The stuffed lamb was given to us at a baby shower. Around two years old, my son named toy Lamby and also gave her a gender. Now he is five and still sleeps with her every single night.
Lamby has a small lamb’s head with two ears hanging on either side of her face, but Lamby’s body is actually a cloth, slightly smaller than one I’d used to wash my face. Over the years, the fabric has worn threadbare in places. A thin, satin border has lost all its luster, though it still feels soft and slick as I rub it between my fingers.
My son’s Lamby is the same dirty gray as Mister Rogers’s Daniel Tiger. Not the shiny cartoon version, but the puppet on the original television show. Mister Rogers knew that children would recognize Daniel Tiger as a true lovey only if he was well-worn like theirs.
When I bring Lamby to my face, I smell my son.
When his mom picked him up after his first day of summer camp, he gushed details the whole ride home about the cold water in the pool and the craft he made with magnets. He had used his backpack as a pillow during rest time because Daddy forgot his yoga mat. He made a new best friend!
But the next morning our son began crying even before his cereal. He didn’t want to go back to camp. I had to carry him to the car and buckle him in, something I haven’t done since he graduated to the booster seat. He choked back sobs the entire thirty-minute drive. I steered with one hand, the other stretched into the backseat to hold his. He didn’t want to let go of my neck at drop-off.
I came home to an empty house and cradled Lamby, his lovey that he clutches when he crawls into bed with me and whispers, “Daddy, I’m scared.”
When we had left that morning for camp, I didn’t bring Lamby along for the car ride. I was afraid. Afraid my son would be shamed.
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The smells of shame. The wet front of my jeans in kindergarten. The pine trees behind the elementary school where I hid on the day after Christmas while the rest of the neighborhood kids rode their brand-new bikes across the parking lot. The smell of chalk when my third-grade teacher made me do math on the chalkboard in front of the class. The hotdogs in the cafeteria when a seventh-grade classmate called me “Dork Face” in front of her giggling friends. My sophomore girlfriend’s perfume as I fumbled with the clasp of her bra. Warm beer in a red Silo cup when my fraternity brothers caught me in a lie about my virginity.
As the catcher on my high school baseball team, it was my job to yell the number of outs in the inning: “Two! Two outs!” My teammates would mock my high-pitched voice in the field, then call me “gay” and “fag” in the dugout. I pounded my fist into my glove, trying to laugh it off. Smells of dirt, sweat, leather, shame.
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In The Men We Long To Be, Stephen B. Boyd argues that American society socializes a boy into becoming a “lonely warrior.” Our society’s “masculine conditioning” is characterized by “toughness, dominance, repression of empathy and extreme competitiveness.” A “real man” doesn’t cry. Shows no weakness. Puts others to shame, never himself. This attitude is not a game. It can mean life and death.
Masculine conditioning can lead to violence like domestic abuse. More often, a lonely warrior fights his own feelings of restlessness and longing, isolation and unfulfillment. Some men cope through addictive behaviors; many more push themselves and bury the pain and pressure until they break down physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Boyd cites the story of a man named Ralph. He was a highly successful corporate attorney who fought his way to the top of his profession only to find that he was alienated from his loved ones, especially his wife and sons. Ralph tearfully confessed, “I feel like I spent forty years of my life working as hard as I can to become somebody I don’t even like.”
Boyd’s book is subtitled “beyond domination to a new Christian understanding of manhood.” In reference to the work of developing healthy relationships, Boyd draws an analogy to the thought of theologian Paul Tillich. Rather than conceptualizing “some external, objective place” outside of ourselves and our background, the goal is to dig deeply into our own experiences and “know them intimately in order to find connections” with others.
I’ve read that smell is our sense most intimately connected with memory. Excavating my own history is not meant to wallow in shame, but rather strip off the layers of masculine conditioning that serve as barriers between other men, women, races, sexualities, and ages. Vulnerability leads to empathy. By identifying my own core feelings, I am better able to imagine the experience of others. Empathy does not negate the distinctiveness of individuals, but rather invites relationships of mutuality, respect, and care. It helps me imagine what someone else might need and opens my own heart to what they might give.
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When we arrived for my son’s second day of camp, I parked the car and cut the engine. In a bright, cheerful voice, I asked if he was ready to have a great day!
This brought fresh tears to his eyes.
But he unbuckled himself and eased out of the car as I hustled to his side. I helped him slip his backpack over his shoulders and tuck the loops of his facemask behind his ears. He hugged my neck and held on. I smelled hints of last night’s tear-free shampoo in his hair, the lavender scent of his freshly laundered Pikachu T-shirt, and his fear of being left alone.
Or was that the smell of my own fears for him?
Over my son’s head, I could see one of his counselors approaching us. I’d met them on the first day. This person was also wearing a mask, but I could tell by their eyes that they were smiling. They called my son by name. And my dear one let go of my neck.
My son turned and walked to the counselor, reached up and took their outstretched hand. The two of them began to skip, my son’s backpack bouncing along for the ride. My son’s counselor snuck a look back at me. They flashed a thumbs-up sign.
I took a deep breath. The smell of the grass beneath my feet. The pines trees above. Another deep breath. I wanted to remember.
~
When he was a baby, my son sucked and chewed on Lamby’s ears. Now only two brown slits of thread remain of Lamby’s black button eyes. Her pink nose has come unraveled and curls away from her face like a cartoon pig’s tail. The satin bow at her neck has also come undone, the ribbon hanging by a thread.
But the more wear and tear on Lamby, the more she smells of love.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, NC. His forthcoming book is a collection of his columns for the Chatham News + Record titled “Hope Matters: Churchless Sermons: In the Time of the Coronavirus.”
