When I was growing up you were considered a baby if you went to your mother for help. That wasn't as true for girls as it was for boys. But it was partly true for girls. They could go to their mother about girl things but not about things between kids. Now, it wasn't only kids who thought you were a baby if you went to your mother for help. Your father thought so too and so did your mother. If you didn't take life like a "man" you would come to be known as a sissy. A sissy was a boy who was acting like a girl, but not a big girl, more like a baby girl. It didn't mean that you were gay or something like that; it meant that boys had to be strong, be able to take pain and punishment without crying, and always be self-sufficient and never dependent. Boys had to be hard and tough. If a boy cried, he went beyond being a sissy. He was a cry-baby, and there was nothing lower than that. A cry-baby was even worse than a baby. It was a baby that cried.

By the time I was three years old, I was a hard guy. Adults loved me, and other children, even older ones, respected me. I was respected and admired because I never cried and I never asked anyone for help or for anything. I was the perfect child because I hid my pain, asked for nothing, and never bothered anyone. I was self-sufficient and relied on no one except myself. The shame of being a baby or a sissy kept me from acting like one, even though I was really both. I didn't know that I was a sissy and a baby for a long, long time. It took many years of living, including having my own children, to discover the baby and sissy in me, and also by the way, in everyone else. I think I was in my early thirties when I came to realize that it was all right and good, to be a baby and a sissy, which really meant I just wanted someone to take care of me. I have been a much happier person since I made that discovery.

How that discovery came about is another story that I may tell someday. I only brought it up to introduce what I am going to write about now, which is mainly addressed to the hard guys of the world. A hard guy doesn't have to be someone who acts tough and nasty, who robs and beats up people, or who is a criminal. Although people like that are always hard guys. A hard guy is someone who, very early in life, gave up on receiving, or even seeking, tenderness from other human beings. Hard guys gave up because, instead of getting tenderness when they needed it, they got a slap in the face. It didn't have to be a real slap. It was the repeated indifference or anger they received when they reached out for tenderness that made them give up. Now, I intentionally said that they gave up on receiving tenderness from a human being because there are lots of hard guys who find some tenderness in relation to a dog or cat or bird or even a lizard or some other kind of animal - but never in relation to another human. The reason why that's so is because humans have trouble living without tenderness. If you've given up on having it with humans, it gets misplaced on to something else - like animals or your car or your furniture or your house or whatever allows tenderness to be there without the pain that was there when you tried it with people.

Most hard guys openly sneer and look down upon anyone who is open about their need for tenderness. They also ridicule people who are tender. They look down on women, because in our world, women supposedly need tenderness more than men. They view babies as strange, unpleasant creatures because babies are so helpless and so blatantly dependent and in need of caring, and because they cry.

Hard guys usually humiliate their own children when they reach out for tenderness. They act as if their child is crazy for asking for something that causes pain. Instead of responding with tenderness, they give their child a "slap" in the form of a spanking, a good beating, or angry, insulting words. Hard guys are big on punishment and harsh discipline. They believe that children want this and that it is good for them. Hard guys like to say to children, "I'll give you something to cry about." They do things like that because they're hard guys, and that's what hard guys believe about life - that it's hard.

Now, when I say "hard guys", I'm not just talking about men. Hard guys can be women and mothers too. Just about the same amount of women as men give up on getting tenderness when they're very young. In fact, most women really become hard guys once they become mothers. That's not only because they've given up on tenderness but also because our society sends them the message that they should be hard guys when it comes to raising children. I could call hard guys who are women "hard gals". But somehow "gals" sounds too tender to me. I guess that's because I still think women are supposed to be tender because nature gave them the responsibility for nurturing their babies. I also prefer "hard guys" for both men and women, because I believe that it was men who, in their envy of women's greater importance in creation and in their jealousy of the closeness of mother and baby, convinced women to become like them - totally unnecessary after a baby was born. Women became guys, just like men.

At this point, I can see I'd better define what I mean by "tenderness" before I get in trouble with the feminist movement, and also because I've been using the word "tenderness" a lot, and in our culture tender has more to do with meat than with human beings. Most of us know about feelings like anger, rage, sadness, happiness, joy, despair, love, lust, and probably other feelings that I have left out. But when it comes to tenderness, people, particularly hard guys, draw a blank. Tenderness is, however, a real human feeling. It's part of us because human babies are born in an undeveloped state, and when we lived in nature babies could only survive after they were born if they could elicit a tender response from their mothers. In our human beginnings, mothers wouldn't have cared for their babies if they did not feel tenderness toward them. It's important to understand that tenderness is catching. If you respond to someone tenderly, it becomes a part of them, and then that person can pass it on to someone else. The feeling of tenderness emerges when you care about a person. You feel soft and gentle and want them to feel the same. When someone acts tenderly to you, you feel warm and good and sort of like how I imagine a cat must feel when it's purring. When you act tenderly to another person, you feel good, and you are happy that you are making that person feel good. So being tender and receiving tenderness are pretty much the same thing because the boundary between the people is eliminated. The two people in a tender exchange aren't really separate anymore. Each feels what the other feels. They each feel tenderness. It's like you only feel your skin when something else touches it, and when it's someone else's skin that's touching yours, it's hard to know which skin is theirs and which is yours. Well, I don't know if I've really given a good description of tenderness, but it's the best I can do with the limited words that I have. It has to do with words like "we" and "one", but I'll get to that a little later on.

One of the reasons we don't know much about the feeling of tenderness is because in our world there is so little of it and it isn't valued very much. Being tender is considered soft and weak and a liability in the struggle to survive. In a world lacking in tenderness, we are trained to give up our need for it at an early age. You won't find tenderness listed as a human feeling in any psychology books. Partly that's because we study human beings as separate structures, and the feeling of tenderness has to do with our lack of separateness from each other. The root of tender feelings lies in the mother-infant bond, and modern psychology isn't based on the unity of human beings but on individuation and individualism.

In the previous chapter, I said that I wished I had a mother who took care of me the way mothers did a long, long time ago. I also asked, "Don't you?" Well, I'm sure most hard guys would be able to find lots of reasons why they wouldn't want a mother like that. To begin with, they would probably say that they didn't have such a mother and they turned out all right. But it goes deeper than that. Hard guys are very afraid of anything that smacks of tenderness. Besides being hurt by their mothers and fathers when they reached out for it, they believe that if you need it, you become vulnerable to the domination of other people. The closeness and continuous contact between the long ago mothers and their babies is scary to hard guys. So they resist any temptation that would weaken their hard guy front.

Real hard-grained hard guys wouldn't even bother to answer the question I asked. They would say something like what's going to follow. I'm putting quotes around it because even though I'm writing it, it's the way I think hard-grained hard guys speak. I can hear one of them saying, angrily, "Here we go again. The old permissive line that leads kids to expect the world owes them a living; rotten, spoiled kids who will think they're too fine to work for a day's pay; hippies, drug addicts, drop-outs, lazy-takers who think the world should be a big breast that they can suck on forever. And this guy is leading up to a new gimmick to justify the liberal, bleeding-heart philosophy which indulges children so they end up being totally selfish, undisciplined and unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives. Just because a million years ago humans may have been like apes and cared for babies like the animals they were doesn't mean we should take care of our kids the same way. Maybe when we lived in the jungle and in caves that was the right way, but we don't live like that anymore. This is the twentieth century, soon to be the twenty first, and we live in civilization. Besides, look what happened to all those primitive people. They aren't around anymore. I've seen movies where these primitive people come to civilization and they don't make it. They either die or run back to the jungle. I want my kids to make it here, to learn how to live in our world, not in some world that is gone forever."

Hard-grained hard guys believe that tenderness is like communism or a crippling disease that could spread and destroy the world, at least their world. But there is another kind of hard guy, the softer kind. They're more often, but not always, women and mothers. In answering my question, the softer hard guys would say something like this, "It sounds nice and it really would be nice if a mother had nothing else to do but be with her baby, but if she had more than one child it would be impossible. It's really totally unrealistic in this day and age." Or she might, depending on her circumstances, respond with, "I would really like to be a mother like that but I have to work. It really worries me that my children may not get all the love and attention they need. Do you know a good day care center? Besides, I don't know if it would be good for children to be that dependent. A mother would have to be with them all the time, and they would get used to it. How would they ever be willing to go to school? Also, a mother needs a break from her children sometimes."

The softer hard guys always have good logical reasons why they can't be there for their children. Their favorite expression is, "I have no choice." Soft hard guys are always victims. Now, no one would argue with the fact that in our world choices are limited by a lack of money and opportunity. But when it comes to caring for a baby, there is a choice. It really depends on your priorities. The softer hard guys have given up on tenderness just as much as the hard-grained hard guys. The difference between them is that the softer hard guys became depressed when they realized, as children, that they weren't going to get any tenderness, whereas the hard-grained ones became angry. The softer hard guys believe that opening the Pandora's box of tenderness will only lead eventually to sadness when they lose it. They believe that it's better for children to not count on it and to learn to live without it, just as they have. Their life philosophy is that there isn't anyone there for anyone so you have to survive on your own or you will never make it in this world. Not being there for their baby or children is actually easier for softer hard guys than for the hard-grained ones because tenderness isn't dangerous to them. It just doesn't exist. Hard-grained hard guys must always be on guard against the infiltration of tenderness into their children's lives. They know that tenderness exists but they believe that it leads to weakness, and if you give in to it you will end up beneath someone's boot. So they have to be around to teach their children not to need it, usually by stepping all over them with their boots.

What I am trying to say is that hard guys aren't all the same. There are probably a lot of shades between the two that I've described. But all hard guys would find it hard to answer my question with a simple, "Yeah, I would have liked to have a mother who was always there for me, always nice to me, always taking care of me. I would even like one now." If you asked them if they would like ten million dollars, they might say no because they didn't earn it.

This book isn't just for children or those who care about children. It's also for the hard guys of the world. I would like them to believe in and to value tenderness. Believing in it won't necessarily help them to find it, but it will increase their chances and maybe the chances that their children will receive it from them. I would also like them to be a little more open than they usually are about books like this one. This book isn't about letting children walk all over you or about permissiveness. It's about biology - about mother biology and baby biology, both of which are the same now as they were when humans lived in caves. It's also about how and why we began to replace our biology with something different and how that different thing affects children, all children, including your children, and how it affected you when you were a child. It's about things that hard guys fight against knowing because when you know these things, you have to face up to the fact that mothers aren't just for sissies, they're for everyone. And the problem with that is hard guys never had a real mother so they still need one, and they don't want to know that.

One: Where Have All The Mothers Gone?

Three: The First Mothers