children's chaotic lives

I thought I had just enough time to take Seamus for a walk before sunset, and he was very pleased with the idea.

Heading out the door leash in hand, I had to pull him to a halt so I could come back in and answer the phone. It was the leader of the writing group I go to sometimes, letting me know that, due to the snow, we wouldn’t be meeting tomorrow. I told her I’d be busy for the next eight weeks with the children’s grief group on Tuesdays, so I wouldn’t be able to be there for some time.

She asked if it was a group for children who have experienced a loss due to death, and I said yes. “Children need something like that for other kinds of losses as well,” she said. Divorce was the first thing to occur to me, but she said more than that. “Children lead such chaotic lives now, they can’t even verbalize what the loss is. It’s stability, trust, being cared for. Too many children don’t have any of that. They may have plenty else, but not those basics, and they act out. Then people say to them,’Why are you acting like that?’ and they don’t know.”

It turns out that she’s a retired professor of childhood development. She went on to talk about men who are out of control. “Ever since Mt. St. Helens exploded in 1980,” she said, “the amount of violent behavior from men has gone way up. It’s because they feel helpless to protect their families, and that’s their job. Like drunks, as my mother used to say, they either get angry or they cry like babies. They’ve lost their manhood when they can’t take care of their families.”

I said something about personhood, trying to take the gender issue out of it, because I believe we all do react to powerlessness, although maybe not in the same ways. What I was really reacting to, I realized as she brought the conversation to a close, is the idea that men are supposed to take care of their families, men and not women. Then I remembered that she lives in a little town that has a church sponsored university, and most of the inhabitants of the town belong to that church. It has a very patriarchal view of family: the man must be the head.

Even though Bill is from a younger generation and a very different religious tradition, he expressed the same feelings the other day, that it was his main duty to protect and take care of his family. I like being taken care of and protected, but I also rail at the idea that it’s a man’s job and God intended it that way. I don’t agree with that; but, weren’t families stronger when more people believed that? What do you think?