Having been diagnosed with anxiety myself, I can see that my dad shows telltale symptoms, and it does have a negative impact on him. However, he is absolutely terrible at talking about his mental health. He always showed his love and talked openly about it, and wasn’t afraid of hugging or showing affection. My dad was quite different to most of his generation. But I also like complimenting my friends on how they look, talk about my feelings, cooking for my partner, drinking sweet cocktails. It’s not like I’m super far away from things you’d expect from someone “masculine” – I enjoy football, I play a lot of video games, I’m tall and well-built and fairly hairy. I’ve come to dislike what the word stands for. W hen I hear the world masculinity, I think of the very stereotypical stuff that’s often lampooned in media – rugged beard, chopping wood, barbecue, not talking about feelings, watching second world war films and going to football games. After five years, without financial assistance from his parents, he has bought a house and married a young lady from a similar background in a New Jersey suburb who has qualified as a special education teacher without family financial assistance. I have one son who moved 2,000 miles from a wealthy New York suburb to teach special education at a Title I school in Wyoming on his own initiative, knowing nobody there. The main challenges for men today are to have an awareness of history and to cast off the complacency which has caused many to become self-indulgent, undisciplined and weak. For my generation, life was clearly much better but we were reared with the discipline needed to confront the return of earlier hardship.
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Men expressed themselves through the way in which they responded to these challenges – and many failed the test. Even then, the shadow of the H-bomb was a constant reminder of the fragility of life. My father’s generation was born during the first world war (in which their fathers fought), experienced the Depression, and fought in another world war before reaching the relative calm of the 1950s and 1960s. I was born and lived in the UK for 40 years. Some of it was unpleasant, but we stuck with it and and things always got better. When I married, I married for life, mostly because they did and that’s what I believed in: keep your promises and vows. I know they were in counseling for a while, but I was the youngest of seven and they never spoke about it with me. My dad never talked about the second world war, never talked about finding my brother dead, never talked about marital problems when it was obvious they were very unhappy together at times. Men from father’s generation kept their feelings private.
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