Nurturing

The suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, cohort of Susan B. Anthony, once made the comment that, “Men as a general rule have very little reverence for trees.” I’ve thought about it a lot this week.

It’s one of those statements that says a whole lot more than it says. The implications of a failure to reverence trees--a failure to reverence the natural world over the intellectual, the body over the mind--are manifold. Our rapacious treatment of the forests of this land is but the outward sign of that failure to reverence. Men in our culture have tended to think more often in terms of profit than of reverence.

That inability to be reverent has had deep and far-reaching consequences, some of which, such as the ecological ones, we are only just beginning to understand. Stanton’s words provide a starting point and a challenge for my reflections on nurturing. Do men have what it takes to be nurturers? Or is there something lacking, some innate deficit of reverence which prevents us men from fully inhabiting the nurturing role?

I cannot speak for all men, and do not pretend to do so. I do know that a lot of men are doing a better job of nurturing these days. I even know a few whom I would describe as great “nurturers.” By this I mostly mean men who are taking a far more active role in bringing up their children than most men of my father’s generation.

Partly, this is the result of the women’s movement, and partly it is the result of the financial realities of the late twentieth century, when it almost always takes two incomes to support a family. As more and more women have gone to work, more and more men have had to take an increasing responsibility for child-rearing.

Partly, too, I think this is the beginning of a real change in the way that some men are understanding themselves. The whole concept of maleness is changing; the old male culture is breaking down--at least I like to think so. It is not happening nearly as quickly as some--both men and women--might wish. More and more men are discovering what, perhaps mistakenly, has been called their “feminine side.” Remember the campy “New Age Sensitive Male”?

I happen to think that nurturing is neither a female nor a male characteristic, though the nurturing role in our culture has most often been filled by women.

For hundreds of years, men played a nurturing role when, as farmers and husbandmen, they were responsible for birthing and production of livestock and the planting and harvest of crops and orchards. I spent the other afternoon in Max Russell’s orchard down in Ipswich, and I can tell you that there is a whole lot of nurturing going on down there. We might well ask ourselves: has the move away from agrarian culture been at least partly to blame for men losing the ability and even the desire to nurture?

Modern political and economic culture more closely resembles the reality of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Seen any saber tooth tigers or woolly mammoths to slay lately? Nature “bloody in tooth and claw” is too much with us in the modern political economy, and it shows in the widening economic disparity between rich and poor and in the increase in homelessness on our cities’ streets.

Certainly, contemporary writers recognize this trend. Among my favorite male writers, Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Ivan Doig come to mind. Most Native American writers are well aware of what our separation from nature--our lack of reverence for trees--has meant. All of us have suffered--women and children the most perhaps--but we men, too, have paid a price for this mentality.

Even in our agricultural practices, men have often treated the creation as only a commodity to be used, mining the soil, destroying the prairies as well as the forests with a will. That is, they have treated the creation without reverence. As the Amish are proof, it doesn’t have to be that way.

But the truth, I suspect, is not all that simple. It never is. The truth, I have reason to suspect, is that both descriptions are accurate. Farmers have been both rapists and nurturers, in differing measure.

Men seem to me to be, and to have been for quite a long time, pretty conflicted creatures. When men talk about feeling conflicted by feminism’s challenge, I know what they mean, for I too am conflicted.

Just because I am a man does not mean that I wholeheartedly endorse male culture (whatever that is). On the other hand, while I appreciate many of the implications of feminism, I am not totally prepared to denigrate all of male culture.

I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that there is an awful lot that I love about being a man. I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that there is an awful lot that I hate about being a man. Just because one is male with access to male avenues to power does not mean that one is comfortable about it, or even understands it. While I may not know what it is to be a woman, and by extension, a mother, that does not necessarily mean that I know what it is to be a man or a father. We all have a lot of learning to do.

I distrust power and authority, yet I feel compelled, sometimes against my will, to yield it. I don’t want it, but I must have it. I would give it up, but I can’t seem to.

Intellectually, I believe that successfully raising children is the highest form of achievement. Emotionally, I don’t. Or is it the other way around? My energies as a man have been dominated by worldly images of success. Even though as a minister I have occupied what some would call a “feminine” or nurturing role in society, I have had a difficult time letting go of the idea of a “successful” career. It makes no difference that I now question that idea and those images, for they are deeply ingrained in my understanding of who I am as a man.

Ten years ago I tried to step away from the career track and found that I couldn’t do it. Perhaps being a minister is the best compromise I could come up with. At least as a minister, part of my job is to nurture people and institutions.

But I will admit that in many areas of my life I have found it hard to be a nurturer. It was a struggle when the kids were little. I wanted to be very active in their care, but found it difficult to demote the ambition for worldly success to second place. Men have spent a lifetime sopping up cultural messages about the importance of success. Sadly, many women are now caught in the same trap.

Some of us do a better job than others of sublimating that drive for success, but I am suspicious of just how much most of us have been willing or able to give it up.

>From my perspective now, as a parent of a child about to head off for college, I can tell you that I wish I had played an even more active role in my children’s lives, especially when they were younger. It was certainly my intent. I didn’t realize how quickly the time would go by. I didn’t realize how soon they would grow up.

Regret is a good thing if we can learn something from it. It may be too late for me to engage as fully in the lives of my children as I wish I had, but for some of you it is not. There’s a lot more time to achieve your goals then you think, and a lot less time when your children are small than it seems when you are in the midst of it.

Stanton left us men with some wiggle room. She said that “as a general rule” men lacked a critical quality of reverence, implying that there was hope for at least some of us. In spite of our questing for power, our separation from the natural order, and our immersion in the ideal and the otherworldly at the expense of this world, I believe there is hope for us yet,--but we still have a long, long way to go.

I began by posing the question, can men be nurturers, too? On this Mother’s Day, when we give thought to the role that our mothers have had in our lives, I think it is a good question to ask. After all, not all mothers are such great nurturers, either!

I am thankful that we live in a time when both men and women can question traditional roles and try on new ones. I am hopeful for what this means not only for men and women, but for all of life on this fragile planet. I am hopeful about what might be salvaged from traditional male culture and softened by traditional feminine culture and shared by both.

I have always thought of the poets as the ultimate nurturers of all that is sacred about both men and women. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats belies the general rule about men and trees in his poem “A Prayer for My Daughter,” where he writes,

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock