Eventually, when the young man returned to the tribe, his achievement was celebrated. But from that day, for two whole years, he was not permitted to speak directly to his mother.
Lakota mothers, like the women of all hunter-gatherer groups, are very close and affectionate with their children, and the children often sleep alongside them in the women’s huts and tents. The Lakota believed that if the boy spoke to his mother immediately following his entry into manhood, the pull back into boyhood would be so great that he would ‘fall’ back into the world of women and never grow up.
After the two years had passed, a ceremonial rejoining of the mother and son took place, but by this time he was a man and able to relate to her as such. The reward that Lakota mothers gained from this ‘letting go’ is that they were assured their sons would return as respectful and close adult friends.
What old societies did
In every society before ours – from the tropics to the poles – in every time and place that has been studied by anthropologists, mid-teen boys received a burst of intensive care and attention from the whole community. This was a universal human activity, so it must have been important. These cultures knew something we are still learning – that parents cannot raise teenage boys without getting the help of other adults.
One reason for this is that fourteen-year-old sons and their fathers drive each other crazy. Often it’s all a father can manage to love his son. Trying to do this and teach him can be just impossible. (Remember your dad teaching you to drive?) Somehow the two males just get their horns tangled and make each other worse. Fathers get too intense: they feel they are running out of time as a dad, and they see their own mistakes being repeated.
Once, when I was an inexperienced family therapist, we saw a family whose fourteen-year-old teenage son had run away and lived in the railway yards for several days. He was found, but it scared everyone, and the family felt they needed to get help. Talking to them, we discovered a remarkable thing. Sean was their youngest son, but he wasn’t the first to do this running away thing! Each of their three sons had ‘done a runner’ around this age. My boss, a wise and scarily intuitive man, looked the father straight in the eye. ‘Where did you go when you were fourteen?’ The father pretended not to understand but, with his entire family looking accusingly on at him, grinned foolishly and spilled the beans. He had been a teenage runaway at fourteen after huge fights with his dad. He’d never told his wife about this, let alone his kids. Without knowing it, though, he had become increasingly impossible, uptight and picky as his own sons reached that age. Effectively, unconsciously, he drove them to run away. Luckily, the family tradition called for coming home again, safe and sound.
So fathers and fourteen-year-old sons can get a bit tense with each other. If someone else can assist with the male role at this age, then dads and sons can relax a little. (Some wonderful movies have been based on this – look in your DVD rental store for Searching for Bobby Fisher, Finding Forrester and The Run of the Country.)
Traditionally, two things were done to help young men into adulthood. First, they were ‘taken on’ and mentored into adulthood by one or more men who cared about them and taught them important skills for living. And second, at certain stages of this mentoring process, the young men were taken away by the community of older men and initiated. This meant being put through some serious growing-up processes, including testing, sacred teaching and new responsibilities. We’ll come back to this in the final chapter, on community.
We can contrast the Lakota experience with many modern-day sons and their mothers, who (according to writers like Babette Smith in Mothers and Sons) often remain in an awkward, distant or rather infantile relationship for life. These sons fear getting too close, and yet, being uninitiated as men, they never really escape. Instead, they relate to all women in a dependent and immature way. Not having entered the community of men, they are distrustful of other men and have few real friends. They are afraid of commitment to women because for them it means being mothered, and that means being controlled. They are real ‘nowhere men’.
It’s only by leaving the world of women that young men can break the mother-mould and relate to women as fellow adults. Domestic violence, unfaithfulness and the inability to make a marriage work may result not from any problem with women but from men’s failure to take boys on this transforming journey.
THE STORY OF NAT, STAN AND THE MOTORBIKE
Nat was fifteen, and his life was not going well. He had always hated school and found writing difficult, and things were just mounting up. The school he went to was a caring school, and his parents, the counsellor and the principal knew each other and could talk comfortably. They met and decided that if Nat could find a job, they would arrange an exemption. Perhaps he was one of those boys who would be happier in the adult world than the in-between world of high school.
Luckily Nat scored a job in a one-man pizza shop – ‘Stan’s Pizza’ – and left school. Stan, who was about thirty-five, was doing a good trade and needed help. Nat went to work there and loved it: his voice deepened, he stood taller, his bank balance grew. His parents, though, began to worry for a new reason. Nat planned to buy a motorbike – a big bike – to get to work. Their home was up a winding, slippery road in the mountains. They watched in horror as his savings got closer to the price of the motorcycle. They suggested a car, to no avail. Time passed.
One day Nat came home and, in the way of teenage boys, muttered something sideways as he walked past the dinner table. Something about a car. They asked him to repeat it, not sure if they should. ‘Oh, I’m not going to get a bike. I was talking to Stan. Stan reckons a bloke’d be an idiot to buy a motorbike living up here. He reckons I should wait an’ get a car.’
‘Thank God for Stan!’ thought his parents, but outwardly they just smiled and went on eating their meal.
You might think that (in the old societies) the boys’ mothers, and perhaps the fathers too, would resent or fear their son being ‘taken over’ by others. But this was not the case. The initiators were men they had known and trusted all their lives. The women understood and welcomed this help, because they sensed the need for it. They were giving up a rather troublesome boy and getting back a more mature and integrated young man. And they were probably very proud of him.
The initiation into adulthood was not a one-off ‘weekend special’. It could involve months of teaching about how to behave as a man, what responsibilities men took on, and where to find strength and direction. The ceremonies we normally hear about were only the marker events. Sometimes these ceremonies were harsh and frightening (and we would not want to return to these) but they were done with purpose and care, and were spoken of with great appreciation by those who had passed through them.
Traditional societies depended for their survival on raising competent and responsible young men. It was a life-and-death issue, never left to chance. They developed very proactive programs for doing this, and the process involved the whole adult community in a concerted effort. (Some innovative ways we might go about this, appropriate to our times, are described in the final chapter, ‘A community challenge’.)
In the modern world
Mentoring today is mostly unplanned