Some fathers give a wound merely by their silence they are present, yet absent to their sons. Divorce or abandonment is a wound that lingers because the boy (or girl) believes if they had done things better, Daddy would have stayed. Stuart’s dad did that, just up and left, and his mother, a troubled woman, was unable to raise him. I’ve had many clients whose fathers simply left and never came back. How is a little boy to understand that? Every afternoon Alex would stand by the front window, waiting for his father to come home. The sun in his universe set, never to rise again.

My friend Alex’s father died when he was four years old. Never spending time with him, or getting precious little time, that is wounding as well. Never receiving any sort of blessing from your father is a wound. He had a workshop out back, attached to the garage, and he would spend his hours out there alone, reading, doing crossword puzzles, and drinking. At the very moment when I was desperately wondering what it means to be a man, and did I have what it takes, my father checked out, went silent. I was about eleven or twelve at the time-a very critical age in the masculine journey, the age when the question really begins to surface. But like so many men of his era, my father had never faced the issues of his own wounds, and he fell to drinking when his life began to take a downhill turn.

It was his father’s ranch that I worked on each summer, and my dad and I saw a lot of the West together as we’d make the long drive from Southern California to Oregon, often with fishing detours through Idaho and Montana. I still remember the fried egg sandwiches he would make us for dinner. He introduced me to the West, and taught me to fish and to camp. Because they are subtle, they often go unrecognized as wounds and therefore are actually more difficult to heal. The passive wounds are not they are pernicious, like a cancer. One thing about the assault wounds-they are obvious. Without some kind of help, many men never recover. This can get unspeakably evil when it involves physical, sexual, or verbal abuse carried on for years. The assault wounds are like a shotgun blast to the chest. Those are defining sentences that shape a man’s life.

“Do I have what it takes? Am I a man, Papa?” No, you are a mama’s boy, an idiot, a seagull.

Wild at heart book boys swords