Looking at the man in the mirror

Throughout my childhood years, I heard many different comparisons to my appearance. “You’re the splitting image of your father” sometimes “they take your mother face and stick it on yuh”.  For the purpose of this blog, I stood in front a mirror to determine which were true. To me, all I saw was my mom, or is it because she was whom I rather embodied? I then looked beyond my physical appearance and began to question the reason for some of my actions.

Is it because of my father that i was never quite sure of some manhood things I needed to know? Like, how strong is strong enough, how soft is too soft, or how much doing and giving is enough from a man's point of view? Only now I realised, I have yet to master the art of how to push forward and when to pull back, when to stand up and for how long I should.

In my earlier years there were times when I was unsure when to speak up or when to shut up. Because of lack of input from my father, I was never really quite sure about what other men will think about what i had to say. Who is a man? What are his attributes? A woman may cry when she's afraid, scream when she's angry, eat chocolate when she is depressed or off balance. What does a man do? How does a man handle turmoil in his mind or heart?

I now understand what Michael Jackson meant when he said “I’m looking at the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways”. For the most part of my life, I was unsure of what was expected of me. At times I overcompensate, under commit and in some cases, just give up rather than fail. There was once a time I used to grieve silently, and cry for what was missing. Cry! The one thing men ought to never get caught doing, and I learnt this from my peers. Maybe, just maybe if he was around I would have learnt that it’s ok to cry because I’m only human.

Looking at the man in the mirror, beyond the mirror, made me answered so many questions I did not even know I had to myself. One question that stood out at me was, how can you miss something you never had? Two days after drafting this blog and reading it over, the answer then hit me. You can’t miss something you never had; you can however miss what it could have been.

This particular blog was like a counseling session for me, the more I type, the more answers I received. What it taught me most though, is the man I ought to be to Triston Junior when he comes, so years from now he won’t be having the same questions I did. Because, I know too well how a boy could need his father, yet so too can a man.