Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
I hadn't realized how much I had hoped for a girl until I found out the sex of our first child. I was shocked and completely overwhelmed when I read the results of our genetic testing on a cold, gray day in October, snuggled next to my husband on the couch.
It took me about 15 minutes to find a way to ground myself and realize this was real life: I was having a boy. It took me even longer, months of the pregnancy, to come to terms with it because I knew how to raise a girl to be strong, but I realized I had no idea how to teach a boy how to feel safe enough to feel soft, connected, and vulnerable.
What ended up being the most surprising solution was fútbol, or soccer as we call it in the US.
My husband is Argentine and loves soccer. Their national team has collected quite a number of trophies over the last few years. The biggest, of course, is the World Cup that they won in penalties in December of 2022.
I was in my second trimester at the time, and we were in Argentina watching the final with our whole family. Everyone was swearing, stressed, celebrating, focused, and, at several points, crying. The emotional roller coaster of that game was so intense that I was worried I might start having contractions.
It wasn't until the end of the game that everything changed for me. Lionel Messi fell to his knees after the final goal was scored, and his teammates surrounded him in a tender embrace. They were all heaving and sobbing, crying beautiful tears after a hard-earned victory that had been decades in the making.
Everyone around me in Argentina was also crying.
After we saw Messi lift that trophy in the air with all his teammates flanking him, their eyes filled with tears, I realized something: What a beautiful gift to see grown men crying so freely.
Here are incredibly famous men at the pinnacle of what society paints as the only acceptable form of the masculine to be — victorious, heroic, peak physical condition, powerful, successful — and they are all crying, showing their emotions, uninhibited, for the world to see and join in with.
My husband cried holding my belly after the game and I knew at that moment I was bringing my son into a world that I hadn't known or ever seen before: a culture that was open to men's tears, to them feeling deeply and passionately without shame.
It's a beautiful culture where I have seen male friends of ours hold each other close, cup each other's faces and look deeply into each other's eyes to share their love. Of course, there are patriarchal and machismo overtones to their culture. After all, Argentina is the birthplace of the Ni Una Menos movement that swept Latin America as a response to femicides in obscenely high numbers.
There is still so much work to be done, but Argentina feels far more emotionally developed than the US because powerful men can not only show vulnerability and emotion; they are also celebrated for it.
On July 14th, Argentina won the Copa America for the second time in a row, and sadly, Lionel Messi was injured about a third of the way into the game and had to be substituted.
His tears that came when he finally made it to the bench wrecked me. There was clearly so much anguish on his face. Perhaps pain from an injury, but I saw more suffering come from his heart.
As much as I empathized with him at that moment, I was also so grateful to him. Not for the trophies and being an incredible leader of that team, but for showing children everywhere who were watching that it's OK to cry.
You can be the greatest footballer who has ever lived and still be human. Still be sad, scared, disappointed, filled with love and pride. And you can hold all of these feelings at once, even as they break you, and find the strength to keep going.
I can't wait for my son to see these games when he is older. I feel such a relief right now that when he watches these men at peak performance embrace their strength both in their bodies and in the softness of their feelings. It will be an amazing source of validation, telling him he is safe to do the same.
