though, and still keep yourself from harm: be yourself. We owe it to our nation, we owe it to humanity, to normalize the parts of the bell curve that do not fall along the center line. Be you. Be weird. Be visible. Be unashamed. Be kind.