From boy to man
Nothing is more difficult than puberty for boys. Either your too-long arms flap down your thin, narrow body like uncontrollable polyps, or you're the only pale boy without a beard among friends who have all had their voices broken and don't have to show ID at the till when they buy a beer. And even worse - your emotions are going round in circles and your thoughts are chasing through the jungle like young chimpanzees as if there's no tomorrow. To make matters worse, you don't even know how to put what's bothering you into words, especially as your friends don't seem to be aware of your chaos.
So you're facing a difficult journey, a kind of anti-hero's journey from boy to man, and no boy but you seems to have ever had a problem with it. And so you are facing this threshold like the boys from Sonogno who were sold to chimney sweeps from Milan. And that's a problem because we've simply thrown a lot of what we know about this threshold overboard. Because we think that the initiation from boy to man takes care of itself. We think it starts at a very early age in the peer group, moves on to the internet and then the boy becomes a man in the military at the latest. Far from it!
The situation is quite different in some indigenous peoples, where the threshold between boys and men is still actively celebrated with a ceremony or initiation rite - in our modern world, this hardly ever takes place. It is rare for fathers to realize what these changes are all about or that their son is becoming someone else. Sociologists fear that this is one of the reasons why we are increasingly developing into an "immature society".
From educator to mentor and friend
But it's not just the boys who are a little lost before this threshold and are already dawdling on the threshold. Their fathers also don't really understand what is happening to their son, but also to themselves. They may realize that the boys are getting stronger, eat twice as much as they used to, speak less or hardly at all and when they do, it's with this strange broken voice. Intuitively (for those who have maintained access to their intuition) they sense as a father that something is going on that they should be involved in, only they know even less than when changing diapers what is expected of them. And yes: where do you take it from, if not steal it? Perhaps now would be the time to take a closer look at your own son and yourself. Because young men no longer need an educator, they need a mentor or older friend who is always there, who always has time for this strange and confusing time. And yes: you can learn that too, as a father. And with us, among others.