'Manning-up' and being a 'real man'

Last Saturday I felt like a real man and 'manned-up'. Here are a few of the things that I did:

1.     Climbed a ladder to fix a light,

2.     Went for a run,

3.     Cooked steak on my BBQ while drinking a beer,

4.     Wore a check shirt all day,

5.     Used a screwdriver to fix something in my car.

However, these things (and many other manly things I did which I can’t recall or don’t think need mentioning now) are probably not the things that I think defined me most as a man on Saturday.

On Saturday night I had a massive cry. No – nobody punched me on the nose or kicked me in the groin. Nor did my footy team lose - I had to wait until Sunday morning for that to happen to the Wallabies.

No I cried over a book. In fact not even the ending of a book. I cried at the end of the fourth chapter and then really lost it to blubbing with the opening of the fifth. The book is Worse Things Happen at Sea by William McInnes and Sarah Watt which they wrote together just before her death from cancer in 2011.

What made me cry was not about her battle with cancer – I haven’t even got that far into the book. I cried when they told the story of their stillborn son Cosmo. I really, really cried (enough to wake up BWM) when Sarah started the fifth chapter with, “Our second baby was born, and he breathed. Then he cried.”

I experienced a similar moment reading during BWM’s pregnancy with H. I read Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and cried throughout the last pages at the death of mother and baby after their survival through the ravages of the First World War. It was powerful loneliness of the final sentence, “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain,” which really reduced me to a blubbing mess.

When H was born all I wanted to hear was a baby crying. In fact it was only about 5 minutes after he was born, I think I’d even helped to cut the cord and I was holding my son that I realised he was my son and not my daughter. I had missed the whole, “Congratulations it’s a boy,” because I was so happy to hear him crying.

BWM and I have never been through the trauma of a stillborn birth and I it’s very difficult to comprehend the pain that occurs for people when this happens. Pregnancy is such an amazing thing that occurs in the female body. It’s something that we mere males never get to experience physically.

However, it is one that men go through emotionally. This probably makes it even harder for us as males because we like to be able to do something to ‘fix’ things. This is easier when there is a physical job to do rather than being something that needs to be dealt with through an emotional lens.

When BWM and I were first trying to start a family together we lost babies through miscarriage. These losses caused us both considerable sadness but this is slight compared to what some others experience in attempting to have children. As a male I could feel the sadness and disappointment that BWM felt in some respects. However, I never experienced the physical side that she did in the loss of these babies.  Dealing with the emotions of these required seeking assistance to help understand my own thoughts in sharing our loss.

Throughout BWM’s pregnancy with H both of us were somewhat anxious in waiting for how everything would turn out. Our anxieties were not fully assured until after we had undergone a battery of tests and counseling until the 15-week mark of the pregnancy. After that our Obstetrician would regularly say to us, “You’re backing a winner here. There’s no need to worry.” It’s a phrase he is already using with BWM again now that she has reached the same stage of our current pregnancy.

Now that I’m a dad with H I still feel the same anxieties that I went through when BWM was pregnant with him. I know there isn’t anything I can do physically during the next few months as we wait for the birth. It’s a time for controlling the emotional aspects of being a dad and husband and looking after BWM, H and our yet to be born child.

What am I looking forward to most in a physical sense now? It’s listening for that first cry. Once that happens I know there will still be some emotional things to deal with but I’ll be back in the game with the physical part too.

One thing I know that I know I’ll be doing with both H and his sibling – is reading great stories to them. It’s definitely not the last of McInnes and Hemingway that I’ll be reading. In fact I look forward to sharing these with my kids.  I think though I’ll start by reading Cricket Kings and The Old Man and the Sea to them. They’ll make me cry but not in the same way as those other books did and I think it’s good that kids see their dad cry – because it’s definitely part of 'manning-up' and being a real man.