On Monday, I posted this blog about my fears about trying to raise my son to be a good man, and many amazing things happened.
First – there were conversations about it everywhere. People connected with me about it in every conceivable media. I got text messages about it. Phone calls. Blog comments. Emails. I posted it on Scribd as a PDF, where almost 3,000 people read it and pushed it to the top of the “most discussed” list. It was talked about on Facebook, Twitter, and “IRL,” when I bumped into people on the street. For the record, not every comment was good — some people told me it was “too honest, too painful.” There is always that fear.
But, in the end, there was one conversation that mattered.
I picked up my son John from school Wednesday night, two days after I posted the blog. He scrambles into the car and says, “Hey mom, I read that story about our hike. That was great. I would have said a few more funny things you could have included if I had known you were going to write about it!”
And there was that laughter again.
But we then launched into an hour and a half discussion about HIS fears, his problems, what he’s doing about the past and what he wants to do about the future. How he’s learning from his mistakes. What he has learned. Why that matters. John told me things he had been holding in, not telling anyone, for months. He asked for help. He planned for the future in ways that were honest assessments of “looking where he has been before so he could see where he was going.” (good advice for mountain climbing, also.)
And at one point John turned to me and said, “Mom, I’m so glad I can talk to you. Don’t you think that has changed? Don’t you think it’s different now, that we can talk, really talk, about all these things?”
Don’t you think it is different now?
I have been saying to people for the past few weeks: “Being a part of The Good Men Project this past year has fundamentally changed my relationship with my son for the better.” (Heck, it’s fundamentally changed my relationship with *men* for the better, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)
Why?
Because we talk about the things that matter. There’s a way into the conversation that I never knew existed before. My son and I, together, take actions that we need to take to make both of our lives better.
The conversation about “What does it mean to be a good man?” Yeah, that’s important.
This morning, I woke up and there was a great short post on Seth Godin’s blog that said “All we need to know is that it is possible.” And I realized this: there’s a way into the conversation that I never knew existed before. And all I needed to know was that it was possible.
