Leaving Boyhood Behind - Jason M. Craig

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with which Jason Craig grapples. He has been a boy, he has become a father, and he has learned to be a man. More to the point, he has the gift to pass on the lessons he has learned to others. It is for this reason that I am honored to have been asked to raise the curtain on the drama of boyhood, brotherhood, and manhood that is presented in the following pages. Indeed, I wish that I could have read this book myself when I needed it most, during my own dark days of grappling and groping with these questions.

      In some ways, I’ve come to realize that a large part of my growing up has necessitated an unlearning of some of the lessons I learned from my father. Don’t get me wrong. I had a great relationship with my father, whom I loved dearly while he was alive, and still love dearly now that he has left this mortal coil. It’s just that he had not fully matured beyond machismo to real manhood, at least not during the years when he was teaching me the lessons about life that I would spend the rest of my life learning to unlearn.

      The problem is that machismo is a mark of immaturity. It is the failure to grow into the fullness of what it means to be a man. The mark of machismo is the boastfulness and braggadocio of the braggart. It is the mask of pride, worn by those who lack humility; it is the rant of one demanding his rights because he does not have the courage to face his responsibilities. It is the “manliness” of one who is not really a man.

      In my own case, I would have to confess that I have spent most of my life as the macho man who was not really a man at all. It took marriage to make a man of me, which is to say that it took a woman to make a man of me. And not just a woman; it took a wife to make a man of me. And not just a wife; it took children to really make a man of me. I can say, therefore, echoing the words of William Wordsworth, that the child is father of the man. My own children have been the fathers of my manhood. Without them, I would still be a pathetic macho man, making all sorts of masculine noise without having any of the real masculine substance.

      It is for this reason that our present culture, which makes war on marriage and the family, is also making war on genuine manhood. In spite of its own braggadocio, modern culture doesn’t really make war on things such as “sexism” and the abuse of women and children. Instead, it encourages the machismo that turns men into abusers while simultaneously discouraging the familial and paternal responsibility that turn men into good husbands and fathers. Such a culture does not only make men miserable, it makes women and children miserable, too — and all in the name of the pursuit of freedom and happiness! It’s all so pathetically funny. It is a tragedy that is also a divine comedy because it shows that virtue is the only way of getting to the happy ending.

      My father became a man before he died. It’s just that he wasn’t a man when I was a boy; he wasn’t a man when I needed a man in my life. All too often he failed to come home after work, preferring to get drunk at the pub with his friends, though he was always man enough to get up in the morning and go to work, taking his hangover with him. My fondest memories of him are his teaching me to play chess and the many hours we played together, united in glorious silence as we pored over the pieces on the board. I recall his quoting from memory long passages from Shakespeare, declaiming whole speeches with intense passion, and his reciting of long poems, such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” or shorter pieces such as Rudyard Kipling’s “If” or G. K. Chesterton’s “The Donkey.” It was at these moments, waxing lyrical with his children, that he was really a man.

      As for me, I still go to the bar occasionally to have an ale or two with friends and, unlike John Wayne, I always finish the beer in my glass before leaving. But I’m always home in time for family dinner and the family time that follows. I enjoy reading the classic works of children’s literature to my ten-year-old daughter, and although I’m not able to declaim Shakespeare as my father had done, I have recently taught my daughter to play chess, passing on this wonderful gift that my own father had given to me. The last time we played, my daughter beat me for the first time. I took the defeat with a real joy, rejoicing that my daughter was mastering the game and that, therefore, she was mastering me. In other words, I took my defeat like a man.

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       Preface

      Whenever I was out of school in my teen years, my father put me to work. The summer sun seared the experiences into my memory, but I recall it more because I know now my father worked me hard to make me a man. He gave me hard work as a gift. These were formative years with sweat on my brow, and my father instructed me in the ways of men as he had received them. He had no other way. He was passing on an unspoken treasure: the life of a man. Masculinity, despite assertions to the contrary, is not something you can build by sheer effort — it is a gift received and responded to.

      I remember pouring concrete with a team of men, probably too few men for the space we were covering. Each of us had on large boots that kept the wet concrete off of our pants and skin, but it slowly caked on, making steps heavier as the day went. Walking in concrete is like walking in a gravelly soup that won’t let go, because a vacuum is created when you lift your foot from the sludge, lending more weight to the already heavy mix of water, sand, cement, and stone. You have to spread, level, smooth, edge, and finish concrete before it sets up or else you will have to jack-hammer it up later and start over. In the summer sun, the concrete would dry too fast, so we could not slow down. Adding water can make it easier to work with, but in the end “watering it down” makes it weak. My father did not add water. And because of the inevitable and consequential time constraints of the job, he always turned into a bit of a wild man when it came to pouring concrete. Anyone from the outside listening to him barking commands might have thought him belligerent and coarse, but he wasn’t — just focused and intense. The demand of working with a liquid that’s drying into stone makes for an unavoidable sense of battle.

      He never “coddled” me. There were no mothers or teachers warning me of dehydration, straining muscles, or working too hard. There were only the other workmen and my father who were expecting me to work hard like them. Pouring concrete with them starkly contrasted the worlds of home and school, places run by the motherly figures of my life. In this tough environment, there was simply no room for whining and self-focus. There was a task at hand, and we were the men to do it. I liked being one of the men.

      I was not fully like them, but after experiences like that occurred, I knew I couldn’t go back to just being a boy. This was a time when I was leaving boyhood behind. We know the term “adolescence” as the transitional phase between boyhood and manhood, but when I was pouring concrete with my father and his team, I did not feel like I was in-between at all. I was in a new place. I was in the world of men.

      My father had the means, through the brotherhood of workers and the work itself, to form and initiate me into a world that he knew: the world of physical labor, where the inner and outer man grapples with a day’s challenges. Let me be clear: in spite of my father’s best efforts, I still faced much of the same confusion in my understanding of being a man as anyone else in today’s world. Even with the discipline gained through hard work, those years were not a complete formation for me. Over the years, I found my way into terrible relationships, destructive groups of friends, and the abuse of things that are cliché in the world of teenage rebellion. I did, however, know that I was a beloved son being guided into maturity by a loving, if imperfect, father.

      I lacked formation most notably in the “higher things.” I did not understand my identity as a son of God until much later, though that too came from fatherly men who taught me to strive for a solid spiritual foundation that was not watered down. But thanks to the rites of passage that my father provided for me, hard work, self-denial, loyalty, honesty, and brotherly cooperation are now traits that I will forever associate with being a man. They are clearly parts of me that play a cardinal role in how I live as a Catholic father and husband, and I am immensely grateful I had that experience.

      More and more today, however, men are not so lucky. Today I speak to, write for, and work directly with men who want to feel within themselves a masculinity that is alive and real, but who are clearly “uninitiated.” It shows up in different extremes: the obviously insecure men on the one hand and the overcompensating men (those who

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