Growing up Fatherless, Part I
It’s a cloudy February day at one of my favorite places in the world: the Oakland Zoo.
Equipped with my tiny coat and my precious green plastic key that unlocked the animal facts from the speaker boxes, my parents and I wove our way through the park. Located just a short seven-minute drive from our house, the Oakland Zoo was a frequent heaven for my endlessly curious, animal-loving mind.
That morning, however, we had a very specific destination.
We strode past the tigers, gibbons, and chimpanzees. Exiting the Tropical Rainforest, we hung a right at the baboons to reach our quarry:
The warthogs.
My parents had read in the San Francisco Chronicle that the zoo was presenting Emma to the world. Emma was a 6-week old warthog, the first born at the zoo since they had acquired their warthogs, and one of only 50 in America at the time. My favorite movie as a child (and still high on the list today) was Babe, the story of the pig who became a sheepdog. Naturally, it was imperative we needed to welcome little Emma as soon as we could.
Having arrived at last, I pressed my 5-year-old face and hands against the fence to watch Emma dash, bounce, and flip around the enclosure, watched carefully by her parents as I was by mine.
“Look!” I cried out, pointing first at Emma. “There’s the John warthog, there’s the Mama warthog, and there’s the Stephanie warthog!”
By 2016, of the some 63.5 million households in the United States raising children, about 45 thousand households were led by female same-sex couples raising boys.
From 1996 to 2014, I was one of those boys.
From birth, femininity was what I knew. Save for Max, one of two cat siblings, I lived with female dogs Bella and Rowdy, my two lesbian parents, and Max’s sister — Idgy. I was the boy in a home full of women. My parents would invite over their generally female friends, and I would sit in their laps, watching and learning how they spoke.
My oft-female only experience wasn’t solely from lack of trying on my parent’s part. They kept their eyes open for men to take me under their wing, but by and large the men that they knew were either too far away, not those they wanted to make a meaningful impression on me, or outright rejected me based on my parent’s choices to live according to their truth, and raise a child.
Until I moved out at 18, I grew up in Northern and Southern California, in primarily left-wing circles. Nonetheless, the men present still flew the flag of the old paradigm of masculinity, whether they knew it or not. That paradigm, as John Wineland puts it, is “kill, provide, and conquer.”
Those men spoke not with feeling, but in an attempt to feel as little as possible. They weren’t married to the women their wife was, but to the stale story of what a man’s responsibilities to his wife were: provide, and you win.
No wonder my parents, children of the 60s and staunch feminists, consciously or unconsciously metered my exposure to men.
My version of childhood, while undoubtedly charmed, also had an unintended effect on me, a little boy in the world of women.
“Man” became a dirty word, and its own kind of outdated concept.
“Did you see how he just cut me off? I can’t believe that jackass.”
“Better tell the car mechanic that your husband said that you don’t need the rear brake pads replaced; they won’t believe you otherwise.”
“Leave it to a man to say something so idiotic.”
While those criticisms were oft justified, being submerged in this separate paradigm that “men were the ones who brought down the value of the world” told me implicitly that there was no such thing as “healthy” masculinity. There’s no need to call it “toxic masculinity” when the whole thing is rotten.
However, the reality of my existence was that I was going to grow into a man, and I wanted to be a good one.
Where was I supposed to turn?
End of Part 1
