Boys are loud. They play rough, need space, can’t be faulted for being the way they are. Girls, well, we don’t need to talk about them. They just are. You know how they are. They want to please. They want to have fun, but as soon as you cross them, annoy them, get the least bit rough with them, they cry.

            “So why are you so quiet?” my stepdad asked me.

            “Why are you so sensitive?”

            I was raised watching men have their way with women, and women seeming to cling to them. We were tough, blue-collar, construction-working men who thought nothing of getting up at 5 a.m., working with our hands, bending our backs, and finishing at 5 p.m. with a cold beer in the pick-up truck on the way home, empties tossed into ditches, belches a sign of contentment.

Women, well they were the anxious, nervous-eyed, shushing-kids type, among us, the responsible ones, the manifestation of men’s broken promises. They seemed breakable, whereas the men were broken.

            “You’ll make someone a good wife someday,” my stepdad said to me, me all of fourteen, a good son, good student, good athlete, good worker, but not much of a man in his estimation.

            Too quiet.

            Too sensitive.

            Too much like my mother who left him because she grew tired of him, and probably the many men that came before him and, I imagine, after. They were all like him. She was smart enough to see the pattern and desperate enough to say enough. Enough already.

            There were weekends he didn’t come home. Out with the guys. There were days we wished he never would. Out of his mind.

There were gifts and loving words to woo her, bring her back from the brink, until they sent her over the edge. And she was gone.

            I was quiet enough to observe unnoticed.

            Sensitive enough to see both sides and but not understand either.

            Wearied enough by it all to know there had to be more to all of us.