The Many Writings of

For some odd reason I've been compelled lately to write about some of the transformational moments in my life. Maybe they'll help someone out there. I dunno. Guess it's part of my intentionally trying to wage peace.
- Barry.

Most men who have bothered with the self-imposed agony of introspection go through an often protracted period in which they attempt to differentiate themselves from their fathers, however DNA is pretty strong stuff, and has no relationship to the temporal world. When I was twenty, my mantra was 'I am not my dad'. My overwhelming feeling for him at the time was not gratitude, but contempt. As far as I could tell, he had wasted lots of time, blown some great opportunities, and obstinately refused to take responsibility for any of it.

When I was little, and craved his love and recognition beyond all else, he had absented himself both physically, and even more painfully, emotionally. Even when he was there, he wasn't there. I wanted to be just like him until I found out who he was. Now that I have the perspective of age, children of my own and perhaps the life he would have lived had he dared, at least I understand the choices he made, even though understanding does not alleviate the sadness I feel when I think of what he could have had for himself; what I wanted for him.

Given the circumstances surrounding his own childhood and adolescence, he did damn well. His father died suddenly when my dad was in his early teens. He was just getting to know the guy, who he fairly worshipped, when poof, he was gone. Left with a clinging, dependent mother, he became the man of the house long before he was ready to assume the role. Like most men, he had to make it up as he went along; garnering a veneer of manhood from the examples surrounding him, semi-aware that beneath the achingly thin veneer was a scared and bitter kid. He became a big, impressive, handsome, distinguished looking man, made patrician by age, with an impressive mane of silver hair and penetrating green eyes. But try as I might, and I tried mightiliy well into my teens, I could never reach him.

I know he loved me. I know he was proud of me and my accomplishments. I found this out mostly via the house switchboard, my mother. If I wanted to know what he was feeling or thinking, I'd ask her. At first she would say 'ask him yourself'. I would try, and invariably come up empty-handed. He was the emotional equivalent of an all-star running back, and could head-fake, stutter-step, and spin away from a direct question quicker than I could think. I'd give it my best shot and come up with a fistful of turf.

After a while I just gave up, which seemed to relieve him. It was confusing for me, because while he was avoiding me, he was also demanding of love and respect. How can you love someone you don't know? How can you respect someone who hides when you need him? I couldn't, and after years of trying and feeling somehow inadequate and ashamed that I was not good enough to merit his confidence and communication, I rejected him. I have forgiven myself for my adolescent arrogance and contempt. They were just camouflage for the deep hurt of being unable to access his heart. Many years later I realized that, having been unable to learn about being a man from the man I most needed to learn from, I had to become my own parent and do the job myself.

I was an expectant father, and it struck me as both ironic and incongruous that I should be waiting around for the approval of a father incapable of giving it, while I was myself on the cusp of fatherhood. If I couldn't find the love and approval for myself somewhere, how was I to give it to my own child? Was I doomed to pass this emotional sandbagging on to my own progeny? The thought of putting another being through that particular torment was abhorrent to me.

Healing opportunities come in strange guises. While I was in the thick of this internal drama, I was offered the opportunity to take a starring role in a three-day intensive workshop for men. The Men's movement was just beginning to take shape, and books like 'Fire in the Belly' and 'Iron John' were on the best-seller lists. At first I mocked them, amalgamating the titles to come up with 'Fire in the John', but my humor simply masked the wound I still carried. My father was still alive at the time, grown more distant by age, illness and the slow encroachment of insanity that had once been a delightful sense of humor.

The intensive, stretched over about sixty sleepless hours, was to take place at a retreat in the dense woods of upper New York State. Thirty men, from ages 35 -70, had committed to participate. I was to be the catalyst around which the event, part drama, part competition, part reconciliation, was to revolve. This 'transformational event', as it was billed, drew on Jungian archetypes and myth; the ancient tales of the prodigal son, Parsifal, the holy fool, and the old king who bled day and night from the unhealed wound of emasculation. The intent was to create a space in which these men could heal and reconnect with themselves, with each other, and with their own fathers, living or dead.

The men who attended this intensive were no bunch of losers. They were all successful, go-getter professionals with incomes in six and seven figures. Yet they all shared common wounds and insecurities. They all suffered from the isolation and insulation that relegates most male relationships to low-level sports bonding. They were all similarly dissatisfied with their lives, which in most cases were classic pictures of success.

My role, and one that I accepted with a certain trepidation, was that of the mythical Red Knight, the archetypal challenger and a tremendous obstacle to the youthful Parsifal on his quest for self- knowledge, as represented by the Holy Grail. It seemed almost laughable that I, anachronistically costumed in an uncomfortable steel shell, could so much as ruffle the composure of even a single one of these worldly, accomplished, seemingly self-assured men, yet what came to pass shook them to their souls, and mine as well.

The first night of the event began with a banquet, with the participants eating and drinking, boasting and posturing in the way familiar to them all. As the revelry reached its highest pitch, I broke in upon them in a fury, clad in a full suit of armor, my face concealed behind a menacing beaked helmet, a huge red cape about my glinting shoulders and a heavy broadsword at my side. I banged a mailed fist on their table and in the stunned reverberant silence told them all, in my deepest and most threatening voice, that they would all meet me later that night. I wheeled and clanked from the room, wondering how much of a fool I'd just made of myself. Most of the bravado in the room evaporated after my exit, and the party quickly and quietly broke up.

The men were kept awake all that night by a tape I'd made, blasting through hidden speakers in the forest. The sounds of galloping horses, howling wolves, the clash and screams of battle, gunfire and explosions robbed them of sleep. One by one, in the hours before dawn they were dragged from their beds and brought before the Red Knight, sitting on a throne flanked by immense burning tapers covered with runic symbols. Under the suit of armor I was a sodden wreck, my heart hammering each time one of these men was brought before me, afraid that the drama would become a parody and I the fool. I was to ask but two questions of each of these men; 'what is your truth?' 'What do you seek?' Each knelt, confused and abashed, and not a single one had a coherent answer to my questions.

During the following forty-eight hours I hid myself away in one of the outbuildings on the retreat property. I found myself asking the same questions of myself, and I was similarly stuck for answers. I envied the participants, observing them at a distance. They seemed to be having a great time, forming and reforming into different groups for games and exercises that, viewed from afar, seemed to be breaking down many of the life-long barriers this group of men had showed up with as part of their emotional baggage. I was sorry that my role was to act rather than interact with them. I began to feel sorely gypped. They were all sleep-deprived, but there was an evident spirit of commonality and community growing among them that made me feel very alone, reminding me of the sense of isolated detachment I'd experienced all my life and one which I was desperate to break through.

Two exhausting days later, they were all roused before dawn and silently led into a huge room, lit by a circle of candles. In the center of the circle, prostrate on the ground, lay the Red Knight, sobbing. They were bidden to sit in a circle around him, and one by one they were invited to share their wounds with the crying knight, still an unknown man completely covered in metal. At first I had to manufacture the crying, an elementary acting job. Once the men began their stories, it was no longer acting.

The common wound, the rip in the soul of each of these men, was that not one of them had spoken their truth to their fathers. Few were fortunate enough to have a living father, and I became that father to each of them. Pale, shaken and exhausted, each was at the cusp of vulnerability so rarely seen in men, and each had the trust and support of the entire group. Their tears joined with mine and rose to a mighty howling chorus as each came and knelt by me and spoke their deepest, most closely held secret to the man who could no longer hear their words.

Some came in anger, beating my plated chest over and over, screaming their pain and frustration, then collapsing into the love they had neither given nor received and embracing the sobbing embodiment of their hope. Some came in fear, and clenched my gauntleted hand in a grip that hurt even through the metal links. Some asked for forgiveness, and some just said 'I love you, Dad' over and over, the phrase never having passed their lips before. Some came with horrific stories of abuse and neglect, and I cried with them, hoping to some day forget their tales, knowing that I never would.

The catharsis seemed to go on and on. I was both exhausted and exhilarated, but exhaustion was winning. It seemed that the procession of wounded men would never end, and my own deep well of shared bitterness, which I had thought bottomless, would soon run dry. As I was reaching the point at which I wondered seriously how much longer I could sustain this emotional storm, the last man had his say, and thirty men were helping me to stand and stripping away the armor that had concealed me, forfeiting my anonymity and revealing me as one of them.

I have never felt so much gratitude either from or for a group of men as I did in that moment. Even though I had been a facilitator rather than one of the participants in the drama, I too had been transformed and my task now seemed crystal clear. An opportunity had been shown to me, a door opened, and I had to act.

I went home that night utterly depleted, but before I could sleep, I wrote a letter to my father. I thanked him for all that he had given me, for all the lessons he had taught me, both positive and negative, and I told him that I loved him. I never received a response. My heart cracked a little, again, but at least I had done what so many of those men I had just met had only wished they could have done; I said what I had to say when I had the chance to say it to a living father. I got clean, said my piece to my father while we were both still on this earth, and I could then get on with the job of fathering myself and my children-to-be. I wasn't waiting around anymore for the pat on the head that wasn't going to come. I was free.