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- šŖµ Honeyyyyyy, dinner time!
šŖµ Honeyyyyyy, dinner time!
Breaking bread, we're all human, and "vibrant" masculinity
Greg Milnarik
October 12, 2023
Hey everyone,
Thanks to those that passed on the word to our new Thinking Loggers last week.
And welcome to those of you new on the Log!
Roots š±
Something from me
In my experience, the cornerstone of what it means to gather begins at the dinner table. As Iāve written about in the past, I am so grateful for many of the values that my mom modeled and established for my siblings and I early in our lives. With our schedules permitting, the emphasis on gathering around the dinner table every night in our younger years is one of the most important. However our familyās experience around the dinner table isnāt like the 1950s educational films (hilarious/real video) would have you believe.
In the US, the historical norms of the dinner table centered around the father of the household. The man of the house! Who sits at the center of the table and his comrades (family) fall into place around him. Conversation and the dynamic as a whole was meant to be of service to the father who has had a hard day being the breadwinner of the family. There are too many hilarious quotes to pull from that video but "pleasant unemotional conversation helping digestion" paints the picture well. Outrageous.
Growing up, I experienced two different dinner table environments. With my dad, conversation was usually dictated by him talking about work or another surface level topic. Keeping the peace, above meaningful connection, was the priority for him and those who gathered around. To cut my dad some slack, I imagine he was just mirroring the experience of dinner with his own father, which likely drew parallels to the 1950s educational video.
The dinner table environment with my mom varied drastically in that it was grounded in reality. After working all day and preparing a lovely home-cooked meal, a simple āhow was your day?ā from my mom would sometimes be met with immediate explosions from my siblings and I about why weāre pissed off at each other or the world around us. Fights, laughs, cries, smilesā¦ Everything shows up and comes out at the dinner table. Itās a funny social construct where you come as you are and have no choice but to learn how to interact in difference and find common ground (or not). As a result, the possibility of more meaningful connection emerges from active listening and unique perspectives. Unknowingly formative for us kids and no doubt exhausting for our mother, itās hilarious to envision some of the scenes when we were younger and how thatās matured over time.
Obviously family and parental dynamics have evolved quite a bit from the 20th century norm. And so too the experience of the dinner table. As life continues to reveal itself, Iāve found that the dinner table provides such a grounding foundation to come together with friends, family, or total strangers. And how something as simple as routinely/intentionally breaking bread with others contributes to a sense of belonging and community.
Trunk šŖµ
How we grow
āDo with this what you want! Some of my clients are so jazzed about therapy and those that talk about seeing me as a therapistā¦ three people that know that they see me got together to talk on their own and talk through things with each other. They feel empowered to go talk to each other and ask the questions that I would have asked them while I was out of the office. Group therapy can be very powerful, might even be more powerful IF its a well run group..because learning to give and get feedback from peers can be more powerful. Thereās safety in the group in that weāre all human beings trying to process.ā
Perhaps a bit of a stretch, but canāt help but draw comparisons of the dinner table to group therapy. Very different in most respects but fundamentally looking at gathering with intention. The reasons for gathering in either circumstance likely vary, yet both can be hugely affirming to our sense of self.
Group therapy may be centered around processing shared experience or struggle, while gathering around a table can so often revolve around simply sharing experiences themselves.
For guys specifically, so much of stigma around emotion and vulnerability comes from a place of worrying what other dudes will think. Especially when using the word ātherapyā itself. While it may not be around a dinner table, creating places or avenues for guys to accept that theyāre not going to be judged by the homies for sharing certain things would be hugely beneficial to chipping away at stigma.
Branches š²
Something from you
Huge huge thanks to a fellow Thinking Logger for his response to the Log from a couple weeks ago about my extended Armenian family & community:
I've been enjoying your writing and musings, but as a fellow food-loving Armenian, this one felt directly tailored to me.
My family's a little smaller and more insular, but I've always been able to get that cultural connection from the church. Which I realize isn't an uncommon sentiment, but belonging to a church that's so tied to my ethnicity and cultural heritage always felt really good.
Moving from the Northeast to the Midwest though, it's been tough. On one hand, I've had to rebuild my entire social network, and I'm still not there yet, but the progress I've made is filling the hole a lot more than I might have expected.
Losing the church though, that's hit a lot harder. There are Armenians in parts of the Midwest (Michigan, Wisconsin), but not where I am. My fiancƩe and I went on a hunting trip for lahmajun a couple months after we moved, and all we found was one $40 frostbitten package in the back of a Greek store's freezer.
It feels like I've left a part of my family behind, I don't know how to get a taste of that community remotely, and it kind of sucks.
We're moving again in a couple months, and I've already checked to see if there's any Armenian presence around (no). But I still want to find some type of community to make the adjustment process easier. I know it's going to take proactivity on my side, but we'll see how it shakes out.
Anyway, that went from "It's really cool to see you share a few of the same touchstones I do" to throwing out a bit of my anxieties, but overall, thank you for writing. It's very cool to see some non-toxic spaces to read about and discuss masculine issues.
Thank you for sharing with me and your willingness to share with others š
Leaves š
Something to leave you with
The Ideal Man Exists - more from Christine Emba (kind of a leading voice on masculinity right now)
āWe ought to be telling ourselves that there are noble attributes any of us can aspire to and strive for. We all need guiding principles and a sense of direction ā all of us always, not just men. Why return to gender for them when we could reach forāor createāsomething higher? A set of ideals, whatever they might be, grand and capacious enough to encompass us all?ā
Sounds a little too much like a religion tbh but I generally agree
āThere are things I would like to say to my parents and my brothers that I never said. It makes me very sad that I never told them what they gave me.ā
Thanks to Greg in Boston, MA for sharing this one. This dude has blown up on insta in recent weeks, particularly for 20somethings in Washington, DC for what can only be described as authenticity!
Have a scroll through his page and youāll get at least one smile
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Iām stoked to have you here and talk soon!
Greg
Wind š¬ļø
What Iām listening to
It very much smells like fall in Upstate New York right now. Which means it sounds like the Monkeys š
