Self-Made Man

When you grow into adulthood without the role of a father figure, one often discovers there are lessons that need teaching; things like how to patch up a hole in the plaster wall before moving out of a rented space, things like which IPA to order at a bar. Things like how to shave, how to win a fight, or how to engage in small talk with men who transiently appear in your life about the football game last night. How to feel strong, how to be strong, how to pretend that you’re strong when you’re not, how to not be strong at all — lessons that would do well to be imparted by a father figure.

A lot of it is pretty trivial. Jobs or skills that I frequently learn on YouTube by kind-hearted strangers uploading instructional videos on practical day-to-day fixes, emotional lessons that I learn from my mother instead. Really, I’m doing okay. I’m getting by. The life lessons embroiled with masculinity have been ones I’ve taught myself and now, I’m able to make peace with that. There is one thing however, that I still wish a father figure could guide me through, and that is the simple yet equally loaded topic of how to be a man.

How can I teach myself to be a man, if I wasn’t born as one?

When I was young, I was a girl. Mum tells me tales about my birth-given name, Molly, and how if I’d have been born a boy, Dad would’ve named me Spike. In a way, it’s lucky that I wasn’t born male — I dodged a bullet there, clearly, instead gaining the privilege of having a much more fortunate name. Mason has a much better ring to it than Spike, in my opinion. Then again, I would hold a bias towards my name; I chose it myself, after all.

It’s not as though my life has been completely fatherless, mind you. My dad was a part of my life until I was eight years old. I remember how he played a Bill Bailey cassette in the car on long journeys, one I’d always beg for over and over again. Blues music, toilet humour, children’s poetry and ambitions of being a millionaire — I don’t remember a lot of good things about Dad, but those are some that stick in my mind. He gave me a Spike Milligan book once, which I used to memorise a poem called ‘On The Ning Nang Nong’ and subsequently used to drive both my parents to distraction with endless, obsessive recitations of the catchy verses. Lingering memories of better times with the man who was meant to raise me, protect me; memories I cling to, in a futile attempt to lighten the memories marred by attic rooms, the smell of vomit, and the raucous crescendo of financial rows I would listen to, sat at the top of the stairs.

He and Mum split up when I was young. For a while, I’d travel to visit him on weekends across counties, to sleep in the attic of a house much nicer than the one I lived in with Mum. We’d go on canal trips a lot, sleeping on longboats and watching the swans nest on the riverbank. I’d watch him play darts, play cards, and play house with his new girlfriend and new inherited daughter, before I'd retreat to the attic room where I’d read Spike Milligan and try fruitlessly to get to sleep. It was during those years, he got nasty. Cruel. Be it overfeeding me and then making jokes about my pudgy stomach, ignoring me completely whilst he played with his step-daughter instead, or yelling at me, sending me to the attic, hitting me a little too hard if I raised my voice in response to an overwhelming injustice — the days of Bill Bailey cassettes and blues music were over.

The only lessons in being a man I ever got from my father were lessons in how to shout the loudest, hit the hardest, harbour the most scathing and unwarranted resentment towards my mother — lessons I learned before even knowing that I’d grow to be a man at all. Lessons of anger, lessons of power, lessons of hatred and stubbornness; they lingered, internalised, festered for years after deciding that I no longer wanted to be his daughter, or, soon-to-be son.

Eventually, Mum fell in love again. She fell in love with a man who could make her laugh, a man who made her feel like she could take it easy, a man who replaced the overbearing financial screaming fits and obsessive pressures to relocate and get rich quick with an easy-going, light-hearted nature. He was fun and by God, she had more than deserved a bit of fun. I inherited a new father figure and two younger step-siblings in one fell swoop, as the promise of family life began to emerge once more.

Dad 2.0 was jolly. He made silly faces, told rude jokes and took us to fun new places to spend the day solving puzzles, playing in ball pits, jumping on trampolines and riding on mini land trains, bringing a relief to my childhood that I didn’t even know I’d been waiting for. He entered my life when I was nine years old, tearing up the lonely, claustraphobic monotony Mum and I had grown accustomed to in a whirlwind of nuclear family novelty, video games and indulgence. He taught me about music, instilling into a love for AC/DC, Metallica and Megadeth. He taught me about video games, sitting me down before his bulky computer and showing me how to play World of Warcraft and strategy games about tanks and World War II. He took me to concerts to gaze longingly at mosh-pits and drove me to and from rugby practise in the drizzly winter months. He introduced to me the idea that I could be an older sibling, as I built bonds with his two children. I gained a younger step-sister and a step-brother with whom I played on the wheat fields surrounding our new home, waging war on each other using twigs as swords and hay bales as home base.

For a long time, it was invigorating. I had a new lease on life and a father figure who appeared to care deeply and unconditionally for myself and Mum, a family I’d dreamed of but had yet to receive. Beneath it all, though, as the days of frivolity trickled by, it stopped being fun for Mum. Soon enough, the endless jokes and laid back attitude stopped paying the bills. Unfortunately, a man who could make her laugh by constantly making light had strict limitations to the support he could offer. So, when life turned on its head with extended family trauma, a grandmother sick with cancer and dwindling digits in the bank account, brushing it off with a joke wasn’t the solution Mum needed or deserved.

Once more, I learned lessons of resentment. Tales of how my mother was too serious or too boring soon turned our found family in on itself, building inner frustrations at Mum’s inability to just laugh things off like he did. Too young to understand the pressures of finances, bills, employment and stability, I once again had an opposition to the mother that never left, instilled by the man who waltzed in and would eventually leave, like the father that came before. Regardless, Mum got pregnant. Soon enough, I wasn’t just two siblings richer, but four. She tried hard to persevere and clean up the messes he left, stubbornly sticking it out in a desperate attempt to keep our family together. They married, started to raise two new children together, and she committed to making it work.

History has a tendency of repeating itself. That’s one valuable, striking lesson that my fathers, both biological and step, were able to impart to me.

Soon enough, the financial rows returned in force but this time, with homelessness muddying the equation. Nights with all our belongings shoved into the boot of our car, nights spent sleeping on the floor of his parent’s spare room. Nights spent cramped into a B&B made sleepless by his sleep apnea snores, nights spent scrubbing the black mould off of my bedroom wall in the temporary accommodation we landed in whilst he busied himself with video games; lesson after lesson thrown at me that I, as a child, swallowed down and shoved to the back of my mind, locked in an unguarded box to fester silently.

He was fantastically loud when he wanted to be, silencing the house with his critical bellows at a fiancée who was heavily pregnant with their second child together. I watched as he broke her down to a shell of the powerful woman she’d once been, forcing her to a teetering, dangerous precipice before plummeting her down into a pit of anguish. I listened through the moulding walls as she gave birth to my youngest sibling and watched as he distracted himself again with computer games and chat rooms, whilst I sat on the couch eating biscuits with midwives to occupy myself at four o' clock in the morning.

When they eventually married, it lasted four months. Now residing in a permanent council house with all the perks of non-mouldy walls and a functioning oven, the child of theirs born first to their partnership was diagnosed with a rare disability shortly after they tied the knot. He left not long after. No amount of joking and screwing around could resolve such a permanent, life-long commitment of care, so he abandond our family entirely; broken down once more with callous echoes of his cutting remarks left ringing in his wake.

Lessons of laziness, lessons of apathy, lessons of rage — another footprint of masculine resentment permanently imprinted into the make up of my being.

I visited him for some time, joining my two baby siblings on weekends at his new bungalow. There, he taught me lessons of drinking cider, watching movies far too grown up for a child my age, playing loud music and eating Pot Noodles at midnight. There, he taught me lessons of empty fridges, bathrooms caked in a build up of stale urine, disregarding the qualms of two young children, and neglect. There, he taught me lessons on how to be a parent, because it was either that or nobody; he was, after all, far too preoccupied with playing video games to bathe his children, wash their bedsheets, clean the bathroom or cook a meal.

I did it all. I swept the floors, scrubbed the toilet, bathed my siblings and cooked meals out of browning mushrooms at the back of his fridge and expired tins of tomatoes. I yelled at him when he made light of my crying younger siblings, I yelled at him for being too lazy to go shopping, I yelled at him for being too absorbed in World of Warcraft, tank games and TV football matches to bother cleaning his own pubes off the toilet seat.

I learned from him, when I went to visit after the split, the same lesson that he’d taught Mum, the same disappointment he’d forced onto her. I learned that now, the humour and the jokes weren’t funny. I learned her suffering. The quips and jabs weren’t paying the bills and the piss-taking giggles weren’t parenting his kids. “You’ll make a great wife to a lucky man one day,” he’d said to me, as I scrubbed his moulding skirting boards on my hands and knees, soap suds up to my elbows and frustrated tears prickling in my eyes.

There’s a night from one of the visits to his bungalow that remains vivid in my memory to this day. I was thirteen, my youngest sibling was still a baby and the other was barely a toddler. That visit, the youngest developed an ear infection during our stay with him. I was exhausted before the visit had even commenced. See, by the time I was thirteen, my body no longer felt like home and a chronic insomnia had trickled into my nights, leaving me lost, tired and burnt out, merely from getting to the end of each day and waking up the next.

During that visit, I cleaned the bathroom, swept the floors, cooked a meal and bathed the kids like usual and by nightfall, I was just about ready to scream or cry or apathetically stare at the wall waiting for sleep that would likely take forever to come. My littlest sister, however, was ill. She wouldn’t settle, screaming ceaselessly with a creeping temperature that wouldn’t abate and, once again, Dad 2.0 was distracted by a pint of beer and a game of football on the TV. I cuddled her, sang her lullabies over her pained wails, soothed my other little sibling who kept being awoken by the crying. I managed to get her off to sleep every hour or so, buying her ten minutes of slumber before the pain of her ear infection woke her up again, at which point the soothing lullaby cycle would continue.

I was drained, sleep deprived and clueless so, without knowing what I was supposed to do, I’d venture into the living room where my step-dad sat with his beer in hand whenever her crying got too intense and ask, “When is she allowed to have Calpol again?”

To this day, I wonder why I’d trusted his judgement. After all, he’d proven time and time again that he’d much rather brush things off than deal with them appropriately. Somehow, irresponsibly, I thought he would at least be able to read the label on a bottle of children’s medicine. In hindsight, I wish I’d read it myself. Come the morning, after a sleepless night of holding frozen peas wrapped in tea towels to her head and hushing her endless tears, my little sister was out cold. Completely unconscious. I couldn’t wake her up, but Dad 2.0 told me not to worry, that she was probably just passed out from exhaustion, that I should let her sleep. That morning, when we arrived back home to Mum, she affirmed my concerns by phoning an ambulance.

Not even a pin prick to her ankle jolted her.

After her intake into the paediatric ward, Dad 2.0 arrived late after endless calls made by Mum to try and figure out what had happened. When he did show his face and discovered that she’d been overdosed, he looked at the information sheet at the bottom of her bed and said, “Well, at least it wasn’t toxic! She’s fine.”

Soon after that, I ended contact with him. Betrayed by my trust in both father figures I’d had, I was left to battle tiredly through developing teenage years of turmoil, insomnia fuelled meltdowns and hallucinations of an angry, detached male voice in my head telling me to kill myself. Years of screaming at Mum and of her screaming back, years of seething resentment towards her and the two men who’d had an obligation to protect me but did no such thing. Years spent carving into my own body and despairing at the curves that filled out my chest, hips and thighs, years spent trapped in a body that had never felt like mine. By fifteen, I’d managed to fit the pieces together, coming to the realisation that the truth I’d repressed during all those years of dissociation from my own flesh, was that I wasn't a daughter at all. I was a son.

In hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if the reason I hadn’t let myself come to that realisation sooner is because I didn’t want to be like the men I’d grown up around. I didn’t want to be the man who yelled at women and locked children in attics after leaving bruises on their backsides, nor did I want to be the man who laughed off the suffering of his family and forced parental responsibility onto a child who couldn’t even look after herself, or rather, himself. Constantly these days, I find myself lost in cycles of recollection, pondering of what might’ve been different had just one of them treated me with a modicum of care and attention, ceaseless curiosity about whether I’d have realised what all of those little signs throughout my childhood had meant a little sooner.

At sixteen, I got back in touch with Dad — my birth father. I thought it fair to try and rekindle some semblance of a relationship, if only a brief one, to tell him that I was no longer his daughter and potentially, to gain some of the life lessons from a father I craved at that point more than ever. When we met, after so many years apart, the only thing of substance he could offer me was criticism for not having any concrete five year plans and a statement in response to my transgender identity; “You’ll always be my little Molly.”

If not for the context, that may have been understandable. I’m not naive to the difficulties of having a transgender child a parent experiences. Hurtful as it was, it may have been something I could've learned to accept from him… except I never was his little Molly. I never was his anything, besides an annoyance he could take his frustrations out on. I wasn’t his little girl, he’d never earned that claim, abandoning all responsibility to Mum when he left to live the high life with his peachy suburban new family in his expensive, three storey house. He abandoned that claim when he invited me to come and visit and then made me sleep in the attic. Needless to say, that relationship didn’t rekindle at all.

Now, I’m an adult. I’m a man, or at least, I’m learning to be one, journeying through day-to-day life without guidance or pointers from a father to impart the teachings I need. Every day is a battle to ensure my fathers legacies don’t continue, attempting with each waking moment to break the cycles of resentment, fury and neglect they’d bled into me as a child. I seek now to define myself, my identity and my life as a man without their stain, abandoning their marred definitions of manhood and replacing them with my own. When I get angry, I swallow it down, trying with valour to abate the imprinted urges to hit the hardest or shout the loudest; I remind myself with every bristle of rage that comes to me, how deeply those learned behaviours impacted me and thus, how deeply they would impact those around me. I remind myself to rewrite the stories and redefine the teachings I could someday offer myself.

Each new challenge that presents itself is a new lesson on how to be a man; searching on Google a step-by-step guide on how to patch up a hole in the wall, drinking a new IPA at each bar before deciding that ordering a simple bottle of Budweiser suits me best, waiting on the effects of hormone replacement therapy for lessons on shaving, not getting into fights at all, let alone winning them, and admitting to the men who transiently appear in my life that I didn’t watch the game last night, because I don’t like football. How do I feel strong? I go to therapy. How do I embody strength? I wake up every morning. How do I pretend that I’m strong when I’m not? Easy; I don't pretend. How do I live with not being strong at all? I allow myself to be what I truly am.

I wouldn’t be the person I am today without my fathers and, candidly, I often find that I resent that. It’s not that they shaped my future with empathy, deep talks, supportive words or a lasting protective presence — it’s that they didn’t shape my future at all. Mum did that. I did that. I took what they gave me and built it into something different; mental handiwork learned after years of suffrage to deconstruct and reconstruct their trauma into my triumph. That, to me, is the lesson that’s stuck with me after a childhood disquieted with masculine instability. It’s the most valuable lesson I’ve learned; the ability to craft myself without fatherly guidance. The ability to be myself, without a father at all. The ability to be comfortable with that. The ability to create something new. The ability to be a self-made man.