Little Wings: Realizing I’d become a man
by Wayne Lee
I’m lying on a padded table, watching while Dominic tattoos little Mercury wings behind my anklebones on both feet. It’s a few days before my sixtieth birthday, and this is my present to myself. I’ve earned these wings. I deserve them. I’ve wanted to do this since I was 21, back when I was a dancer.
I’m not a dancer anymore—in fact, some days I can barely walk — but I wanted to remind myself that, by God, I can still fly.
This indelible reminder is especially timely right now as I deal with a perfect storm of major life challenges — business failure, bankruptcy, foreclosure, unemployment, my wife’s depression, and progressive neuromuscular disease. Coping with all this loss is like watching the banners of my happiness and success blow away like so many dead leaves in an autumn wind. This is real, gritty, adult stuff — not fun.
As I’m lying here enduring the pain of countless little puncture marks on my ankles, I realize that I’m “taking it like a man.” Not just the tattooing, but everything. All the life wounds I’m experiencing right now — all the uncertainty, anger, fear, grief and shame.
This kind of struggle isn’t new. I’ve had my share of misfortune. I was abandoned by my father, nearly killed four times, sustained injuries that ended my performing arts career, endured chronic pain, multiple surgeries, disability, divorce, and the birth of a severely premature daughter. So this isn’t new, this rash of seemingly bad luck.
What is new, though, is that I’m dealing with it like a grownup — a victor, not a victim. I’m no longer blaming other people, external circumstances, the stars, or God. Neither am I blaming myself. I’m realizing that “stuff” happens, whether or not I deserve it, and that everything that is happening to me is the product of every thought and action I’ve taken in this life. I’m letting go of the childish notion that I deserve lollipops and moonbeams simply because I’m a good boy.
I’m not a boy anymore. Finally, at age sixty, I’m learning to accept what is happening rather than fighting it. I’m embracing change, as Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chodron suggests. I’m not judging as much, not resisting the so-called bad changes and celebrating the so-called good ones. I’m realizing that ultimately I can’t know the difference between the two, like a man who curses missing the last flight home only to find out his plane never made it home.
How do I know? Maybe all this struggle is happening because it will make me a better person? Maybe somehow I’ve chosen this path because it’s best for me spiritually. Maybe I’m in the perfect position, karma-wise. Maybe we all are, all the time. It’s possible.
I’ve been active in a men’s group over the past couple of years through MKP, which is all about integrity and accountability. It’s about being the man I want to be, showing up in all the relationships in my life, deepening my connection to the world and being in touch with my feelings.
Ah, yes, feelings. Those are supposed to be the milieu of children, aren’t they? But being silly, vulnerable and spontaneous are child-like, not child-ish, behaviors. By leaving that kind of emotional honesty behind like so many discarded toys, we adults too often abandon the kind of mind-body-heart integration we need to be fully functioning grownups. Sometimes we need to act like a kid to become an adult.
That’s why I got my little blue wing tattoos. That’s why I try to be grateful for small things, like the fact that my wife and I still have a safe place to sleep, food in the fridge, healthy daughters, freedom, beauty all around. That’s why I try to remind myself to take joy in merely being alive, to be grateful that I can still walk and talk, and to give thanks for my abundance of family and friends.
I look back at the so-called “hard knocks” in my life, and I now see that I grew stronger simply by surviving them. I grew, but I never really grew up.
As a pre-teen, I worked alongside some pretty tough men on a commercial fishing boat in Southeast Alaska. It was hard, dangerous work, and I learned to work like a man. But I still didn’t know what it was to be a man.
Other rites of passage weren’t much more successful, developmentally speaking. After I injured my legs, hips and back, after I had to give up my chosen career in the performing arts, I wasn’t blessed with any great flash of wisdom. All I felt was pain, loss, depression and bitterness because I was cut down in the prime of my life, crippled, defeated. Poor me. I felt like a failure, not like an adult.
Then there was the breakup of my first marriage. My first wife yelled a lot, which I just couldn’t handle. I tried being Ward Cleaver — the only real father figure I could conjure up — but that didn’t help. So I did the only thing I could think of doing. I left — to save my life, I told myself.
That decision caused my ex to move three thousand miles away, removing my daughter from me physically and emotionally for the next decade. That separation caused me to be consumed by anger and grief. I felt devastated, not mature.
Now I know that in its own way my life is perfect. Sure, it hasn’t turned out like I thought it would, but whose life does? Who can know how the fabric of his days will unfold? All we can do is be present, be grateful, do our work and take responsibility for ourselves.
To me, that’s what it means to be a man, even if it has taken me sixty years — and a couple of tattoos — to figure it out.
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Wayne Lee: A former music critic for The Washington Times (DC), The Seattle Times, Jazziz and other publications, Wayne now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where his writing focuses on poetry and fiction. |
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