🔵 By Thomas Riffenburg. Photo by lauragrafie.
I look back at my youth, and wonder from where I learned to be a man. My father, he wasn’t a man I knew, he was gone out of my life by the time I was 3. My mother stayed with me till I was 10, but she could hardly teach me how to be a man. She provided me with a stepfather by the time I was 4, but his interest in my mother, and then his own kids, my brothers, didn’t really leave any time for me. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I felt as if I was always the burden, the unwanted child, a reminder of my mothers past without him. I can’t say I ever needed for anything, except perhaps for a break I the never-ending punishment delivered for some sort of infraction, some deed considered bad. My brothers were angels, while I was a fallen child, destined only for the fires of hell. By the age of 10 I lived in the system. Foster homes, group homes, juvenile hall. Surrounded by other boys like me, misfits for some reason or another. Birthdays and Christmas came and passed us by like any other day of the year, seemed that peace and goodwill towards man, celebration of another year’s growth of wisdom and experience didn’t apply to you if you were a misfit, a fallen child. Always surrounded by strangers with distant and weary eyes, smiles and relief when the time came to end their jobs of trying to care for us. Showers and locked doors, cold sandwiches, and a blanket showed that they did indeed care. Through those years I learned I was nothing special, a burden tolerated for the sake of a paycheck.
At 18 I thought I had finally become a man. A man who now controlled his fate, who could choose to do as he wished. No more locked doors and cold sandwiches. I was free, a man, and I could choose as a man to have hot steak and a house with wide open doors, but wait, how did I get those man things? I didn’t know the ways of a man after all, and yet, wasn’t I a man? So many questions without answers, so I did the only things I knew to do, the only things I had actually learned, the things which were taught to me as the wrong ways to live, yet the secret of the right way was held on to, kept secret.
Perhaps fallen children aren’t allowed to learn such things. But when I did all I knew how to do, I was put back behind locks, but instead of doors it was steel cages, instead of a cold sandwich it was two cold sandwiches. It seemed all the other fallen children were with me.
Years and years later, a man of 37, sentenced to life in prison, I can finally say I’ve become a man, and it’s not who taught me to be a man, but what. Trial and error has been my only father, taught me respect and honesty, taught me the true meaning of peace and goodwill towards man, what it takes and means to be a good proud man. I thought I had it figured out long ago, but I see now how lost and worthless of a person I truly was, I did not need all those cold sandwiches all those years, what I needed was a spanking, a hug, to be taught to be a man. I believe now I can be worthy of life, be a contribution to the society of progress, a real man, but I look back at the mess of a life. I’ve lived, and I hang my head low because I know I’ve already used up all my chances. It took em so long to learn to be a man, but it’s too late for me. Some times my jailers ask me to try to talk some sense into someone who has yet to figure it out like I have, but I doesn’t make me proud, it makes me even more tired and sad to see the acknowledgment from another, the validation of my manhood, and know my life is already over. I became a man, but how sad I am that it took so long. Don’t be like me, if you haven’t figured it out by now, ask someone to teach you, don’t let it become too late. Be a man now, with ll of lifes’ possibilities before you, or be a man later with me, the locked cages and cold sandwiches will be here.