I've only seen my dad cry three times. The first time was when he had to put Sonja (Our 19-year-old shepherd mutt, His first daughter) to sleep. I will never forget the stiff way that he walked into the house, straight to the garage; pausing only to tell me he needed to work on something and not to bother him. The crack in his voice was a warning for something I was ill prepared to handle. A single anguished wail still resonates on my eardrum.
The second time was when my Uncle Chris died. "He's dead." My father states as I crawled into the Thunderbird exhausted from water polo practice. "What?" was the only thing I could muster as my brain refused to accept his vague statement as fact. "Uncle Chris passed away." was all he could say before focusing on deconstructing the task at hand; driving us home safely with floods raging in his eyes.
You see, when my father cries, it is like a landslide; intense and overwhelming. A force of nature not to be reckoned with.
Luckily, my father has hands like excavators. They pick up all dirt and debris of his emotions move them somewhere deep inside of him. Hiding behind a rock face there is infinite loss and grief and anguish but also love and joy and gratitude; all mixing and compressing. It boils, pressure rises and is released a geyser of anger and frustration.
Some days this geyser spills and pours over me. Just like the first time I saw my father cry I am ill-prepared to bear the downpour.
My father is a mountain. I am a valley forged at the fault line where he and my mother meet. Most days their runoff shapes me into the woman I have been growing into. Maybe one day, I will be a mountain too.
Some days my father is a volcano. Venting hot hatred that sears my skin. He needs someone to hear him; to know he is hurting. I will always be a child in comparison to him; ill-equipped to bear his weight, to hold his world in my twig fingers. On those days I leave my parents house feeling drained, like a smoldering forest after a wildfire.
The point is that feelings are natural and unavoidable. Men should not be expected not to feel. When we suppress all these feelings they come out only in negative, maladaptive ways. My dad has never hit me or hurt me in any way but some days I feel helpless in his presence. I can not make him deal with all the things he has burning inside of him but I am not capable of bearing all the negativity that it produces when it spills out, muddled and chaotic. He raised me to be strong, to be a fighter, to be persistent, to be resilient but I have never been given tools to fix my father or anyone else for that matter; only tools to fix myself.
We have the choice to be self-aware and address all the things that are gnawing at our insides or ignore and suppress these things till they turn into something we and the people around us may not be able to handle. Sometimes, it takes these things growing into a vicious black dog for us to realize that there is even something wrong. Even if it becomes something big, malignant, there are options to treat it. The simplest is to talk to an objective person (someone who is not a friend or family). This does not have to be a psychologist (although I highly recommend at least 5 sessions) or psychiatrist but it should be someone skilled, who will know how to ask the right questions to help you find awareness.
It is hard to satisfy our needs and live a healthy life if we are preventing ourselves from feeling. We need to be willing to feel bad, as much as we are willing to fill the good. All of these feelings, both good and bad, help us satisfy our daily needs. We need to be open about the thigns we feel so that they do not grow into something worse; something too difficult to handle.