being men and feeling useless
note: this essay is not one of my usual light hearted gluten free piece. writing this took a lot of courage and to and fro between whether I should publish this or not. but here we are with this raw and vulnerable piece.
don’t know if men are strong, but I am numb most days for sure.
i’ve cried a lot in the past. i was the kid who was famous for crying. for my relatives that’s a fun memory, for me it is my uncomfortable past. i was always told that men don’t cry. they do. they just hide it well. i’ve seen enough men break in tough times and still try to hold on to whatever they could.
the social media is great at sensationalising trivial stuff. it turns preferences into personalities. people who love chai become chai-paglus. a man has to be either a sakht aadmi or a softy crying over something that didn’t even matter to him. everyone loves telling everyone else what they should do. we did it to women for ages. now we do it to everyone.
look maa, we’re progressing!
i’ve tried hard to move on from what was told to me, to calibrate it with what I felt. however, there is still so much that no one is teaching us. there is no manual for what to do when the woman you love is going through the worst.
no one prepares you for the deafening silence of tough times.
‘be strong,’ they say.
ask how?
silence.
no one knows, yet everyone expects.
what do you do when the pain is so much that your partner starts vomiting?
be tough?
bang your chest and call other alpha males of your tribe?
calling a doctor or rushing to the hospital works better. and still, it won’t take away the feeling of being absolutely useless while she goes through it.
every month.
the world told me that becoming a parent is a beautiful feeling. but no one told me how difficult it is to see the woman you love puke at random hours to random smells that didn’t exist before. sometimes even your smell makes it worse. how do you deal with the fact that your presence is adding to her discomfort?
they say that the only way out is through. and you’re just there, holding her while she fights multiple battles at once. yes, you can bring medicines, give her care, cook what she likes. but she still has to go through it alone. watching that and not being able to fix it breaks something inside you.
as the man, as the would-be parent, I carried the anxiety of seeing my partner in distress while being unable to make things normal again. i want to fix everything in her life. not being able to do that because that’s how it is, is torture. the world loves to tell you that everything is possible. to them: respectfully, fuck off.
what do i do with all this physical strength when the person who gave me emotional strength goes through so much? if holding her hand eases her pain even a little, i will do it every single time. being soft at the right place and right time beats the macho image the alpha males love online, every time.
the man is supposed to protect the family. we got obsessed with the performance of strength instead of its purpose. you don’t have to choose violence every time to protect your family. sometimes a warm hug, your presence or maybe being vulnerable in front of your partner is enough to sail through tough times. whenever you choose to be the sakht launda at the wrong place, the world gets a little worse.
i don’t know if i’m supposed to be wild or warm. all i know is that seeing the people i love in pain makes me sad and not being able to take it away breaks me.
when they took my wife away for the OT, i stood longer than needed, trying to make peace with all the ways things could go wrong which she very enthusiastically taught me while she was in her residency. five months later she is still getting back to normal, fighting sleepless nights and hormonal imbalances. and i get to see her fight it all while holding our love in her arms.
when i saw my daughter for the first time, i couldn’t hear anything that the people around me were talking about. i didn’t care because i was feeling nothing or maybe too much at the same time, to focus on the outside world. she was being transferred from the operation theatre to the nursery. i was walking beside her, trying to fathom the fact that the human next to me was a part of me. she chose me as her father. i didn’t say a word or blink until we reached the nursery and the flood gates broke when the nurse handed me the form to fill out her details. i took longer than usual to fill the form because the father’s name column suddenly felt heavy. that tiny human next to me was my kid. i’m her home. she’s mine. maybe i could shed tears because i was alone with her and the nurses were minding their business. had i been with someone i knew i would’ve suppressed it all. i’m not that cool. crying is for the weak, i had learnt in my childhood. i would’ve not let this knowledge go in vain.
men may have more physical strength. but we are nowhere close when it comes to being human in our truest form. be it caring beyond capacity, loving beyond imagination, women know it better. even when life is trying to break them, they still find a way to smile and survive.
if you’re a guy reading this please know that no amount of wisdom or knowledge is going to prepare you for such moments when you would feel pointless, questioning your existence. the pain your loved ones will face cannot be removed from their lives. you can only do so much. you may or may not get the strength needed to watch them go through it all but you will have to do it nonetheless. guess that’s God’s way of mocking us — ‘still feel all that strong eh?’ if you can somehow understand that protecting your loved ones can have multiple forms apart from display of physical strength you’ll probably find yourself at ease.
i wrote all this because i’ve been feeling too much for over a year now and wanted to share with you all. this is not the final word in any way. we all will feel this at some point in life and when you do, please do take time to reflect on it. your experience might be very different from mine and that’s perfectly fine. i am just still not okay with how there is so much around me that i cannot fix that can make my loved one's lives easier.
so i don’t know if i am strong, but i am numb, quite often, for sure.
big thanks to Shristy Priya for taking care of our daughter while I wrote this over multiple sittings and to Nanoheart for helping me improve this piece.
It would mean the world to me if you buy my debut book — The Misadventures of Detective Ghanshyam. It is a light hearted short novella about the life of wannabe teenage detective who gets outsmart by his younger sister while he tries to be like his idol, Mr. Holmes. If humour and sibling rivalries are your thing, you’ll love it! ❤
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Man this is so brilliant, I read this twice.
The problem of attaching yourself to a label as you said "the alpha male" or the "soft boy", is that you will be discarded from their tribe just for an action opposing their predefined set of behaviors. So when people constrain themselves to a single label, they are expected to perform within that circle of actions decided by someone they have no correlation with. There is no room for change, rebellion, and also they lack the discomfort of the identity crisis that I think we all go through. You penned down this experience beautifully, as I always want pieces to be longer, I just felt this was short but still what you have captured in these amount of words is phenomenal.
I don’t know why, but while reading this, a tear just rolled down my cheek. That line you wrote about being made fun of as a kid for being emotionally sensitive, for crying, I’ve lived that too.
I may not be a father, and maybe I never want to be, but seeing someone you love in pain does something to you. It makes you go numb. And yet the world keeps telling men to “be tough,” to not feel, to not cry. I honestly think we need to unlearn that completely. Man or woman, we all deserve the right to feel, to break, to cry, to be human.
Your post brought back memories from my NGO days. We used to receive abandoned infants, two days old, three days old. I would hold myself together in front of them, but once I got home, I’d cry. Just thinking about how innocent they were. So fragile. So undeserving of the world’s harshness. We are here with you bhai. So truly, congratulations on becoming a father, bro. After reading you, I’m certain you’re going to be a good one.