The Transience of ManhoodFollow

Here come 30 pages of arguing about what a man is.

That's simple. A man is as swift as a coursing river.


With all the force of a great typhoon.

The very best secular definition I've ever read for Manhood is Rudyard Kipling's "If". Manhood is most definitely earned.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!

But enough talk... have at you!

But how many roads must it walk down?

Seven.

Your words are as empty as your soul! Mankind ill needs a savior such as you!

Just go straight to Pikko and feel hurt.

If you have a phone number, I have a sack of Meow Mix and a jar of glitter body paint.

I can't really speak to the idea of manliness, but I can speak to the idea of womanhood and wanting kids. I had always tOld myself that when I got married, I wanted to wait at least five years before having a kid. I never really examined whether or not I wanted this, I just assumed it would happen. So four years after I got married, I started the "let's talk about kids" discussion with my husband. I was on some medications and wanted to be off them for a while to make sure I would be ok getting pregnant. So I went off my Remicade and when a year went by we sat down to talk about it again. That was when my husband told me he wasn't sure he ever wanted kids.

After I stopped being irked that he waited so long to mention this fact, I told him I needed to do a little soul searching. I had to figure out if I wanted a kid or not. I consider the relationship between my husband and I to be pretty strong, and I was sure then, and am still sure now, that had I come back from that reflection and told him that having a kid was important to me, he would have gone along with it. But he wouldn't have wanted it. I even think that had we gone that route, he would've been a great father. But th more I thought about what it meant to have first a baby, then a toddler, then a teenager, and the fact that during at least the first 18 years of its life we would not be truly alone and able to do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted, I balked. I wanted to travel. I wanted to be free to walk out to dinner or a movie spontaneously and not have to scramble to find childcare or be forced to eat at a restaurant where I thought kids wouldn't disturb people and watch only G movies.

I like my freedom. I don't want to change dirty diapers, potty train a kid, and clean up after it for years an years. I know there is a great reward when your kid turns out awesome and all that, but I didn't think that was enough.

To this day, I still occasionally struggle with my decision. Not because I'm having doubts, but because I sometimes feel like I have somehow failed as a woman in a very fundamental way. What kind of woman doesn't want to hold her own baby and watch it grow into an adult? And it's not my friends who have kids that make me feel that way. Well, not directly. It's just something that I thought I always understood as a kid. Something that you see so often in our culture. The happy ending for a woman is almost always a kid. That's the goal. That's what they've really been searching for. Or, at the very least, the marriage that can bring them that goal. But for me, the goal is to be happy and secure. To do the things that make me happy. To take off to Europe or Japan or Australia. Or Hawaii. I don't want to be responsible for a kid. And I feel like, in our culture, that's strange and unwomanly.

I can't help but think of the woman in that article as being anything other than whiny and neurotic. And also a bit selfish when it comes to her husband.

Maybe I really am a traitor to my gender.

Hiow judgmental.

I think less of you because of this.