Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (9 page)

For instance, a comparison between older men’s and older women’s responses to my survey question about mentors/role models reveals an intriguing difference. As stated earlier, nearly three-quarters of the older men in my study reported having one or more mentors or role models at some point in their careers. Even more of the women—more than three-quarters—had one or more mentors or role models, among them a list of supportive family members, employers, and educators that was similar to the men’s list. Yet the women included two groups scarcely mentioned by the men: colleagues and friends. One can only speculate that men launching careers in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s had less need to depend on colleagues and friends for help than women did.

That explanation is far more palatable than John Gray’s stereotypical observations in
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
.
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For Venusians, said Gray, it’s all about sharing feelings and the quality of relationships, about supporting, helping, and nurturing. “Relationships [to Venusians] are more important than work or technology. . . . To share their personal feelings is much more important than achieving goals and success.”
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Martians, in contrast, are more interested in objects and things than people and feelings. “Martians value power, competency, efficiency, and achievement. They are always doing things to prove themselves and develop their power and skills. Their sense of self is defined through their ability to achieve results. They experience fulfillment primarily through success and accomplishment.”
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Gray’s portrayals of gender differences, once all the rage, are no longer valid insofar as they completely underestimate twenty-first-century women’s commitment to their careers and their striving for success, as well as men’s greater willingness to share in parenting and be more communicative. Still, for better or worse, there is at least a small kernel of truth in the rest of his analysis. It is still hard for men to ask for help. And, true to form, relationships are extremely important to women: they are still more likely than men to cite positive connections with coworkers or managers as reasons for staying with their current employers.
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(These workplace networking kinds of relationships differ from close male friendships with buddies, also known as male bonding, that can involve “arguing, competing, or doing nothing much at all”
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and can last for years.)

How are men reacting to changing concepts of masculinity? Robert Bly’s
Iron John
told us that “The Fifties man was supposed to like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide.”
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Later on, after the feminist movement urged men to be “softer” and more “receptive,” Bly found that men were no happier. Thus, according to Bly, for a young man to transfer from the mother’s influence to the father’s and enter into adulthood, he needs to “find the father” (who may be absent or remote) and do the hard work of connecting with “the deep masculine” within himself.

An outgrowth of the contemporary men’s movement is the Mankind Project (MKP), inspired by mythopoetics like Robert Bly, Joseph Campbell, John Lee, and others. The MKP helps men face challenges and heal emotionally and supports their further growth and development. Ed Barton, the subject of the next profile, serves as a leader and an elder in the MKP, internationally and in this country, in addition to his day job. Being an elder has nothing to do with being elderly, he assures me. He plans on working for another ten years.

Profile: Edward Barton

Ed Barton was comfortable talking about a series of midlife crises he suffered—Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in the mid-1980s; the suspension of his law license in 1990, followed by the dissolution of his marriage; several years spent agonizing over coming out as a gay man; and, nine years ago, triple bypass surgery. Now in his midseventies, he has managed to put all that behind him or grow through them, thanks in large part to MKP, his other mythopoetic men’s emotional healing activities, and a little therapy.

The MKP is a global nonprofit organization “that conducts challenging and highly rewarding training for men at every stage of life.” MKP “helps men through any transition, men at all levels of success, men facing almost any challenge.” The MKP’s flagship training, called the New Warrior Training Adventure (NWTA), stresses initiation, accountability, intention, commitment, and emotional intelligence. The MKP also sponsors peer-facilitated men’s support groups (called I-Groups), which teach
emotional authenticity
,
personal responsibility
,
leadership mastery
,
empowered mission
, and
supportive community
. In short, the MKP encourages men to self-reflect, grow, and move forward. While the MKP is composed largely of heterosexual men, it holds special “gateway” weekends to initiate gays into the organization and has an annual Rainbow Warrior Gathering for gay men of the MKP and their allies.

Ed told me that he earned a JD from Cornell in 1964, passed the bar the next year, and practiced law for twenty-five years. He lost his law license for three years after he “went too far for a client” by committing perjury, a felony offense. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years of probation. He paid all the fines and court costs assigned to him, never missing a payment, in fact paying them off early, and earning an early release. Ed has been asked why he went so far for a client. His explanation: “I think I subconsciously knew I had to do something to get off the treadmill, and that’s what allowed me to start on a more healing and spiritual journey.”

By the time the suspension of his license had expired, however, Ed knew he didn’t want to return to the high-pressure legal arena and he didn’t want the hassle of applying for reinstatement. To keep his mind active, he took some part-time paralegal jobs, such as doing collections work for an attorney (pursuing overdue payments was an area in which he had years of experience) and reviewing and editing legal documents. He chose not to do legal research (tasks that he never liked and that required computer skills that he lacked).

He also began working on a doctorate at Michigan State University in Family and Child Ecology, which is the study of the family as an ecological system. He completed his PhD in 2003. With men’s support groups having been so important in Ed’s emotional growth and development, he wrote his dissertation on men’s support groups.
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Then sixty-five, he began looking for a faculty position. When interviews with a few college departments didn’t pan out, he suspected that they were unwilling to hire someone his age. Consequently, he continued doing part-time paralegal work, convinced that, “If I tried to land a full-time paralegal job, I would again encounter age discrimination.”

Ed still owns the family farm where he grew up outside of Kalamazoo, Michigan, but he has been leasing the land and buildings. Until his marriage and his livelihood began to fall apart, he, his wife, and stepchildren raised purebred sheep on the farm with the help of a hired hand. Meanwhile, Ed operated his law office full time as a sole practitioner with four full-time secretaries. His former wife waited until Ed had been sentenced by the court, and finally she moved out.
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Realizing that he needed help after the separation, Ed sought out a counselor. Ed knew it was important to answer his counselor’s questions honestly: “I couldn’t fudge, couldn’t gloss over the truth.” The first thing the counselor asked after Ed had completed an inventory was, “You are gay, aren’t you?” Ed’s reply was, “Gulp, gulp, gulp. Yes.”
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Later Ed joined the counselor and a half dozen other men in starting a men’s peer support group in Kalamazoo. Emotional authenticity, personal responsibility, empowerment or no, it took Ed (as a gay man) two and a half years to come out to his Kalamazoo support group of mainly nongay men. “If they had been gay guys, it wouldn’t have taken me so long.”

Even many years later, Ed found coming out publicly was still a struggle. As an example, when he attended his fifty-fifth high school reunion in 2011, he waffled about disclosing that he was a gay man. “I decided to go for it and came out as gay to my classmates. One classmate said that she already knew. I asked her how she knew and she said, ‘Because you never hit on us gals like the other guys did.’” And as he expected, the extremely religious classmates didn’t stop to talk to him after the reunion was over.

Ed has been very involved in the MKP, serving as a staff member for fifty-three NWTA trainings to date, taking advanced MKP trainings, Shadow Healing trainings, and undertaking many leadership roles. He is the research coordinator for MKP International (MKPI), secretary to MKP-USA, and is centre elder in the Windsor-Detroit MKP Centre. To Ed, the MKP means community and inclusivity. “I am accepted both as a gay man and in a general sense. My skills and contributions are appreciated, in particular my legal skills and understanding of governance. I’m an elder holding
elder energy
, and that has become part of my identity.
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I hope you understand that elder energy is not at all the same as being ‘elderly.’ Elderly is old, like the stereotype: retirees go off to Florida or Arizona to vegetate in a retirement village. That’s definitely not elderhood or positive elder energy; elderly is not who I am!”

Ed explained that the MKP belongs to a division of the contemporary men’s movement known as the “mythopoetic” branch. Inspired by the work of poet Robert Bly, mythologist Joseph Campbell, John Lee,
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and others, mythopoetics engage in meaningful men’s initiation, spiritual rituals, and psychological self-help workshops aimed at helping men reclaim and restore their “deep masculine” natures that have been lost due to modern lifestyles and consumerism. Among Ed’s own contributions to the men’s movement is an anthology he edited, titled
Mythopoetic Perspectives of Men’s Healing Work: An Anthology for Therapists and Others
.
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In addition, he coaches two or three
warrior
brothers who phone him on a regular basis about their own midlife crises, and he attends a local co-ed support group once a month.

When I asked Ed whether he thinks men and women differ in terms of career choice and ambition, his first response was that men seemed more focused and goal oriented than women. Then he quickly reconsidered. “If we’re talking about
older
people, elders, I’ve seen women who were primarily nurturers for years turn into
warriors/crones
once their kids left ‘the nest,’ while men who have been on point in the ‘provider role’ for years often look to their softer side, their feminine side, as they get to midlife and beyond.”

Ed has also devoted countless volunteer hours as Curator of the Changing Men Collections (CMC) in Special Collections of the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries.
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The MSU Libraries have the largest collection of men’s movement materials in North America and possibly the world. For example, there are newsletters from groups of all branches of the contemporary men’s movement—profeminist, fathers’ rights, men’s rights, Promise Keepers (a Christian men’s group), the mythopoetic, African American men, Jewish men, Moslem men, and gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender (GLBT) organizations. In the CMC there are nearly four hundred different men’s movement newsletters from around the world that have been cataloged and another four hundred remaining to be cataloged. He seeks materials at conferences and requests other donations such as the archives of the Mid-South Men’s Center and the Ithaca Men’s Center.

Looking ahead, Ed expects to keep working as a paralegal for perhaps ten more years to supplement his Social Security benefits, provided his health holds up—his cardiologist says Ed is doing well and is cutting Ed’s medications in half. “My job gets me up and out of here in the morning. I could stay home and read all day, but that would not be healthy for me either, mentally or physically.” Ed thinks he will probably cut back his volunteer hours at the library. “I am getting burned out on the collection and would really like to find something else to be passionate about. Remember Joseph Campbell’s advice? Campbell famously said ‘Follow your bliss,’ find something you really enjoy doing that nurtures your soul, and make it work for you emotionally and physically to restore passion in your life. That’s what I intend to do!”
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