He sat across from the table from me. He was sad; I knew it. He just didn’t know I knew. We have known each other from high school and bumped into each other again just last year while he picked up his nieces and nephews from school. I hadn’t recognised him without any hair, his boyish blonde locks gone, but he instantly grabbed me and hugged me like an old friend. It’s Mark, he said. I looked at his big blues, heard his voice and went, yes, it is.
Six months on, here in front of me, he sat. It felt so good to see an old friend again, but there was something not right, and so I started.
“You know Robert took his life last year,” I said. His eyes widened as I continued, John had gone to school with us.
“No”, he said, shocked.
I wasn’t shocked when I heard. Robert had always struggled. You could see it if you listened and watched hard. So when I heard about his passing, I wasn’t surprised. And yet, when I heard about Paul, Michael and Vernon, I was. That’s how many young men I know have been lost to a mental illiness. All but one becoming fathers, leaving wives and children behind bewildered. All unnecessarily so, and that is the part I can never understand the unnecessariness of it and yet having been there I can.
“Why do you think this happens?” I said to Mark, trying to start a conversation. He looked at the bottom of his empty cup.
“Some of it’s a genetic disposition,” he said but then “we as men boys have lost our place in society.”
“What do you mean?” I asked?
“You as women no longer require us. You don’t need us to hunt for you, care for you; you don’t even need us to make babies for you anymore. Our place is lost. We are just here.
Look at you,” he said, “I offered to mow the lawn for you, and what did you say? “I don’t need a man. Bam Deb, that hurt, and I’m not even your husband”.
It hurt the way he said it back to me. “That’s not what I meant,” I told him. “I wanted you to know I was capable. Not to worry about me. I don’t need a man; I want one, and that’s the difference. I’m a proud, independent woman, and my husband loves me this way. I’m capable of doing it myself. Should we turn back time, I asked?”
“No,” he said, “we want you to thrive as women, not to go back to being less than, but where does that leave us?” ”
To love and support us,” I said.
He sighed. “But we are men, and often we are taught that loving is for sissy’s and admitting that we are hurt because we don’t know how to do that- more so. We haven’t evolved emotionally as women have. Simply have not.”
I looked at him. He still looking; at the bottom of his cup, still not looking at me. Me crying because I could see he was lost.
“Admitting is half the key,” I said to him. “I don’t understand the shame men have ” I said
“I know,” he said, “but I do because I’m a man.”
“Mental illness is no different to any other illness,” I said. “It’s an inbalance in the brain or our lives that happens for whatever reason. Like an imbalance of iron or B12, it requires medication a change of lifestyle to fix it. Where is the stigma in that” I asked Mark?
“The brain is the holder of your emotions, Deb that’s the part you do not understand.”
“No,” I said, “it’s the part we are not evolving enough in men.”
He looked at me the first time in our conversation and smiled.
“I love you, Mark,” I said and “I need you as my friend. That’s your place for me.”
“Yeah,” he said, “me too.”
Xx Deb
{image with thanks to here}
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