Family Man

I am not a family man. I do not have children. I’m divorced. I was married and wanted children. I was with women who wanted children but could not have children, wanted careers more than children, women who had children, women who had had abortions and women who aborted my child. Today I am childless and old. I have a dying dog.  He’s living but he has a deteriorating heart, is eyeless blind, has a bum back and when he breathes he sounds like he has smoked too many Cuban cigars, his grunting helping the blood flow through his damaged heart valve. He’s ten and a half in dog years, 73 or so in human years.  We suit each other.

I’d rather have a sex change today than children.  I admire women, especially mothers, and  admire men, especially father   I truly admire those men and women who are family men and women investing their lives in the present and the future.  I believe they deserve to be central in society and I support them.  I know how difficult it is to live with girls and have done some 20 years in marriage, albeit, different women.  The binary relationship is tough but the trinity is where the rubber hits the road.  Individuals can be narcissists and are commonly calling others narcissists.  Family men and women can’t hardly be narcissists because they have committed so much energy and time to their marriage, their spouse and their children. 

I’m committed to the present.  My brother and father were family men.  At all times they had one eye on the present and one eye on the future. They were building and saving for their children.  Neither believed the ‘budget would balance itself’ and both lived their life so their children and grandchildren would have resources and finances to help them along the way.  My grandfather was a family man and he did the same.  Family men are the cornerstone of community.  Family men get together and with real skin in the game discuss what they want for the future.  For me the future is always an intellectual exercise. I’m concerned for myself, of course, but everyone else is theoretical.

If people tell you they are not self interested, they are lying.  It takes a lifetime of spiritual progress to overcome the ‘bondage of self’.  Gandhi didn’t make it. Neither did Martin Luther King or the Dalai Lama. Certainly they were freer than most but they had a life time of saying no to themselves.  My father and mother and my brother and his wife and my grandmother and grandfather all said no to themselves and yes to their children. They knew immediate personal sacrifice.  I’ve sacrificed but not like that. 

I’ve been a physician and its not been easy. My friends though are family men and physicians.  Indeed I loved one woman who said that her Mrs. degree was more important than her MD.  All of the fathers and mothers said that they would sacrifice their careers and their awards for their children.  A lot of my friends are family men.  I admire them.  The doctors achieved what I achieved all the while dealing with the most difficult creature on the planet, a human female, and at the same time caring for children.  Women have no idea how difficult they are. Often they will say they prefer men to women and don’t like working for women but they don’t identify with that.  They forget they are women.  Men don’t.  Women are loud and dominating in the eyes of men.  Mothers are so big and powerful.  Part of that is their blindness to their greatness and their willingness to defer to girls or lesser women and lesser men.  They are an enigma.  I love the Mother Child love pictures through history.  I love the earthy transcendent love of motherly women who have such passion and wisdom.  I actually am cautious in their presence.  I prefer girls to play with.  Like me they can be in the present and ignore the bigger picture of the future and children and grandchildren.  Family men are the men who embrace and love these women and their children.

I am more an adolescent. I have my sick dog to think of and I’ve taken a calling to be in my profession and serve my fellow man but now I’ve done my duty.  I could retire but I haven’t. I like to serve still but I’m entertained more each day by the person I was when I was younger, the actor and dancer , the man who wore women’s clothes and didn’t think for the future. The family men don’t have my freedom. My grandfather, father and my brother were father’s till they died.  They loved and laughed and we had boyish fun together but unlike me they were never ‘off call’. As a doctor when I’ve been on call it’s been like the front lines of the war. I’ve not drunk or drugged then and always been ready at a moment’s notice to deliver a baby, perform surgery or convince a psychotic man not to kill or a women not to suicide.  I’ve felt that being on call was like when I was off shore sailing through winter hurricanes. I was never free to truly relax. Even when the sailboat was in the tropics, sunny days, fair winds and following seas, I was in love but had one ear listening to all the special sounds of the sailboat, the creaks and the familiar. I was always keyed up for the strange. On land I’m not.  Riding my Harley motorcycle at high speed I am but lying on the grass in the back yard, not really.  

Family men are always on call and families are always like high speed motorcycle rides. Mothers are always like high speed motorcycles. Girls are like scooters and scooter can kill you. But families are like sailboats in a hurricane.  I know this. I’ve deliver a hundred babies and cared for tens of thousands of people in tens of thousands of families.

I like being a boy. I like putting on my white coat and becoming the professional man. But at home I’d rather wear shorts, a skirt or a loose sheaf.  I’ve never known family men to be able to be as much like a child as I can be any time I’m not working or not on call.  I can walk away and it will be okay. I can have a sex change and it will be okay. I can be poor and become like Thoreau in Walden Pond. I used to think I could join the Foreign Legion.  The world is the oyster for boys and girls.  Not so for family men.

My grandfather, father and brother were never not fathers any more than my grandmother, mother and sister in law.  They ooze that kind of love. I admire them for it.

I defer to them in the family meetings and community decisions. I’m smarter and more experienced and deeper than a whole lot of people I know. But intrinsically I have always felt a family man was closer to God and closer to the present and the future, that shiny place where the two run together in the Flow. It’s sometimes call synchronicity or attraction or some other kind of new age word. I just think of family men as more Godly.  I’m a boy and I’ve got more of the devil in me.  I’m not unhappy with that. My divorced childless aunt, my childhood best friend, she was like that.  We are both the kinds of Christians that the church want’s to reform but we belong.  Like medicine men and women in ancient tribes.  I’m a hunter and a fisherman too.  I’m not without my use. But I’m not a Chief and I’m certainly not the one to ask to lead the tribe.  I have my share of a special kind of wisdom but not the kind that Family men have. I’m not that solid amazing powerful giant. I’m boyish or girlish.  At least I’m humble enough to consider what the whole of society needs isn’t necessarily what I personally want.  I can honestly say its not all about me.