the boys can be alright

When I was at religious camp, the summer I was desperate to get french-kissed and convinced my abs were my best asset, we lost two boys on a mountain. It sounds like the beginning of a parable or a horror movie, but it was just a bunch of kids in the Adirondacks in the tech-free ‘90s, two of whom snuck off to smoke pot.

In the morning, buses dropped us off at the base of Ampersand Mountain, one of the six peaks that ring Lake Saranac. We were a bloated group: 132 campers and 25 counselors, so summiting took a long time. When we finally had a late lunch at the top, squirreled away amidst granite and balsam firs, all were accounted for. But somewhere between lunch and the bottom of the mountain the boys went missing.

Rain swept in during the final leg of the hike, and as we cleared the trees, we made a run for it across the dirt parking lot. When the counselors counted us on the buses and we were down by two, they initially sent us back out searching. But it didn’t take the counselors long to realize 130 teenagers running around the base of a mountain in a storm would end up more Donner than Sacagawea.

Over the next couple of days, we prayed a lot, sang songs—Kumbaya, This Little Light of Mine, anything Dave Matthews—made lanyards, and gave a wide berth to the parents of the boys who had arrived to help the search party. The days that followed continued storming, the humidity thickening, and a helicopter search had to be called off for lack of visibility.

But there was also this perverse thought tantalizing: will these be the first young deaths in our young lives? And the whispered bets: How long do you give them? How long do you think you’d last? And the jealousy: What grand, transformative adventure were we missing out on?

***

This week, I dropped my son off to hike a mountain several miles from where we lost those boys. My son, a teenager next month, has always loved the outdoors: hiking, camping, orienteering. He finds relief in the woods and is quick to tell us he is not made for the urban existence we’ve insisted on. But when I picked him up that afternoon, he was miserable. Avoiding goodbyes, he strode towards me, giving me a let’s-go-now look. I could see him fighting tears, and when I asked him what happened in the safety of the car, he became taciturn, staring out the window, arms crossed.

After his father dies, Hamlet returns to Denmark, only to have his uncle Claudius demean his bereavement. Claudius’s speech today reads like a corporate performance review: a real compliment (or shit) sandwich. It begins by acknowledging Hamlet’s virtuous attentions to his dead dad, “bound in filial obligation”, but soon Claudius’s rollout of excessive adjectives for Hamlet’s feelings—obsequious, obstinate, impious, unmanly, unfortified, impatient, simple, unschooled, peevish, absurd—betray his surface calm, and his speech becomes a histrionic attack on “unmanliness”, an insistence that as a man, there is a time limit to mourning, to feeling. You can almost see the jawline tensing, the biceps flexing when he insists Hamlet “throw to earth this unprevailing woe”.

It’s nothing new, nor old, this assault on men’s emotions outside of anger or jest. (Nor is it a surprise that this suggestion comes from a man who has disregarded his own fraternal obligation in pursuit of a desired kingship.)

And of course Claudius is wrong about Hamlet as we’re often wrong about the sullen boys sitting in our classrooms and at our dinner tables and in our passenger seats. He’s not “bound’ in obligation, he’s unbound, his wounds undressed because in acute grief, he has no means of dressing them. Even before I had sons, when I was sure I’d have daughters, stories of abused boys hit me harder than those of abused girls. Perhaps it was my fierce and deluded belief in my own endless capacity; perhaps it was the patriarchy working through me to center boys as protagonist and antagonist; perhaps it was my fear that boys are already at such a disadvantage to feel their way out of anything; perhaps it was having a younger brother I felt protective of; perhaps it was my utter lack of imagination to see myself in them, and I’ve othered or made a monolith of them all my life. Regardless, they were, in my imagination, entirely more vulnerable.

In Shakespeare’s day, they were still applying the theory of humours to people’s temperaments and feelings. The humours related to a balance or imbalance in four liquids: blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile. Our language today is peppered with the theory: good-humored, bad-humored, “you’re so pissy,” “what a shit head.” To the ancient world, our fluids were all paired with psychological diagnoses: melancholic, choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic. (And solutions to these humour imbalances were literal: extraction of the fluids through blood-letting, diuretics, laxatives, or enemas.) “Too much of water have thou, poor Ophelia,” Laertes bemoans of his sister after the description of her suicide. It’s a trope we know well, accept well—the sad, vulnerable, overemotional young woman.

But interestingly, men on average have 5% more water in them than women.

And we now know because of developmental differences in brain and nervous systems, in early years, boys need one-on-one attention even more so than girls. And the loneliness in older men has become increasingly obvious to those of us with lonely older men in our lives. So what are we denying them in between toddlerhood and retirement? And more important: what are they denying themselves?

***

Even more than their disappearance, it was the lost campers’ return that’s stuck with me. When they were at last found on the other side of the mountain, they were dehydrated and to those of us who hadn’t known them long, unrecognizable. Physically transformed. Their faces were blown up to twice their original size because of the insect venom; clothes and bodies coated in mud, spots of dried blood everywhere from the brambles and itching.

But their transformation apparently stopped at the physical. The loud one was still loud, bragging about it being no big deal, ignoring his parents, scratching roughly at his welts. The quiet one, still quiet. I sat on the periphery of the circle, hoping there was a story he’d have to tell. An epiphany or insight he’d share.

I was disappointed at their return. More than that—I was sad. Sad at the way their parents, who’d wrung their hands for 48 hours sat by, still empty-handed, and sad at how hollow those boys looked and sounded.

Nowadays, this story feels both prevoyant and familiar: the boys without a story to tell, without an emotion to share. I thought about it glancing at my son, resolutely staring out the window.

After my first son was born, a friend with teenage boys cautioned me, “when a boy wants to talk, you stop whatever you’re doing and listen. Because that opportunity may not come around again.” Two years ago, my colleague had that same instinct when several of her 11th grade boys approached her to talk about a concern they had. When they found themselves upset, the boys told her, they might reach out to friends who were girls, but rarely to each other.

With them, she began a club, tongue-in-cheekly labeled “Lads’ Lunch”. The group now regularly assembles over 15 boys, and the meetings have grown in frequency, at the boys’ request. The opening question for each of their lunch sessions is “when was the last time you cried?” They make it clear this isn’t hazing, but it is a kind of initiation—in the sense that it’s initial practice for the friendships they want to have, those friendships they can rely on when real emotion and setbacks and challenges and celebration happen. Reliable friends they can cry in front of and talk fluently about emotions with, friendships with capacity.

They’re practicing deeper, more lasting friendship, based not just on shared activities and circumstances, but shared confidences, too. They’re confronting the creep of homophobic tendencies to avoid physical intimacy, and misogynistic tendencies to avoid and demonize “the feminine”. Two of them kiss each other on the heads now. When they said goodbye after graduation, three of them said “I love you” to me. At these lunch meetings, the boys in attendance usually sound wiser than the men, teachers and administrators they’ve invited in. The boys are curious even as some of the men seem intent on explaining, finding quick solutions to problems named. “In my experience the fix has been—” at one point an administrator was stopped in his solution-suggesting tracks and reminded of the purpose of these gatherings.

Indeed, the boys have to repeat themselves often—their goal isn’t solution; it’s practice. And this repetition has been practice in itself. They’re asserting a desire to build better relationships and in so doing, better selves. Honing the ability to say what’s felt unsayable.

In these lunch sessions, the boys talk a lot about their relationships with their parents, too. What they wish they got more, saw more from and in their parents. It’s been a lesson for me. This semester, I taught several of the Lads in my English elective. One of our practices is “text shares”: over the course of the semester, each student brings in a text thematically linked to our class to lead a discussion around. “Text” is used lightly here, it might be a poem, a song, an ad, a TikTok video, an Instagram post, a speech or book excerpt. I’d expected our penultimate class to be a soupy one—wrapping up Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, finishing our personal narratives, squeezing in our final text share. I did not anticipate what happened.

N—, one of the Lads’ Lunch founders, presented the final text share of the semester: “Calling Dad”, a SNL skit about two friends (Andrew Dismukes and Devon Walker) trying to connect over the phone with their dads (Bill Burr and Kenan Thompson).

It’s silly, over the top, absurd with its stereotypes for typical maleness of sports talk and car talk. It’s touching, too. The sons ask their dads repeatedly “but how are you doing?” Devon Walker, exasperated, says “just tell me one real thing.” Each of the dads at last relents, but the only way they know how to share their feelings is through mangled metaphors of the Philadelphia Eagles and car repair.

Instead of asking his classmates what they thought of the skit, N— told a story—a true story—about his own relationship with his dad. How hard it is to know him, how unavailable he is as a mentor in the most human things. And then his invitation to all of us: “I’m curious how it is for you all, with your dads?”

We navigated together the most emotional class I’ve taught in my 21-year teaching career. Again and again, students expressed a desire for dads, moms, parents to ask them how they are more regularly; to tell their kids more regularly, more honestly how they are. To make more time for the conversations that really matter. Several boys talked about their parents’ discomfort with their tears which had conditioned them to avoid conversations when they’re emotional. Several noted that competition was the prime characteristic of their relationships with fathers, and that the demand of competition was a demand for constant stoicism. Several girls talked about their fathers not knowing how to be with them now that their bodies had become more adult, like some invisible wall had been erected in puberty, resulting in an awkward mimicry of father-daughterness.

***

Students emailed later in the day to thank N— for what that class’s discussion allowed. Several students went home and talked to their dads about the conversation. Something shifted then, they said.

Earlier in the semester, in that same class, we discussed a 1929 thought experiment, one posited by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, about the androgynous mind (a term penned by Samuel T. Coleridge), one of mental and emotional openness—being the ideal brain. “It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, I thought.” We considered it critically, as the literature classroom does, tossed it from palm to palm, wondering at its shape and substance, its validity.

Does this acceptance of the feminine and masculine within oneself apply beyond creative liberation? I’ve wondered if this is what the boys in Lads’ Lunch are accomplishing: a liberation, of self, of thought, of feeling, of community. A gentle, brave rejection of that tired cocktail of misogyny and homophobia: the distrust of the feminine in boys and men.

Today’s statistics are clear: girls are not only doing better in school, but boys are three to four times more likely to commit suicide. In the 90s, we girls were encouraged to lean into our masculinity, the great unlearning of being the protected sex, then in the 2010s, we were reminded not to let go of our femininity. We have access to both, and it’s a good deal. One I want my boys to have part in. They, too, don’t need protection from their own feelings.

***

I like to imagine there were stories those two lost boys on the mountain told, just not to me, an awkward 15-year-old girl voyeuristically hoping for their metamorphoses. And I imagine there might have been emotion felt and hopefully, if felt, expressed at some point. I, a fanciful girl hungry for and fearful of transformation, had no right to be their audience. As a grown woman, I understand this. I’m not looking for performative male emotion—the gift of sitting in Lads’ Lunch and witnessing their honest practice and devotion to one another has assured me of this. But I do have an obligation to the boys in my life, my students and my four sons.

Those lost boys, the Lads Lunchers, they’ve been necessary reminders to me of my obligation: to allow feeling in my house and in my classroom, always. Even when, as my sons get older, I blanch at the tears I find silly, some part of me bucks at the sight of my 12-year-old crying over pencils, I refuse to insist they stop crying. There are enough tears in my house to float a boat some afternoons. And by learning to cry instead of bury, in learning to talk through with me and their dad and each other, they’re less afraid of themselves, their capacities.

My instinct, driving away from the mountain with my son this week, was to figure out what was wrong and work through solutions with him. But the memory of that semester’s near final class stopped me. It was my lesson even more than my students’ lesson. And so I said to my son, “When you want to talk about how you're feeling, I'm here.” Once out of the car, he didn’t tell me how he was feeling. But before heading into our rental house, he hugged me.

I don’t want to protect my sons from the world, but inspirit them to feel their way through it. And when my sons get lost, which they inevitably will, I want them to be able, upon return, to hug me, hug and kiss their friends. Unconditionally.