Dear society,

Let’s settle something once and for all: Boys are allowed to have feelings, too.

I know you feel uncomfortable with a boy who cries. I know you cringe to see a boy walking sad. I know you can’t stand to see a man barely able to crawl from his bed for the darkness hanging his head, weighing him down.

I watched my brother shake beneath your hand, society, but I didn’t fully understand it until I had six boys of my own.

These boys in my home are brim full of emotions, and those emotions leak out his eyes when he’s told he can’t bring a book to the lunch table, because he’d rather bury himself in a book than talk with friends about video games he doesn’t play; and they climb out his mouth when his playing time passes way too fast and he’s not ready, not at all, for the clean-up time; and they hide behind frustration when he just can’t execute that flip as perfectly as he wants.

I know what you would tell them, society.

Forget about it.
It’s not that bad.
We’ll give you something to cry about.

Man up.

Man up, because real men don’t cry.

And there they go, walking around with their emotions trapped by your dam, so they’re ticking time bombs, and you shake your heads in disgust when you read about that young man sneaking into an elementary school with a loaded gun and that baby’s daddy beating her, a toddler of only two years, to death and all those men walking out on their families because disengagement is easier than feeling the sorrow of alienation or the frustration of a crying child or the disappointment of a rocky family that points to a rocky marriage that points to a messed up life.

There they go, turning from their inner lives toward stoic silence and solitude and cynicism. There they go straightjacketed by the rules of manhood, so they don’t even know who they are anymore.

You are stealing life from these boys, society.

You whisper it behind your hands: Wow. He’s really sensitive. Dramatic. Easily upset about so little.

And you shout it in their faces: Be someone different.

And you tell them a thousand other ways that men don’t feel because they’re men, dammit.

But here’s the thing, society:
Real men do cry. Real men do feel. Real men talk and grieve and walk with vulnerable hearts instead of clenched-tight ones.

You are not a man if all you ever do is hide behind a straw house of strength. You are not strong if you never show us weak.

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When do our boys just get to be who they are, without being called names or labeled into a box or dismissed as something they’re not?

What if all that negativity poisoning a life leaks from a clenched-tight heart in those tears that make you so uncomfortable? What if letting a boy walk sad for a minute means we save him from not just a physical heart disease but an emotional one, too, because he feels understood and supported and highly esteemed? What if naming the darkness following that man who can barely climb from his bed means, for him, a release from the shame and fear and anxiety heaping his shoulders at the possibility of being found out, of being seen as weak, of forfeiting his identity as a real mean?

What if they all walk lighter for it?

Maybe we see a brave new world, a world where boys stand with an emotional vocabulary they aren’t terrified to use, where boys honor and value their emotional lives as rich windows to their souls, where boys unclench those precious, magnificent hearts.

Where men can be real men.

And that, society, is worth letting my boy weep for the losing of a toy, because it meant a whole lot to him. It’s worth permitting him a good, healthy cry for the leaving of a house when it’s time to go, because he genuinely, wholeheartedly enjoyed this visit with people he loves. It’s worth holding him while he shakes out his sorrow for the trouble he had at school because he really, really regrets it.

After all, “teardrops are healers as they begin to arrive” (Rumi).

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