Listen to Your Mother

My father was a big, strong man who had a physical presence that could dominate and control most situations. He was my hero and I wanted to prove to him that my toughness was worthy of his admiration. My mother was a fairly small woman who could never intimidate people with her stature or perceived physicality. Unlike my father who wore toughness on his sleeve and overtly admired physicality, my mother could not approach confrontation by cloaking herself in a threatening demeanor. Her ability to stand up for her beliefs came from internal strength and an unwavering sense of right and wrong. Looking back now it is so obvious to me that I should have recognized her brand of genuine courage and integrated it into the physical version that I almost exclusively demonstrated. I should have listened to my mother.

When I was about seven years old I was playing with some of my siblings in the street in front of our house. Our next door neighbor, Mrs. Goldberg, came out of her house and discovered that someone had let their dog go the bathroom on her nice lawn. Disgusted, she went back into her house, got a shovel, scooped up the excrement and threw it out in the street where we were playing. My mother, who happened to be in the garage at the time, heard the commotion and came out to investigate. Upon discovering what Mrs. Goldberg had done she went back into the garage, got some old newspaper, walked out in the street, picked up the dog leavings and returned to the garage. She did not say a word to any of us nor did she even acknowledge the presence of our neighbor. Mrs. Goldberg stood quietly watching, then turned and walked back into her house in shame. My mother said nothing but her actions screamed loud and clear. In the thirty seconds it took my mother to act, she showed subtle defiance of wrong by quietly doing right. Looking back over my life I now see that I had many opportunities to achieve successful resolution through subtle defiance but I chose overt aggression that only escalated confrontation. I should have followed my mother’s quiet example.

When I was about fifteen years old I limped into the house following a soccer practice or game. I was dirty and probably bleeding from somewhere, a condition in which I had returned home countless times. My mother was standing there looking at me with a resigned look on her face and she said, “Someday you are going to regret treating your body this way”. I smiled at her but I was sure that she did not understand the sacrifices I needed to make to help my team succeed. She always supported my participation in sports but she knew that some of my injuries did not come as collateral damage during my effort to win the game but instead were the product of me trying to show others that I was tough. Now as I limp through my day enduring the pain of all the games played and the demonstrations of toughness made, I hear her voice and I realized she how clearly she saw this painful part of my future.

From the very beginning of childhood I was determined not to be bullied. I was one of the smaller kids growing up but I was not afraid to stand up for myself. This attitude which was not rooted in physical reality caused me to get beat up on occasion. As I got older I began to train for the altercations that my approach to life would always bring. My acquired strength and size went along nicely with the attitude and fights began to occur with some regularity. When I was about twenty years old, I emerged from my bedroom, bruised and battered from a fight the previous night. I encountered my mother in the kitchen and when she saw the condition of my face she became visibly sad. She shook her head and as she left the kitchen she said to me in passing, “The bigger man walks away from the fight”. I heard her words but I did not listen. In my misguided mission to gain the respect of others there would be many more fights and even more serious consequences. I now can see that my mother was trying to show me the value of self-respect.

When I was about thirty years old my mother asked me to give her a ride to a doctor’s appointment. She was experiencing some double vision and she wanted to find out what was going on with her eyesight. I drove her to the appointment and she went into see the doctor while I sat in the waiting room. I was daydreaming about where I was going to have my mother take me to lunch when I heard someone call my name. I looked up and saw the doctor who asked me to follow him. We went to the examining room where I found my mother sitting on the table crying. I turned to the doctor for an explanation and he informed me that she had inoperable brain cancer and that within the next year or so she was going to die. Almost frozen by this shocking revelation I turned back to look at my mother as I heard the doctor begin to explain chemo therapy treatment. My mother stared straight past me and said, “I am not going to do chemo therapy. I am not going to spend the last few months of my life feeling nauseous”. The doctor began to protest but mother simply dismissed him with a look. She was so strong and courageous on that day and all the other days that followed as she made her way toward the end. I know that there are family members who think I should have visited my mother more in her last months. What they don’t know is that the inevitability of her death exposed my own fears and weaknesses. I was not courageous facing her death because I was terrified of her being gone from my life. I visited only when I could maintain the appearance of being strong. I did not want to stand in front of my mother crying and in anyway erode the courage she so consistently and valiantly demonstrated. Even as she died she was still teaching me about personal strength and real courage.

Boys will use aggression to demonstrate courage; men will continue the charade by using physicality and confrontation to show masculinity. In the end, most of the behavior is just posturing, a facade to mask fear and weakness. So I will now join the choir of men who have lived through and finally accepted the folly of this hyper-macho existence and say...if you really want to be a strong and courageous man, listen to your mother.