NURTURING

Men generally make lousy nurturers, even if they bother to try. How's that for a sexist comment? I say it as a man who has chosen to be a nurturer professionally and in interpersonal relationships away from my work. 

I suppose my imprinting as a child has a lot to do with these choices. My paternal grandparents were soul mates who lived a life of mutual nurturing. I spent many weekends with them as a child. My own parents were nurturers in their way. My mother was a domestic genius, a brilliant cook, a relentless curator of a clean, comfortable home. My father nurtured by taking care of business for all of us. He built our house. He secured and rehabbed a summer cottage for us. He worked around the clock to ensure our financial security. They nurtured by significant actions which were often devoid of overt affection. 

This imprinting and my disposition led me to submit to the endless encouragement to prepare for a medical career in college. But, by the time I graduated from college with the qualifications and grades for medical school, I had decided that Medicine was not for me. The turning point in that decision process occurred during a summer job as a medical aide in a hectic emergency ward on Cape Cod. Two events stood out. 

We were often swamped with accident cases on weekends. One Saturday we took in three young members of Dutch aristocracy. They were burned black from a car fire after they collided with a truck in a small convertible. Their suffering was horrible and fatal. Their agony lasted for hours. The whole staff of the ward were exhausted and emotionally decimated by the event. I had spent several hours alone in a room with one 17-year-old male victim as he screamed before dying. I was 19. All I could do was attend to whatever comforting measures were available at the time. None of the senior staff seemed the least bit concerned about the impact on me afterwards. This struck me as inconsistent with the ideals of a healing profession. 

The second incident occurred shortly thereafter. A male drag performer from Provincetown was brought in during the early hours of Sunday morning. He had been hunted down, stabbed, beaten and gang raped after the bars closed. He was a slim blonde about thirty. The EMT's dumped him onto a stretcher in a hallway like a sack of potatoes. The treatment rooms were temporarily full. The man was in excruciating pain, but was muffling his screams with a pillow. Two of the treatment rooms were vacated soon after he arrived. 

The staff took a break and left him in the hallway. They invited me to join them and mocked me when I declined in order to attend to the gay man. I took him into a treatment room and cleaned him up. The stab wounds were minor punctures, which I covered with compression bandages. His whole body was scraped and bruised. Huge purple welts were forming everywhere. His eyes were blackened and swollen shut. I soaked towels in ice and applied them over his bruises. I was so busy I did not notice that morning was starting to dawn. That patient had been there for hours without a doctor or nurse looking at him. I was enraged. When I complained angrily to the nurse in charge, I was told it was not my place to criticize "professional" staff.

The patient barely survived and eventually had surgery for a ruptured spleen. I was instructed to keep my mouth shut about the negligence I had observed. Days later, when I was in the staff locker room, I observed two senior staff physicians making fun of that gay patient. One devout Catholic doctor said, "He got what he deserved." In that moment I decided not to go to medical school. If medical school produced monsters like these men, I was having none of it.

Today's medical schools are attended by a majority of women. This is as it should be, in my opinion. I taught secondary school for two years after a brief stint in dental school. I was drawn back to health care and took an aide's job before going to nursing school. I had felt like I had deserted. The injustice of that emergency room haunted me. I devoted most of my nursing career to working with under-served populations, which included my own gay-lesbian brothers and sisters of those pre-and-post-AIDS times.

Nurturing is still a challenge for me as a male. And I am convinced that the impedance I experience is biological. I take as evidence the fact that I and men in my life accept nurturing much more readily from females, even though I am a male who tries to nurture males and females equally. Females accept my nurturing much more readily than males. And I witness females accepting nurturing from each other more readily than males do together. 

As men, we derive great satisfaction from task fulfillment. The "task" of nurturing goes beyond cooling the fevered brow. Nurturing those with considerable need never really ends. Simply filling a person's stomach or putting a temporary roof over that person's head does not nurture that person. The growing hordes of deranged homeless in U.S. cities are evidence. 

Our male task orientation is vital to civilization, as many intellectuals have recently pointed out in the face of the current trend of feminist-promoted man-loathing. In my own life, that maleness has prevented me from falling over many cliff edges, where I was led by my nurturing instincts. Because those masses who have deep need, based in poor development and trauma, require ongoing and possibly lifelong remedial nurturing, any society could slip into complete chaos if that became its sole focus. And, if that focus is not moderated by male task orientation, nothing progressive will be accomplished for the whole human species in the long run.