Men Do Feel: How my Struggle is Socially Unacceptable

18 min readJun 4, 2021

And how I told society to go **** itself

I wrote this article 4 years ago on GirlsAskGuys and have adapted it to reflect the time change.

My own emotions cause me great distress, simply because I’m a man and society tells me to “suck it up.” This is a story of my struggle and how I must find a way to tell society to go to hell.

The Struggle

My name is Tim and I grew up in Oklahoma for most of my life. The picture above is me when I was about 4 or 5 years old, or so I’m told.

My childhood — and even a lot of my adulthood — was full of pain, physical abuse, feelings of inadequacy, and feelings of worthlessness. Maybe the worst part is feeling more saddened by the fact that I’m bothered by those feelings, as an adult.

I mean, c’mon. . . I’m a man! I can’t be like that, right? I’ve gotta’ puff out the ol’ chest, waddle around and do man-stuff. I mean, look at me now:

What a manly-looking man, right?

Well, I can tell you right now that I’m not. I hurt and I hurt often. When things from my childhood come back, an overwhelming sense of pain washes over me. My head heats up, my eyes water, and sometimes I will just cry. I do my best to shove it all down into my man-parts, but — I’m human.

Why should I even have to do this? I’ve been with the same woman for 23 years, have two beautiful children, am self-employed, and have made a good life for myself. We don’t want for anything, so why do I struggle with being a “man”?

Because I feel bad for feeling, that’s why. Maybe I should back up a ways, so please follow me on a painful journey through my life and maybe you’ll understand what I’m getting at.

The Beginning

My mother was married to my biological father for 10 years when they had me and I’m the youngest of 3 boys. After the 2nd child, my real dad started drinking. Heavily.

Mom always said she’d never live with a drunk, and apparently, he’d get so drunk he’d pass out in the litter box and piss himself. He did it so often that I think she put the litter box where he’d always pass out…

So, she moved from New Mexico to Oklahoma, taking us with her.

Then she married James and our real trouble began. At our age, James was a giant who stood 6'4, weighing 200 lbs of solid muscle. He was a massive guy who served in the military, had been trained in martial arts by his father — who ran a Judo school in Iowa — and he was mean.

When we’d do anything wrong, he would grab us by the temples and squeeze really hard. It made our heads feel like they would pop open. It was excruciatingly painful. James called it “the claw.” We would cower before this man when he’d raise his hand up like he was going to give us “the claw.” He would even do it just to laugh at how we’d back away and beg him not to. He thought it was funny. It wasn’t funny at all.

It wasn’t just “the claw” that made him mean. He would punch us, kick us, choke us unconscious, and even throw us. One memory that sticks out to me the most was the day my oldest brother accidentally knocked down a ‘blanket-partition’ that was put up to prevent the air conditioning from cooling off our bedroom during the day.

My brother was upset about something that happened in school — and he was 14 at the time. James was going to show him, though. He leapt from the couch and punched my brother, then picked him up using “the claw” method, then threw him into the other room. Thankfully, my brother landed on the bed and was otherwise okay.

I remember another time where my other brother didn’t move fast enough for James, so James latched onto my brother’s hair and dragged him across the carpeted floor, melting the skin from his knee - rug burn, we called it. His knees took weeks to heal and he had scabs all down his shin from the injury.

Another memory was when James caught me smoking. I’ve never felt as much fear in my life as I felt the moment I saw this hulking mass of muscle peering around the corner, catching me. I believe he punched me, but all I remember was him running at me, then me waking up laying on the ground.

He kept threatening me to not tell my Mom what he had done. I think it freaked him out that he knocked me out. I was only 13 at the time. I still smoke to this day, by the way. A lot of good that did me, right? Boy, taught me a lesson. . .

Bruised, battered and beaten, we endured every day of his relentless temper. The physical and mental abuse were torturous because we feared for our lives nearly every day of our childhood. We hated when he was home because we had to walk on eggshells. Every day of our life was a potential black-eye or a potential opportunity for this man to rage against us, taking his anger and frustration out on us. We really thought he would kill us some day. But, we survived James. He taught us lessons in how not to act.

Through all of the abuse, however, he never hit my mother on purpose, although he did break her thumb when he threw a bottle of Seagram’s Seven across the room. Most of the things he did to us, he wouldn’t do in front of her, but she knew about it because we told her. She defended us a lot, but still she stayed.

Being Homeless

James was a hard worker, and besides his sexual prowess, had a great work ethic. I can’t remember a job where he didn’t become the manager within a months. People who didn’t “know” him, always liked him, or, they were afraid of him. He was sociable and would be considered very “manly.” He hid the evil that resided within him well. He was very good at hiding.

He was also very good-looking, though, and couldn’t keep it in his pants. He would regularly lose jobs when it was discovered he was sleeping with his employees, or, workplace jealousy would play a factor and would lose his job.

He cheated on my Mom all the time, unfortunately. One of the times this happened to him, where he found himself without a job after a trist, we ended up homeless.

My mom stayed with him and claims that she wanted to “teach him a lesson,” so instead of finding low-income housing or a shelter, we moved out of our home and onto the Illinois River, where we would live for the next 8 months.

We had a pup-tent that my brothers and I slept in every night, though we later upgraded to a larger tent. We still went to school and, in the beginning, would walk over a mile to a podunk convenience store (not pictured above) across the large field shown in the picture, east of our campsite.

Our first week on that river was horrible. A huge snowstorm caused school to let out early and the blizzard-like conditions made living on the river quite difficult. The river swelled and swallowed our campsite, forcing us to seek shelter in a car that couldn’t handle the terrain, snow or ice.

My brothers and I huddled into the back of that old Buick, and I was smashed between them. Mom & James tried making it to a family member’s house, but the car kept sliding sideways on the road. We had waited too long to try and leave.

The road we would have to traverse was hilly, curvy, and ultimately impassable in that car, in those conditions. I remember being petrified that night in the car. My brothers and step-Dad got out in the blizzard to help correct the vehicle’s path to help get the car over small hills, but all was in vain. I stayed in the backseat, staring out at the snow pelting the windshield and couldn’t help but be reminded of Star Trek’s light speed travel. My body was trembling from fear. I was cold, sure, but my entire body trembled.

We were stuck, so we hunkered down in the vehicle, hoping the storm would pass quickly. We couldn’t run the car for long because we didn’t have money for gas and if we had run out of gas, we really would’ve been screwed. Had it not been for five people being inside that tin-can, we might have frozen to death.

The storm finally passed, however, and the rest of our life on the river was quite interesting, and at some points, it was fun. I remember helping my mom create a travois with two large branches and a wool U-Haul blanket. We sowed the blanket around the branches, added a strap to the front and would put the strap around our stomach to pull firewood back to camp. This was a daily chore that we would do after school.

We took baths using a wash cloth from a pot of river water that was heated over the campfire. It was our life and we did what we had to, I guess.

The Summer was the fun part. We swam daily, just about. We bathed in the river when it was hot outside and we used any and all resources the river provided to us: food, water, and nature’s air conditioning.

Then there was “the stove.”

We found an old stove out in the woods. It was just a random stove that probably washed into the area during a flood. We called it the “shitter,” then later, the “Shit Stove.”

The top grills were missing the burners and hotplate underneath, so the holes on top opened up directly into the ‘oven’. We still laugh about this stove. It actually made “sawing logs” in the woods a lot more comfortable. And, well, it’s a pretty funny story that I get to tell my kids.

We even had a reputation on the river. We were called “The River People” by those who frequented that swimming area, which was about 2–300 ft. south of our campsite. People knew we lived there and no one bothered us. We were still fed and clothed — we just didn’t have a house, electricity, running water, or heating and air.

We eventually made our way out of that situation when my brother’s football coach learned that we may not be able to stay in the town we had lived in for a couple of years at that point. The coach had land and a trailer that he was willing to rent to us, so that’s how we got off the river.

The Woman

James eventually left my mom for another, younger woman. After he left, despite all those years of abuse, I still wanted to see him. After all, he was my Dad. Despite his streaks of terror, he did have redeeming qualities and he taught us a lot of things. Whatever the reason, I was hurting, confused, not sure how to cope with the continual nightmare that was my life, and I thought that perhaps seeing him would help.

So I had the youth pastor at my church drive me over to his house. James had come to visit a couple of times after he and my Mom split up and he said if I ever wanted to talk, that I could call him or come over. So, I did that.

When I showed up, it was awkward. He was living with this other woman, who had four children of her own. In the back of my mind, I thought that maybe they could be brothers and sisters to me, but the situation was awkward because I was, I believe, fifteen at this time and here was my “Dad,” with another woman, surrounded by other children, two of which were my age. I didn’t know what to say or do.

But when I sat down to eat dinner with them, he says “So, Timbo…what do you think of my new woman?” As he said it, a shit-eating grin spread across his face and he put his arm around her waist. She was holding a bowl of salad, staring at me, smiling, expecting me to respond.

She was pretty. She was in shape, had pale-white skin, long, thick blonde hair, and blue eyes. But she took a married man away from his wife, and away from three children he had raised for thirteen years, one of which — at that time — I thought was his biological son. Me. I thought he was my real Dad.

I really didn’t know what to say or how to react. My head felt like it would explode in that moment. The tears started to build and I could feel myself losing control of my emotions. I felt bad. Really bad. I tried stuffing it all because I didn’t want to embarrass myself by crying, so I just said “yeah.”

What the hell else was I supposed to say?

A Turning Point

The school I went to had issues with me signing James’s last name on my school work. As far as I knew, that was my last name. Whatever Mom did for enrollment wasn’t something I ever concerned myself with. I just signed my name as Ellsbury. James was my Dad and his last name was Ellsbury so that’s who I was. Ellsbury. But the school kept bringing it up to me, so I relayed that to my Mom.

In response, my Mom wrote a letter to the Principal and gave it to me to turn into the office when I got to school. We didn’t have a car and email wasn’t a thing yet.

I got on the bus that morning and decided to open the letter and read it. It ripped my world apart. Why would she lie to me? Why would he lie to me? Why did I go through life thinking that my brothers were step-brothers when they were my real, full, blood brothers?

That still bothers me to this day and I harbor some anger and irritation towards my mother for how she handled that situation and how my entire life up that point was based on a lie — or at least that’s how it felt at the time. It was a turning point in my life, so to speak.

I was no longer “Timbo.” That’s what Dad called me. Well, my step-Dad. My identity had been stripped from me and I had to learn to be this other kid with this other name and this other dad I didn’t know. I also had to learn how to sign my new last name.

Fast-forward to me graduating and the man that my mother tried to get child support from all those years was found. He lived in New Mexico, in the same city I was born, and on the same land that his Dad left to him.

As it turned out, he cleaned his act up soon after we left for Oklahoma.

He stopped drinking, finished college, and worked in the oil field as a geologist for all those years. He made great money and had everything, yet never sent anything to us. The only contact I remember was a phone call initiated by my oldest brother to him, only to hear my brother tell him he never wanted to speak to him again. I still to this day do not know what was said during that phone call, but my oldest brother hasn’t spoken to him since.

It bothers me that we were the poorest kids in school while our dad was wealthier than most of the kids’ parents in school. And there I was,18 years old, trying to process this information.

The Strange Father

I met my real dad — John — for the first time when I was 19 years old. He had driven to Oklahoma and my brother and I met him (the younger of my two older brothers). It was awkward, to say the least. . .

Who the hell was this guy, I thought. I understand that he’s the person I share genetic material with, but he was a complete stranger. My own father is, was, and may always be, a complete stranger.

But I was a man at that time, so how was I supposed to get to know a man that never wanted us, never cared about us, left us in a situation like that, and never bothered to help? There’s no book that could tell me how to deal with that. This troubled youth was forced to deal with this in the way a man does — shove it into his man-parts.

But honestly, I still don’t know how to deal with it. Over the years, he and I have talked about a lot of things, specifically James and how bad our lives were, but he would always find a way to disrespect my mother and try to pin all of those years on her. It was her fault that he didn’t see us. It was her fault that he didn’t pay child support. He even blamed her for “driving him to drink,” which led to him breaking into our house one night and him trying to kill my Mom. She managed to stop him when she happened to find a rock and beat him half to death with it. He was on top of her, choking her, screaming “If I can’t have you, no one can.” He was going to kill her.

Yet that was her fault. He shows no remorse or guilt over what happened. But at the same time, he’s still a stranger to me.

Then I find out that soon after we moved to Oklahoma, he had started dating a lady with a daughter. He dated her for about 6 months, but still had a thing for her for a while after that. She didn’t want him, though, but she started using him for his money. He then started showering them with money. The same money he refused to give us. The same money he could have used to buy us new shoes, new clothes, or to help us get a house.

As a parent, I can’t fathom the mentality of a man that refuses — out of sheer jealousy or spite — to care for his children. I just don’t understand it.

The Daughter

The daughter of his ex girlfriend got everything she ever wanted or needed from my dad. While he took her out to eat, we went hungry. While we were made fun of for having old rags and shoes with massive holes, he would buy her brand-new, brand-named clothing.

While we had to go to school events with no money in our pocket, forced to watch other kids buy multiple things from stores while on a trip, she never went without. Never. Financially, he was her Dad, but in reality? She lived closer to us than to him. Her Mom moved to Oklahoma soon after she and my Dad split up. She moved to Oklahoma because she was with another man who worked in Oklahoma.

Yet he would still wire them money constantly, for whatever they needed. When he came to Oklahoma when I was growing up, he did not come and visit us — he would go over to their house.

This has not changed, in fact. He visits Oklahoma once a year or so, but never to come see me or my children. He goes to his “daughter’s” place to celebrate her kids’ birthday. He’ll spend a few days with her, then drive to my house and stay for an hour or two and go back to New Mexico.

Same thing this year, only now his daughter lives close to me. She lives 20 miles from me. She got married recently, so he drove up to her place a week ago and stayed there until yesterday. I didn’t even know he was in Oklahoma.

He was in Oklahoma for three days before he called and he called to see if I would drive up to her house because he was watching his fake grandkids.… Yeah, I don’t think so.

A couple of days later, he called, wanting to come visit. He visited for just over an hour, then drove back to New Mexico. This was too much for me. Despite being almost 40, it was just too much.

Men are Humans Too

The whole situation bothers me. It bothers me in a really big way. It makes me feel worthless and unwanted, but damn…I’m almost 40 and shouldn’t feel this way, right?

I shouldn’t be a crybaby about this situation, should I? Being jealous of some girl because she stole my dad from me as a child and continues to do so throughout my adult life. I don’t necessarily fault her, per se, but the situation still hurts that it is still going on.

I feel more ashamed of myself for feeling sad about this than I feel sad about this. I recently asked a forum for legal advice in the event he wills her his entire estate and leaves us nothing — if there was something I could do about it.

The responses made me feel even worse. Grown women calling me a crybaby, saying that I’m 30+ years old and should get over it. It’s his stuff and he can give it to whomever he wants and I should just stop being jealous and petty.

Apparently, I should also fire my therapist because they aren’t helping. I don’t have a therapist, by the way. I’m a man. . . . don’t need one, right?

The problem with “get over it, crybaby” is that, well, I can’t. I have feelings and memories and “what-ifs” that race through my mind when my dad calls or when the subject comes up. When I think about my life and what it should have been, I feel like I got shafted because we weren’t worth a damn. Just a bunch of little dark-skinned native babies that his family didn’t approve of. His family never accepted my Mom because she’s a dark-skinned Native.

So I feel like I have a couple of choices here: stop speaking to my dad because when I do, I get upset and all my childhood memories come back, which makes me feel worse for being this age and being bothered by it … or I can tell society to go ‘Eff’ itself.

Maybe I’ll just do both. But everyone needs to know that just because I’m a grown man with a life and family of my own doesn’t mean that I cannot feel. This is probably true for most men.

You should never dismiss a man’s pain — or anyone’s pain for that matter — because he should “man-up” or “get over it.” I can’t help the way I feel and it’s hard to push the memories of my childhood away because of how traumatic life was for my brothers and I.

And imagine if I had been a girl who had a deadbeat Dad that financed the life of a boy and called him ‘son’ while treating his biological daughter that way. Do you think those grown women would be telling that girl to “cowgirl up” and to “stop being petty”? Of course not. They’d criticize the Dad, label him a deadbeat, tell her she’s a victim of piggish men and they’d support her feelings and try to make her feel better.

But a man dealing with that problem? Oh, well, hell, you’re just a crybaby and need to ‘man up’.

It’s bad enough that I had to deal with what I had to deal with, but to either have to bottle up my feelings in order to not be shamed or to be shamed by the public for being a near-40-year old man with emotions, feelings, and childhood baggage is no way to treat anyone.

We try our best to maintain our manliness, but we do have feelings and instead of shaming us for having those feelings, maybe you should just say something nice. Since that probably won’t happen, I guess the only thing left that I have to say is: