It's a Boy: the Wound is Where the Light Enters
In my last blog post, I wrote about the gender disappointment I experienced when I learned my third baby was not a girl—of mourning the story I’d created around female legacy.
But this only proved to be half the equation.
In the weeks after I wrote Hannah Kathleen—the story girl—her eulogy, I could not shake the shadow side of this work. In some ways, the blue “it’s a boy” notecard that came with our genetic testing report summoned something even deeper than the conscious maternal grief I could name—a deep masculine wounding not fully healed or accepted.
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But this was not clear to me at first, when all I knew was that I could not look at the notecard without feeling uncomfortable, like something was not right. After ritualizing the loss of Hannah Kathleen, I did feel the relief of grief-release, but also felt the irritability of something untended.
This began with a fixating on the blue notecard. I churned the words over in my head. “It’s a boy,” was different than, “it’s not a girl.”
The latter, “it’s not a girl,” speaks to the loss of the ideal—the need to process through what I believed would be instead of what was. But “it’s a boy” means exactly that: it. Is. A. BOY. “It’s a boy” means that inside of me was a tiny-sized man. A male. A masculine energy carrying XY chromosomes. The more I thought about this, the more unsettled I became. I started to feel trapped—ill-prepared and insecure. Afraid. It was different, in my mind, to raise one boy, but two? Two outnumbered me.
I hid the blue notecard.
In fact, I buried it. I stuffed it inside a manilla envelope and put it behind a pile of papers on my desk. I could not look at it. This avoidance extended to all the men around me. I averted my eyes when my husband came in the room. When my father called, I silenced the phone. Even when my toddler son had a very run-of-the-mill meltdown, I asked my husband to handle it. In the starkest of terms, my response to the collective masculine was the inverse of the longing I felt for the feminine:
Aversion.
I felt averse to all men with the kind of the all-or-nothing thinking characteristic of fear. I even Googled, “which parent is responsible for determining the baby’s sex?” and felt Red. Hot. Blistering. Anger. When the search results yielded, “the father.”
I imagine my husband could intuit this. My body language told the story. My apparent rejection of the boy I was carrying must have translated, at least energetically, like this: if she doesn’t want a boy, and I am a man, what does that mean about her love for me, or her ability to love our sons?
He never said this, of course. In fact, in the days after getting the blue notecard, my husband was supportive.
“I know you’re sad,” he said the morning after we found out we were having was a boy. He gave me a hug.
But as my grief and irritation persisted over the next week, he started avoiding me, making passive aggressive comments, acting frustrated. His resentments came out sideways, sometimes explosively and irrationally. I knew what his frustration and avoidance meant without him saying it: “Move on. Be grateful. We have a perfectly healthy boy on the way.”
His judgment gave voice to the self-recrimination I already felt. My sadness was interwoven with self-hatred. How can a mother be disappointed in who she’s carrying? Is this not conditional love? Doesn’t this baby deserve to be loved JUST FOR WHO HE IS? I kept asking myself. I wanted so badly not to care, to be able to simply accept the baby’s boyhood as rightful, meaningful, ordained, even.
But I just … couldn’t.
Like an uncared-for wound, the periphery of my discomfort widened—reddened. It was sore and hot to touch, like the acute stage before a cyst ruptures. Something was in there.
I tried to talk this through with my husband, but he could not tolerate what came across to him, I imagine, as self-pity or wallowing. He walked away each time I brought it up.
Eventually, my resentment and my husband’s avoidance separated us: my desire to be understood, heard, and held in my sorrow; his desire to ignore, sweep my experience under the rug to move on and get excited about what was, not what was not.
This marital dynamic deepened the confusion and pain: my husband’s inability to stay present in my distress highlighted the very core issue I could not yet name—a masculine judgment buried deep within me: that men cannot be trusted to stay present to pain.
That, when faced with deep emotion, men abandon us.
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This part of my history – the origin of this deeply mistrusting belief – predates my husband and has nothing do with the tiny being inside me. But it has everything to do with the lens through which I heard the news I was having another boy—the fear it activated in my body: that I wouldn’t be able to handle raising not one, but TWO well-adjusted, expressive, boys able to tolerate both their own, and others’, deepest emotional experiences. At the most self-centered of levels, that I would experience disconnection from them, too. That I would be alone in the pain of desiring emotional connection with boy-men unable to reciprocate.
The blue notecard was a mirror, like often pain points are. My aversion to it was an aversion to the question it posed: what inside of you is unhealed?
I started meditating to this question.
One day, the image of a greeting card my father gave me eight years ago came into view. On the front was a Rumi quote: “Our wounds are where the Light enters you.”
It was his response to reading the first draft of my memoir-in-progress, THE FAMILY CLOSET, about the impacts of growing up with a closeted gay father. I was thirty-one when I finished the draft. It was the first time I’d been completely, terrifyingly honest about how his silence, my family’s silence, affected me growing up—how I had yearned for the deep connection that comes with the kind of vulnerability that is constantly out of reach when you’re guarding a secret.
I spent much of my young adulthood blaming my father for his inability to break the silence of our shared secret. This resentment fueled a lot of my own addictions. I know now, after years of therapy and recovery work, that only people who believe they are worthy of love risk being honest enough to form deep connections. That we cannot make other people do their work. That we are all doing the best we can with the skills we have.
But that didn’t stop the yearning as a child. I had an unmet, unasked for, desire to see each other’s frayed edges and hear the words: You are WORTH talking to, even if I am not able to speak.
This kind of validation—seeing and attending to another’s needs despite our capabilities—requires knowing our most precious interiors, our fears, desires, insecurities, fantasies. It requires the radical bravery of being vulnerable with oneself and, in turn, vulnerable with others. It’s a skill, vulnerability. In her research dedicated to vulnerability, research professor Brene Brown, asserts that it is the pathway to intimacy is vulnerability. My own therapist talks about how vulnerability builds trust, closeness, and a sense of belonging. It leads us to the wholeness that comes with the human-to-human connection we are hard-wired to want. Without it, relationships struggle.
My memoir draft, the one my father read two decades after I learned his secret, chronicles the ways I dealt with this wedge between me and my father—how our relationship was devoid of vulnerability despite my wish for closeness. In response, or in conjunction with, I became emotionally dependent on my mother for these needs, groped for achievement to prove my own worth, and developed an eating disorder to numb the pain. When my mother died, when I was 22, and my father came out, I started drinking compulsively. I used – and use – avoidance, too. I followed very much in the footsteps I begrudged.
“It’s a book,” my father wrote on the inside of the card. It was the closest he had ever come to saying, “I see you. I hear you. You are understood. Your experience in this MATTERS.”
It was also the first time I’d said it. After he gave me the card, there would be years of conversations, healing work to be done, amends to be made. In time, I would come understand that I am his mirror. And he is mine.
But my father’s greeting card was the first time I attached a word to the markings of my primary experience with men: wounds.
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Just like the stage before suturing an abrasion, I examined this masculine wound closely. I journaled, inventoried, meditated more. Each time, I found myself transported back to the point where it all began:
I am eleven. I lay awake in a cheap motel bed, pretending to be asleep. I am listening to my mother tell my aunt a secret. They are outside, on the porch. The door is cracked open. They have been using hushed tones all night, and I know this motel is a meet-up spot to talk. I also know why they are here: my parents have been fighting at night, filling crystal ashtrays with cigarette butts that I find in the morning. Something is wrong. I want to know what it is. I know my mother is here to tell my aunt.
After a day of shopping, my mother has put me to bed. I pretend to close my eyes but turn my ear to the door. On the cement porch, I can hear my mother crying. She is talking about my father in whispers. She takes a drag of her cigarette.
My aunt puts her hand on my mother’s knee.
My mother sucks in her breath. Loud enough to hear through the door, she chokes on these words: “He’s gay.”
My father is gay.
I don’t know what gay means, really, just that is threatens all the security I know—that my safe, nuclear family unit is now at risk. Until that point, we have been like a band that marches through our house to the same beat. We eat dinner together, read stories in the Big Bed, send family Christmas cards with giant smiles on our faces.
I start to cry from the bed. My mother hears me. She runs into the room and rocks me. “Oh Emmy,” she says and wails almost.
I know she is devastated. I can feel the gravity of my knowing in how firmly she clasps my ears – like earmuffs.
But it is too late.
When we get home the next day, my mother tells my father that I know. He comes into my room to say he loves me and ask if I have any questions. I say no.
This is my first lie.
All I have are questions.
My father says, “Okay.”
This is the moment when we decide to tread the deep, emotional waters instead of dive in—to avoid and skim our inner truths. It is a severance point, the tearing open of the laceration from the motel room.
My father and I do not talk about him being gay for another eleven years.
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Some back story here, that I have learned in the years since my father and I started truth-talking: my parents were hippies, married in the bliss of non-judgment and peace movements. They shared a deep love and desire to create a family. They both wanted the security of a nuclear unit and wanted this in the standards by which the world operated in the 1970’s: a heterosexual, Leave-it-to-Beaver, white-picketed fence, kind of way.
The problem with the equation was that my father had the deep inner knowing that he was gay long before he married my mother, but the inevitability was too painful to deal with, so he avoided it—created a false exterior to hide what was underneath. “I didn’t possibly think it could be true,” he says now. To escape the questions, the nagging suspicions, the fears, he drank to cover the insecurity and convinced himself it would be fine. His denial extended first to himself. His ability to avoid inner truth started long before I overheard his secret in a motel room.
Eventually, the drinking stopped working as an anesthetist for the inevitable pain of denying who he was. My father got sober when I was eleven—the year of the motel—and “came to the inevitable conclusion I was gay,” he says now. Soon after, he told my mother.
The major wrench in the plan was this: I overheard the secret that night in the motel room. Because both my parents knew I had overheard, and thus a child was involved, the complexity of what to “do” – whether to stay married – deepened.
A few months later, they decided to do just this: to stay married, monogamously, and bury this secret. Gay, married men were not being talked about in the early 90’s, especially in rural New Hampshire, where we lived.
And so, I abided by their code: don’t talk about it. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
This decision might have been conscious for them, but I made it by osmosis. Keeping their secret felt like survival to me. I parroted what I saw them doing.
This new family code rewired my understanding of life, and of men. Under the mask of our everyday life, I knew my father lived in a different world. And yet, our interactions stayed only on the everyday. We did not share our truest truths. We pretended.
Deep down, in the very place triggered by the “it’s a boy” notecard, the message generalized:
MEN CANNOT BE TRUSTED.
And, by extension or internalization, the deeper wound formed:
I AM NOT WORTH THE TRUST IT TAKES TO SHARE A MAN’S INNER TRUTH.
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With the fervor of an unhealed paternal relationship, I set out to disprove this. In my twenties, I dated men who could be trusted, and this to me meant someone who was opposite from my father. At least on the surface.
I was not far into my experiment when I met my husband. I was 22—a college senior. I saw in him what I could not reconcile in my father. My soon-to-be husband was a man confident in his heterosexuality whose military background promised the values of HONOR, DUTY, LOYALTY. He was someone you could call “all man” –a veteran, a West point football player, a dude. He had thick shoulders and a virility about him that my father lacked, but a mystery and inaccessibility that felt familiar. He felt masculine to me. And we spoke the same language: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
I fell in love. Unaware of my need for connection through vulnerable sharing—and my feelings of unworthiness when I don’t receive that—I fell in love with all the parts of my now-husband that made me feel safe (and still do)—his strength, his trustworthiness not to leave me, his commitment to family. His masculinity, or what I believed I knew about that at the time.
Over the next fifteen years, I would come to see how much like my father that description was. Because they presented so differently on the exterior, I didn’t recognize the signs of having a trauma place that he, like my father, guarded. His unreadiness to witness his own dark places, and others’, was the very thing I had set out to avoid and yet was the glue that eventually bound us.
It has been said that we attract what is unhealed within us.
That our primary relationships are our mirrors.
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When I opened the blue notecard a few months ago, a new mirror emerged: a soon-to-be-son sitting right inside an unprocessed wound.
Perhaps I was not ready to see all of this with my first son. Perhaps, at that time, my body interpreted the equity of having one girl and one boy—the same family structure I grew up in—as normal and therefore, not threatening. Who knows. What I know is this: the blue notecard was a point of disconnection for me and a point of connection for my husband. I grieved. My husband disappeared, emotionally. I was cast back in the same role I been in as a child: needing support from a very good, well-intentioned man who wasn’t able to stay present to my pain.
I could not trace my initial anger to my eleven-year-old self, to the little girl who needed to talk through her feelings but instead pretended to be fine. I could not make sense of sleepless nights that happened after letting go of the story I was having a girl—a story, of course, that bypassed this work to shed light on my masculine wounding. To begin to heal it.
To answer the question, what inside you is unhealed?
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One day this fall when I was in the middle of unearthing this wound, I walked outside, into the woods. I knelt in a wilting grove of ferns. It was early morning and the light streamed in and landed right on my growing belly.
I felt, in that moment, a sense of billowing purpose: of intention. Of meaning. Of order instead of chaos.
Perhaps this little boy—this second little boy, the one who will tip the scales so that my household will be more male-dominant than female-dominant—is here to teach me something. Perhaps he is only a reflection of the wound where the light enters – not the wound itself.
This is how shadows talk: as if they are threat.
And, unexamined, they are.
But examining, considering, healing these wounds does not leave me with Capital-A answers. More a series of questions, a sense of being called into relationship with my shadow self, where the braid of primary men in my life—my father, my husband, my sons—can help me awaken to how my unconscious reactions to how my wounds might hurt another human. Might recreate the very history I am trying to outgrow.
The work requires looking at the masculine energies within myself, too—of how I have neglected or over-depended on these energies to survive. How have I avoided, or villainized, this side of own interior? If I cannot extend compassion here first, I cannot extend it to others and will not be able to see the very positive attributes of my father, and my husband, and my sons.
Among many things, I worry about passing along the cultural beliefs that boys don’t cry, don’t have feelings, don’t have experiences below the surface that they are able to share. That they must put on the “mask of masculinity” popularized by Lewis Howes: be stoic, be aggressive, be invincible, be alpha. Be fill-in-the-blank. But don’t be vulnerable. Don’t let the world see the real you. Protect the projection at all costs and avoid people who challenge you.
I don’t worry because I will actively teach these things, but because I see my complicit involvement in these systems. My own entanglement and attraction to them.
My desire and intention, of course, is to break out of this – not to pass along my woundedness. “Hurt people, hurt people,” a mentor of mine says. While I cannot prevent pain for my children, or outsmart my reflexes, I can be conscious of not projecting the limits of my thinking and experience onto my burgeoning relationships with my sons.
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A few weeks ago, when I started this blog post, I took the blue notecard out of the manilla envelope. I hung it above my laptop, where it sits today. When I looked at it, I noticed two hearts around the words It’s a Boy – two bookends to a reality growing inside me. One of the hearts comes before this announcement and one comes after.
A before and an after.
A history and a future.
An icon of where I have been and an icon of where I am going.
When I look the notecard now, after the process of writing through the beliefs that limit me, it reminds me that everything I am given is an opportunity for spiritual and emotional growth. Even more so, that perhaps this boy, this given child, is the very balm I’ve needed to do my own healing work. That it was not one, but two boys, that would push me into the necessary counterpart to grieving my perceived loss that this baby was not a girl.
But this perspective requires looking beyond the horizon of my own pain, which call to me when I ignore it. I am at risk, when I ignore it, of recreating the same patterns: allowing my aversion to speak louder than my desire to steward.
If I am surrendered to that belief that I am given what I need, not always want I want and from whom I want it, then there is no resistance to fact: this boy WAS meant for me. Me for him. We have lessons for each other in this hall of mirrors.
“You can think of this as a vocation – of raising two little boys,” a minister said to me the other day. “That your job is to make them feel safe enough to live vulnerably.”
This charge requires an essential shift in perspective: that my relationship not be about what I might or might not receive from these boys—how they might or might not make up for what I didn’t get in childhood and sometimes in my marriage—but about what I can give them.
The French moralist and essayist Joseph Joubert once said, “to teach is to learn twice.”
I get to be the kind of mother who teaches this boy, my two boys, how to open themselves to the fullness of human emotions—and in doing so, risk pain. I get to be the first person they practice this with and the first person they fail this with. I get to show them how to speak their truths, how to listen, how to honor and not fix. I get to—not have to—teach them how to be, how to love, how to grieve, how to embrace the inherently uncertain business of intimacy in relationships… how to dive into deep waters and not only not drown, but float –stay present –until the waves settle to stillness.
Together, we will build capacity.
We will all mess up. I will want to run sometimes, too. I accept that in serving this role, I will be opening myself to risk, too. And, yet, the purpose of showing these boys how to hold space, and feel safe and worthy enough to also share, outweighs my own nerves around it.
In fact, it allows me to question and assess and heal my own relationship to this. To learn to hold space for my own and others’ deepest experiences, and not expect others to do this for me. To integrate my own feminine and masculine energies.
This, I am beginning to see, is there the Light enters.
