Gender Reflection: past & present

1) There was a time when I was around the age of nine or ten.  I was playing touch football outside with the neighborhood boys.  During the game one of the boys that lived across the street, decided to get rough with me.  He pushed me down to the ground and scraped my knee.  I immediately began to cry and ran home.  My mom and dad came to see what had happened; my mother assessed my scrape as my dad began to ask me what had happened.  I told my parents about what had happened and my dad had gotten angry because I had done nothing about it; fighting the boy to redeem myself.  As I cried my dad would tell me to shut up, that boys didn’t cry, as I was being pushed back outside to go fight the boy from across the street as a way to regain my “manhood.”

My parents are both immigrants from Mexico, and their upbringing was very strict and old-fashioned.  My grandfather (my dad’s dad) was very strict on his children; the men were expected to be hard working, and unemotional.  They were the bread winners, and as a form of showing their love and affection were in the form of providing food, clothing, and shelter.  The women were the ones who stayed home, cared for the children, cooked, and cleaned.  It would be easy to say that my grandfather and father are your typical macho men.  My dad has a very hard time showing his emotions, especially crying.  As a young boy, it was considered unmanly to cry and I had to “suck it up” every time I had the urge to vent out frustration or sadness. 

2) One of the most recent stories about some of the expectations of my gender is currently with my two year old nephew.  My nephew is considered to be, by my father’s terms, a crybaby.  My nephew will quickly cry whenever he’s in a bad mood, or doesn’t get his way.  Whenever I would hear my nephew cry, I would also hear my dad tell him that “boys don’t cry… only girls cry.”  There has even been a time when my dad was frustrated with my nephew and blurted out “you want to cry? I’ll give you something to cry about.”  It’s taken my sister and me to explain to my dad that sometimes babies will cry for other reasons; not because their showing signs of being more feminine. 

I have noticed now that my dad is much more patient with my niece and nephew than when he was raising my sister and me.  I suppose it’s the whole grandfathering thing where he’s trying to instill in his grandchildren what he couldn’t instill in me and my sister.  Another possibility, and something that I like to joke about often, is that he’s just grown too old to get angry because he’s trying to watch his blood pressure.  =)