The Men We Weep For.

When I was nine, I peeked around a wall and watched my Mamaw silently cry as she sat on the steps in her home. I stood, frozen, as I observed a mother’s quiet defeat from the addiction her son was wrestling with. Defeated from her fears for him and her fears for me, she took a moment and she wept. 

When I was sixteen I came home from school in a hurry to go somewhere I thought was really important. My mom followed me around the house trying to get me to sit down as I blustered around. When I turned around, exasperated, she told me he had died. In my room alone after the funeral, I wept. 

When I was 21, I was in my first stint at a mental health facility. I begged my step dad to come to family night, to be there for me. My texts went unanswered. I was on the edge of my seat the whole night hoping he’d come through the door. He did not. I convinced myself the whole way home that it didn’t matter. My mother wept. 

When I was 27, my brother, the son of my stepdad, died. Two days after his mother, both from a drug overdose. My mom told my partner to keep me busy until she could get me to slow down long enough for her to tell me. At the end of his funeral, my mom laid her head in my lap and wept. She wept for him and she wept for my stepdad, who couldn’t bring himself to face the day. 

When I was 28, I stood by my step fathers side as he took his last breath. Surrounded by his mother, my mother, his daughters, and my aunts, his addiction defeated him once and for all. Collectively, we wept.

When I was thirty, the man who I thought was the love of my life told me that he had been doing cocaine daily. When I reached out to help, he told me he did not love me anymore and to give up. I watched him for the next six months battle this addiction as it spiraled more and more out of control. I begged and bargained with the universe. I screamed out with my eyes bulging, “If you take him, I’ll follow shortly after. Don’t think I’m fucking joking!’ As he got clean and relapsed again I was back, “I hope you don’t think I was fucking kidding!” I did not give up. I pray daily I will not have to bury him too. Over and over again, I weep. 

These stories might be collectively about the men who are selfish, sick, undeserving of the women who love them so deeply. The women who beg and bargain with the universe, that try every type of love they can to save the men who don’t want anyone to save them. The women who leave and come back, that you think should have a backbone and leave. But it’s not. These women are strong, admirable women. They love deeply and unconditionally. I know because I am one.

I have watched the men in my life dissolve into disease, I’ve watched the light fade from their eyes. I’ve seen them do things no one should be capable of. I’ve looked back on pictures from happier times and been devastated at the difference. I’ve looked into my partners eyes and realized that I no longer recognized the love of my life.

The men in this story are and were sick from childhood trauma, untreated mental health and addiction issues, and lack of support.

We have to change the way we talk about men.

The men who in a moment’s notice went from the apple in their mothers eye to something society deemed as worthless unless they did everything right. Their inherent worth is said to be reliant on the ability to provide, love, protect. If they do it badly, they are doomed. They’re told they will never change. They have been told they will fail before they even start. They are told they are inherently bad just for being men. 

We are failing men as a society. We are putting astronomic amounts of pressure on men with no blueprint of how to get there. There are few programs dedicated to men outside of the VA (and don’t even get me fucking started on them). There are few memes littered across social media telling men how worthy they are. There are not many groups or books with mainstream focus on how to just be as a man, or to become the best man you can. Mental health and self help is largely focused on women.

Men are killing themselves, literally and figuratively, at alarming rates. They are beating their partners and falling into addiction. They are sacrificing their youth, mind, and bodies to war and then getting the door slammed in their faces when they come home. There are millions of instagram accounts and books dedicated to the simple idea of, “Men aren’t shit.”, “Men are narcissists.”, “Men will never change.” As women, can you even fucking imagine if that’s what you were blasted with every single day?

We condemn men, we hate them, but we expect more constantly. We want more, we beg for more, we need more. For US. But what about them? When’s the last time we asked our men what they truly, deeply need? And cared to really listen?

Not very many people harm someone else without there being an underlying and festering trauma wound. We know this as women.. if it applies to us. Men are expected to, ‘get the fuck over it, youre a grown man!’ And I say this as someone who has said those very words and has neverending depths of empathy for the men in her life. I fall short when their unprocessed trauma is hurting me. I am short sighted. 

We have to continue to have empathy for men. We have to be willing to ask why and we have to be willing to listen to the answers. We do not have to be willing to stand by their side, that choice is up to you and your own wellbeing. But we have to be willing to have compassion and love for the men around us.

We have to be willing to remind men of their inherent worth, simply for existing. Men are worthy of putting the work into themselves, to process trauma, to be heard. Men are worthy of having their needs met and not put in a box of ‘sex, food, sleep.’ Men are complex and they are broken. They have been abused, humiliated, and frightened. They usually are trained not to see it. They are trained to fight back or fuck off. They’re not usually trained in the complexities of what it means to stand up.

As women we can brush them off, we can get angry, we can see how this has all affected us. We can count the tears we’ve cried over the men in our lives who have hurt us or left us. But we can also keep our hearts open to truly see the men in our lives and how their trauma has shaped them. Compassion does not equal low self worth. It does not mean we have to accept certain treatment. But it is healing to know, sometimes, it’s not really about us.

Unprocessed trauma in men often comes out in anger, infidelity, and addiction issues. Men are trying to maladaptively soothe themselves constantly. And you know what, if we were honest with ourselves, women are too. We’re all hamster wheeling through life in a sea of unprocessed trauma and we’re destroying ourselves in the process. The difference in most of these situations is society is naturally empathetic to women and their struggles. Men? Grow the fuck up. Be a man.

We can change the way we talk about men. We can change the way we talk to men. We can change the way we look at them. We can love them, but we cannot personally change them. But we can believe they can change themselves. 

And I believe, whole heartedly, that seeing them as human beings worthy of love is the only way to do so. They are not neverending need providers or simple minded morons driven by sex, food, sleep. 

They are human beings. They are fathers, sons, partners, and friends.

We’ve fought for equal rights. Now let’s go to war again, this time, to level the emotional playing field. Let’s fight for our men to be able to be safe, vulnerable, and comforted by us and by eachother. Let’s fight for more resources for all of us to get off the hamster wheel and deal with the traumas that causes so many maladaptive coping skills, rips apart our families, and destroys our relationships.

I have lost almost every man of note in my life to addiction. 

We have to change the way we talk about men.