In the true crime book The Onion Field, Joseph Wambaugh describes a moment between two characters:
“Sometimes the boy wished they could sit and that words would flow. But when they sat, eyes would turn shyly away. Father and son usually fell silent. It was the ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons.”
While that’s not everyone’s paternal experience, it is a familiar trope.
Another type of this awkward silence can lie between a daughter’s boyfriend and her dad or the reverse: a son’s girlfriend and his mom. The dialogue there goes, “Nobody is good enough for my baby!” and “Babe, your parents hate me.”
In the gospel of Luke, Jesus anticipates these rifts: “They will be divided… mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.” The context there, though, is people choosing Jesus above their family, rather than a sermon about in-laws at an impasse.
There is yet another trope of inherited shyness: between a father and his children’s babysitter.
In a home life of integrity, the woman of the house will have communicated with the babysitter the logistics of Date Night. The husband has no role in this, for there are few allowances for a grown man to speak privately with a young girl who is not his daughter.
Mom is in the other room getting dressed for the date so Man opens the door for Girl. What is there to say? He doesn’t know the half of what Mom wants the sitter to know. And a teenage girl will find the small talk Man might offer to be a totally creepy interrogation. So, they wait, eyes turned shyly away.
I learned of one final instance of this same sort. It happened to me just the other week.
My wife and I were watching our friends’ daughters, 5 and 2 ½, for the day. Not long after they were dropped off, the 2 ½-year-old glanced at me in a shy, piercing moment. I, feeling the ancient shame that whatever I said would be the wrong thing, said nothing.
The girl wasn’t scared. She knows me; our families break bread with others every Sunday night. She was sizing me up, ascertaining how her day away from her parents might go. It was an awkward moment between her and me—Man and Girl, thirty years apart.
Ancient, familiar shame is the natural response to the shy, silent stare from a youth.
We read in Job the thoughts that mute the youth in these awkward moments. When Job’s youngest friend, Elihu, prepares to tell his thoughts on Job’s tragedies, he prefaces it this way:
“I am young in years,
and you are aged;
therefore I was timid and afraid
to declare my opinion to you.
I said, ‘Let days speak,
and many years teach wisdom.’”
The youth are silent because they assume the elder knows what to say. Yet, Elihu turns out to be the wisest of Job’s friends. The 2 ½-year-old, the babysitter, the daughter-in-law, and Wambaugh’s son-character need the elder to speak first to break the ice, set the tone, andestablish the nature of the relationship.
Later, Wambaugh writes why the father, the elder, has his tongue-tied.
“He would have been willing to drive a nail or a million of them, to saw a forest of lumber, anything to help his son. But there was nothing he was able to do. They couldn’t even speak. It was the ancient inherited shame of fathers and sons.”
In these awkward moments, the elder is silenced by the shame that their accrued wisdom does not give them the right words to fix a problem for the one they’ve given life to, shame that the one they’ve given life to has replaced them with a significant other, or the enduring shame between Man and Girl.
When next I sit as the elder, I hope I am first to speak. Open-ended questions and humor that fits my audience are tried and true methods to break the ice. With the 2 ½-year-old, I was ridiculously silly thereafter, and she ate it up.
When next I sit as the youth, I hope I have grace to recognize that my elder may be silenced by shame. I will trust that they want to help, want to say something, but don’t know how to say it. Or perhaps by their ancient wisdom they know there is nothing to be said.
– Scot Bellavia