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Manhood often feels like navigating through uncharted territory, but you don't have to walk alone. Join us as we guide a conversation about how to live intentionally so that we can join God in reclaiming the masculine restorative presence he designed us to live out. Laugh, cry, and wonder with us as we explore the ins and outs of manhood together.
Why Your Story Matters To Your Son?
00:00
Guys, welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with my good friend, Jesse French and welcome Jesse. Good to see you. You too, Chris. So guys, we are in a conversation about rites of passage for boys and I will never forget, I talk about this often because it was such a profound moment, but I kind of had a little oh crap moment when I was in the hospital with my first born who was a boy.
00:26
And my wife was sleeping there after, you know, hours and hours of labor. I had him in my arms and I was looking at him. Dawn was happening outside the hospital room and I'm like, Yikes. Dang it. Like I'm both overcome with the emotion of the awesomeness of what just happened. And here's this now new little life that's in my arms. And kind of a recognition of, oh, yesterday I was not a father and today I am a father.
00:56
And not only am I a father today, but I'm a father of a boy. There was something inside of me that both like sank and rose at the same time, sank in the like, oh crap. And rose to like, I gotta figure this out. I gotta figure out what am I going to do to lead this boy into manhood? Like the stakes are high, but game on. Yeah. Game on. Did anything like that happen to you, Jesse? Yeah. Yeah. So I had our first two.
01:26
kids were girls and our youngest is a boy. And so that piece of it, and I'm resonating cause like it does feel like a different awareness when my son was born of not that he's more important than his sisters, but there is a, oh, feels like more is more, maybe not more but something different is required of me for him. And not knowing really like any of the details of that but feeling, oh buddy, this is exciting. And
01:56
terrifying too, because I just had the sense of like, oh, I matter a lot in this. It sounds obvious and also that was true. It sounds obvious, but it's so true. And I mean, I've talked to other dads of boys too, and there's something different about when girls, I mean, obviously we love our boys and girls the same in one form, but there's this, the responsibility of leading this boy into manhood.
02:24
is different than leading this girl into womanhood. I've never walked that journey. And so I can't participate in it the same way that I'm going to need to participate in walking my son into manhood. And, and so like, I think when I was standing there, the the oh crap moment for me was not only what I'm going to need to do for him. But I think I had to face my own story, I had to face my own like this was never done for me.
02:53
How is it going to be possible for me to walk this this boy into manhood when my boy myself was never even walked into manhood? How am I going to do this for him? Right, right. And to go back to what we said a little bit before, there's no social cultural modeling of that either, right? There's no, hey, you know, the guys in my neighborhood or whatever I was able to observe from afar, right? Like there, I'm guessing for you, there was, there wasn't even that piece of it too to
03:22
to sort of observe from afar. So it is really like, oh no, you have to build the plane as you're flying it. Yeah, you gotta do it. And so I think that's part of where and why for me, as I looked around when my son was born and kind of looking ahead to the years where he would be making the physical transition from boyhood into manhood, there were some things that I kind of recognized I needed to do first, and it didn't have to do with him, it had to do with me.
03:52
And it had to do with some of the deeper work of my own life and story and looking at like, who am I, what was my formation? What did I have? What did I not have? What did I miss? Like all of those kinds of things and, and just, yeah, sitting with that. So I'm going to play devil's advocate here, or maybe the contrarian. Why take that vantage point? I can imagine some people thinking like.
04:21
And this is about the process that you're leading your son into. Why, why take a look at your own story? Like that was, you know, decades in the past. What the past of the past, uh, type of type of mentality. I think it's in, tell me why. Cause I think that's maybe a counterintuitive piece to this process, process of being willing to actually examine your own life and your own story. Why is that important? I'm going to put in this way, Jesse, like,
04:51
You know, we say this often at Restoration Project, that our story leaks. Our unprocessed stories, our unprocessed lives, our brokenness, our pains, our woundings, our traumas. And even, that feels extreme even to put it in those, but just even our disappointments. Even the places where we've been disappointed or there's some smaller moments when it just feels like,
05:21
something's not right in the world. All of those things, we kind of like a sponge just absorb into our lives. And eventually, like there is nothing more challenging to our own story than raising kids. Because what they do, what they do and what they don't do and how they are and how they press on us and.
05:49
require things of us and all that, like, man, they're gonna challenge the living heck out of you. And that's, when that starts to happen, your story is gonna leak. Your story is gonna leak out on them. When you get squeezed, man, you're gonna leak some stuff and it's gonna come out on them. And so for us to really be attentive to that first, to our story first, is really, I think, important.
06:14
One of my favorite authors that, you know, we refer to him a lot, Richard Rohr, he talks, you know, there's some things that I love that he says and some things that I don't like that he says. But one of the things that I love that he says is this, that we are heaps of undigested experience. That we have all this experience in our lives that remains inside of us and undigested. And it's that undigested experience that I think will end up leaking out on our kids. And no.
06:42
you know, yes to our daughters. But I think mostly for those of us that have sons, mostly it comes out on our sons. Because the rage that we experience inside is triggered by the son, and he then becomes the object of that in many ways. So more I can say about that in other ways. But that's kind of why I say, hey, we've got to start with our own stories. Because, so I hear you saying that they are
07:12
the natural outlets for how we are understanding our own life, right? That they are kind of on the first layer of proximity, right? That they're going to be the recipients of that. Yeah. And to have a sense of how we have been formed, how we have been forged, right? As we are on this podcast, that enables us to not leak, right? To not have this, you know, this uncontrollable.
07:41
undigested rage or presence or absence or whatever the form that that takes. When that begins to get countered, what then or how then are we able to step into? And I realized I just compressed a whole engagement of our story and healing into some, you know, 30 seconds. But like, yeah, the byproduct of that is what. Well, so first of all. Regardless of how much we work on our stories, we are still going to leak. OK.
08:11
That's just part of human nature. So I don't think there is ever an arrival time when all of a sudden my leakage stops. I think what we wanna do is we wanna stop the gush. And so if we can stop gushing out on everyone, that's good. And I even wanna say like, gushing includes the other end of the pendulum swing of, hey, I am...
08:36
I did not get this from my dad, my dad was violent, my dad was blah blah blah, like he was all these bad things. I'm not gonna, I'm determined not to be that guy. The gushing, the determination happens on this other side too. Despite our best efforts and despite our best intentions, that still is going to happen because you're working against a story inside of you, and it's still coming out on how you are with your son. So I want to say that. But
09:04
ends up happening is that the psychological, the spiritual, the emotional, the sociological formation of your son, as you're not trying to work out your own story, you're giving him more of a platform, a foundation to have a, I don't want to say a clean slate, but you're giving him a new place to begin. Another quote that I love is that
09:33
that trauma and tragedy passes down from generation to generation until someone is brave enough to feel it. And I think doing some of our own work as dads is stepping into the courage of feeling it so that my son then doesn't need to feel it. He gets to start from a cleaner slate. He gets to start from a new day where it stops here in my family tree. And that's ultimately I think what I want.
10:02
is what I inherited from generations of men in my life. I don't want my son to have to contend with those same things. I wanna give him a new start. That's not with him. The new start doesn't start with him. The new starts with me doing the work that we're talking about. Attending to my story, wondering about it, and I think that's a huge thing to understand because the logic. Coming to some of the restoration project things, where you talk about story, like all of that kind of stuff happens there.
10:32
right with me. And then he has a new day to start from. Yeah. Yeah, one of the ways that one of our friends at Restoration Project languished it as we were on a back country trip with a bunch of dads and sons and kind of talking about this very thing of understanding our own story, he used the phrase, you were born onto a moving train, right? Like the train of what your family and the generations ahead of you
11:01
have experienced is already moving and it is not, and the willingness to understand that, to understand its repercussions and its impacts on who you are is massively important so that your son can step into a clean slate. And I feel like there's just this picture of the freedom to be able to step into something new while also understanding like what has been, right? That is not just this disconnection where it's like, this is what has been and the way that it has been processed and healed.
11:31
so that new spaces can then be engaged. Yes. Well, we're gonna keep talking about Rites of Passage for our boys moving forward. And so you guys listening, when we say things like, start to do some work in your own story, start to think about things, the question would be like, where? Where do I start? How do I even begin that process?
11:55
And I just want to invite you to so many of the resources that we have at Restoration Project, a bunch of free resources that are here for you to just understand like what is story? What is my story? Where do I, where do I begin? What are the layers of story and how do I even begin to walk through that? We've got some books also and you know, all that kind of stuff is here for you. So if you're wondering, check out our website and get some of those free resources and start the journey.
12:23
And then Jesse, we're going to keep the conversation going in the next episode as we talk further about rites of passage for boys. Yep. Looking forward to it. Okay.