Repair & Remain

by Kurt Armstrong

About Repair & Remain

Repair and Remain is a book for my son, about masculinity. Not the crossed-arms, clenched-jaw stereotype, nor its retreating, apologetic opposite. It’s about a masculinity that is strong, attentive, responsible, and careful. I want to encourage my son to develop a wholesome and generous masculinity, honed and shaped by the exacting demands of work and love. This is about my formation of masculine identity amongst farmers, teachers, preachers, and fundamentalists. It’s about grief, manual labour, friendship, bad jobs, depression, community, loyalty, and a handmade coffin. It is a vulnerable, honest account of fatherhood, faith, fear, and love.

I know masculinity is damaged and flawed, but I owe my boy more than simply “masculinity is toxic." I wrote Repair and Remain to tell a better story. While culture shakes and rattles in the cacophony of social upheaval, and looming political and ecological disasters continue to threaten the world we as we know it, it is that wild-haired, energetic boy with the enormous appetite, sitting at my supper table, who reminds me of the crucial task of helping guide our boys to become good men.

Boldly asserting an old-fashioned masculinity is mostly just going to wreck things. A healthy masculinity demands attention and care. Having grown up on a farm and spending nearly all my working life in manual labour and the trades, I’ve had to learn to work with great care. Take drywall mud, for example, which requires me to pay attention to the materials and work very carefully to get satisfying results. Or, much more dramatically, my tablesaw, with its mindless, vicious, whirling blade, which has taught me that tools have demanding and inflexible rules which I ignore at my peril. (I have had some scary run-ins with my tablesaw, but I still have all my digits intact, knock on wood.) In order to do good work, I must start by paying attention. Likewise in love, a fragile gift which will wither and die in the face of the brute force, hubris, and swagger that characterize the toxic expressions of masculinity. If I am to be a good man and loving father, I must be present, vulnerable, attentive, open to grief and suffering, and generous.