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The Absent Men: Too Personal a Tale
To say that I had no male role models in my life would not be an exaggeration. I have had absolutely none from my early childhood to today, although the issue of role models is somewhat in the rearview mirror of my life now. My father was a troubled man. He failed at almost everything he did with the exception of his years playing high school baseball. I try to imagine my own last positive experiences having been in high school and I cringe. How could that have been for a man who seemed destined to achieve? My best memories of my father are of playing catch on a road that bordered our home in Rhode Island, and that’s it. I wonder if my performance on the Little League field in my hometown was shadowed by my father’s presence at games. It must have been since I excelled and loved sandlot baseball with no adults and our own informal rules, which turned out to be none.
My father lost at almost everything he attempted besides building a vacation getaway near a lake a few miles from our home. There were so many lies told in my family that it’s impossible to know with any certainty whether or not the story of his discharge from the army during World War II was true. The story went that a beam fell on his back and the military gave him the choice of either having surgery or being discharged. I can’t imagine what it must have been like living in our hometown during the war and having no one his age to relate to. Even worse, he was probably looked at as a slacker during a war which was a just cause.
My father inherited a successful clothing business from his father, who committed suicide in 1944. Suicide in those days was a closely held secret. I only found out about the grandfather I never met when my mother died, and a neighbor related the story. It seems to me that when I questioned my aunt about her father’s death, the details she related may have been inaccurate or cooked up. My surviving grandfather was absent from my life. We had absolutely no meaningful conversations and did nothing together, which is exactly the opposite of how I relate to my grandchildren.
I had a few role models who were men in high school, but that was a much different situation than real role models. My father remained distant and emotionless until his death. I recall spurts of violence and serious depression by my father, who could not seem to make a living for the family, an expectation in the 1950s and 1960s that was a given.
The fathers of young women I dated were either hostile or withdrawn for many reasons. The family of the young woman I dated in high school did not like me. My take on it was that my ethnic/religious background and the fact that I was in college bothered them. My first real relationship during and after college saw open hostility between the young woman’s father and me. It was humorous, as the family of the girl dated in high school perhaps saw me as too smart, and the opposite was true with my first serious relationship in college. The next serious relationship I had saw the history of the young woman’s father as a violent man who committed an unspeakable violent act against her younger brother.
Not to sound like a car’s engine that will not start, but my relationship with the family of the woman who I married was equally bizarre. Like my father, my wife’s father was mentally ill, but to a more serious degree. In our entire non-relationship, until his death in 1989, I had one conversation with him that was comprised of a few sentences. I wish I could joke about that, but that was the extent of our nonexistent relationship. My brother-in-law was also mentally ill and unable to form relationships or relate on any, even marginal, basis.
A relationship with my brother, that was never much more than a competitive situation, ended almost two decades ago at our son’s wedding. Pretty amazing stuff! I do have a relationship with my son.
I met my best friend in college in my junior year as the peace movement opposing the Vietnam War grew on our campus. The college we attended was quite a conservative and militaristic place. We remained friends through graduate school, but like the other male relationships in my life, that relationship went belly up during a road trip to Canada in 1971. I describe that trip in The Road Trip (June 2011) and in My Friend Judy (May 19, 2025).
Work relationships with men proved to be a bust! Working in public schools was unrewarding and not challenging. The relationships with men in those schools, and outside in the relationships formed from work, were without any distinction at all. The majority of men I met in the school environment, extending to part-time work at a college and community colleges, were bad news and completely superficial.
In a kind of semiretirement, living in a hilltown in Massachusetts, I joined a coffee klatch based on relationships formed from working out at a local community center. Those relationships were also meaningless, with the self-appointed alpha male in the group acting like a kind of klatch dictator wanting to govern who was allowed to be a member of the group or not. Although most members of the group had PhDs, the extent of discussions in the group involved providing leads for tradespeople in the area who did home repairs. I really am not kidding here: PhDs discussing roof repair and landscaping. That was the extent of our interactions. Pretty sad!
The majority of male relationships I’ve had were connected to alcohol consumption both in college and at work. I question as to whether or not males need to be soused to relate?
So, there it is, a life that provided opportunities to fall back on my own designs and depend on relationships other than with men. During a graduate degree program in counseling I completed in the middle of the 1980s, I began reading about male relationships. There were men at that time who were attempting to replicate the women’s movement, a good idea on its face, but a group of men I belonged to at that time was so full of wannabe feminists (this essay is not a critique of feminism, which is a worthy movement) that much of the relations in that group were little more than window dressing and politically correct nonsense.