I have had a long time notion about knowing whether and when we are making the right decisions about the course of direction in our lives as we negotiate the pathways we are on, including the twists and turns and forks in that road. It has been my contention that we cannot know the answer to that until we have the luxury of looking back on our lives. It is then, with perspective we can look back and make sense of our lives. How the decisions we made changed our course and direction leading us to choices we’ve made, and how other choices could have led us to other lives we could or would have lived.

We have all been born into the circumstances of our lives, such as the time and place of our birth, obstacles, inured benefits, parents, siblings, etc. The phrase “an accident of birth”, something we may or may not be able to control. I do however believe that we as individuals bring something of ‘us/our self’ to the world in which we are born as in predispositions, personality expressions, proclivities for one thing or another. And, we somehow sit in judgment about that self in experiencing our lives and how we negotiate them in the circumstances we are born into.

And so for myself, I come back to a childhood thought that reoccurred as a theme throughout the course of my life, where I am judge and jury. That thought is essentially: What kind of man did I want to become?

I grew up in the 1950’s in post WWII America, and am considered ‘a baby boomer’. One of the things many of us had was called ‘a baby book’, which was filled with pictures and comments about our development, relatives and ourselves, starting with our height and weight, then baby’s first steps, first words, etc. These books were fuller in documentation with the first born, and typically began to decline with the second and subsequent births of siblings. I was second born, with two coming after me. I saw that although I was the first son, I was in a line of succession of others to follow, and this informed me as a child that I would have a brief spotlight on my early infancy before becoming swept aside for the next in line. And, seeing how this flowed, it did not affect me as it did my older sibling who confessed to me once that as a result of therapy in her 40’s that she never forgave me for being born, which explained her behavior to me both in childhood and adulthood. The fact is that some kids never grow up. They take their resentments along with them as they go through life no matter the indignities they suffer in childhood. One thing I decided was what kind of sibling I wanted to become and this decision affected my relationship with my siblings of a much closer and loving bond going forward and continuing throughout adulthood; whereas the older sibling did not make this connection with the younger sibling. This is an example early on of deciding what kind of ‘man’ I wanted to become.

Getting back to the baby book, there were drawings of parents and their outfits and images projected in a child’s mind, giving me an idea of what that might look like. I can still recall the image of the father dressed in a suit with a pipe in his mouth reading the newspaper while sitting in a large chair. There were other images growing up in movies, like Cary Grant; impeccably dressed, handsome, witty, funny, both a ladies man and a man’s man, so to speak, and magazine images I culled from. I also observed my father and his mannerisms as well as his character as I perceived it, morphing over time as I grew up. I tried on some of these appearances, personalities, and behaviors. I decided how I might look and dress when I became an adult.

Ah, but the times changed with the 1960’s and 1970’s and so did the county with the emerging young adults throwing off the previous ‘shackles of convention’ of those 1950’s sensibilities and male and female roles, including long imbedded sexism in our culture regarding behaviors and expectations with one of those, being the reemergence of Feminism, equal rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment, with this social development shaping my thinking and behavior going forward as a man. And, let me take this moment to reaffirm that sex and gender (roles and role playing) are two different things.

In embracing feminism for me meant among other inward manifestations, becoming a whole person by embracing the characterizations and attribution’s of maleness and femaleness within myself, and learning to integrate the yin and yang within. Some of these behaviors or shall I say latitudes or spectrums including allowing myself to be vulnerable emotionally, showing tenderness and affection to myself, my partner, and the significant other males in my life; processing feelings and qualities of what it is to be human, including empathy and compassion not only for others but for myself, allowing me to become authentic and ‘real’, and eventually becoming a whole person through this process of integration, and taking that to subsequent relationships and introducing that into my own family.

These lessons translated to an enhanced self-awareness observing my behaviors and actions along the way and making decisions about how I commit to a long term partnership in marriage, and how I would parent and endeavor to bring the best of these behaviors and lessons to my marriage and my children, and what behaviors I would model in that context, playing it forward generationally, consciously rather than unconsciously by keeping my word to myself and my family and by rising to the occasion. And looking back I can say that I did in fact keep those promises and commitments, testing my character along the way especially when coming to various forks in the road on the path to becoming true to myself and my ideals. Regardless, the proof is in the pudding of the outcomes we make through our actions, deliberate or undeliberate.

Planning for the future, living up to our own ideals and promises to ourselves, and experiencing the challenges of the present tense all along the way, reaffirming and defining just who we are and what we have become. This included for me as a marker or touch stone, emulating the best of my father and his father, and role modeling that for my son and daughter as a parent and as a person in managing my own life and how they assess my success as a parent and an adult role model for better or for worse.

I am pleased to say that I have grown up to become the kind of man I aspired to be, and I know that you can too, should you consciously choose to.

Editors Note: This article is part of a series on what makes a man, a “good man” and is a matter of perspective from the writer. Its all their perspective on how they got to their thought process on what a good man is, or what a good man looks like. To read the rest of the series, please click here.