BOYS TO MEN

I remember the morning our first son, Reuben, was born. He rushed his entrance and arrived a good six weeks early, all 3lb of him. He spent his first weeks in the Special Care Baby Unit. Side by side, all kinds of babies and their families became his neighbours.

I remember walking into the sound of machines that sounded like spaceships. Sometimes the beeping stopped. Then it started again, alongside my own breath, which I hadn’t even realised I was holding. The nurses would calmly pull back the curtains and continue on with their daily work of saving little lives again and again. 

For a couple of weeks we became part of that small community, living amongst tubes, monitors and tiny tiny people and their families.  Our newborn son was so small his nappy reached almost to his armpits. The clear tape holding the feeding tube against his tiny face looked so big on someone so little. 

As he grew stronger day by day, he reached up, grabbed the tube and pulled it out.
I’d only turned away for a second.
The nurse came over, took one look and smiled.
That was the day we stopped feeding him through a tube and began trying to feed him naturally.
Even then, our first born seemed determined to choose his own path! 

As I left SCBU that afternoon I walked past the bigger babies. Some had graduated from incubators, others had never needed them. They lay in their little cots breathing the air as though it was the easiest thing in the world. They simply took a breath, never knowing the struggle some of their neighbours had faced just to do the same.

Then I heard music drifting across the ward.
I laughed out loud.
These tiny babies, wrapped tightly in their swaddling blankets, were listening to Oasis.
Wonderwall drifted across the ward. 

I walked into those words and heard an ode to parenthood. 
I found myself wondering what it meant to raise a boy into a man. 

Thankfully, I wasn’t asking that question alone. Reuben’s dad and I would spend the next years trying to answer it together. 

And being a man is about far more than how men relate to one another.
It’s about how they choose to be in the world, especially with those of us who are not men.

What makes a good man?   How do we raise boys to become one?

Looking back almost thirty years later,  I realise that was the day those questions first took root in me.

Raising a mixed-race son in the North of England added other critical questions too, though many of those belong as much to his story as they do to mine. 
​
This summer I have the privilege of directing Nathan Jonathan’s They’re Just Small Town (Northern) Lads, a play that explores many of those same questions.

Together with the audience, we’ll be asking:

What makes a man?
Where do our ideas of masculinity begin?
Who teaches them?
And what happens when boys inherit these ideas?

​As I’ve watched England’s men’s football team celebrate with their supporters this summer,
I’ve smiled hearing thousands of voices singing the same song I first heard echoing through that neonatal ward all those years ago.

Wonderwall has travelled a long way.
So have those tiny babies.
And some of them are still becoming the men they hope to be. 

Amanda. ✨