put, I never recall seeing a ribbon in my grandmother’s hair! At the time of this book, my grandmother would have been 29 and my grandfather, 30, and attending to everything in the home including my mother’s care. My grandmother sadly had a few miscarriages, including the twin of my mother. Through today’s lens and my mother’s perspective it is likely she was living through episodes of postnatal depression that had lasting impacts on her mood. I often wonder if these societal pressures exacerbated her depression and subsequently led my grandfather to adopt the role of a caregiver. I often wonder now, did he recognise the weight his wife must have carried?


Joining with my grandfather Growing up in my family home with


my mother and my two-year-older sister, my mother often referred to me as “the man of the house”, and the only man I had regular contact with was my grandfather. So, what did I learn from him about being a man? I learned to be quiet and for women to talk and for men to ‘potter’ and be in the kitchen. I learnt to be gentle. My grandfather never shamed me.


He was kind and affectionate. He never wanted to label me as the protector to my sister, he never wanted to engage me in play fighting and he never once encouraged me to be competitive. Most importantly to me personally, I always remember him being loving, tactile and ‘serving’ the significant women in both of our lives, my grandmother, mother and sister. His example has without doubt influenced how I make sense of the male position when talking to and being with women. When my grandmother passed away


11 years ago, obviously my relationship with him changed. When we went to his house, we’d talk more and spent time exploring his family of origin and stories from his history. Something happened, something joined. How did this happen? I think this is linked with my changing professional position of supervisor and tutor, which lead to a confidence that I may have previously lacked, possibly due to gay shame. I wonder if I was hesitant in building a relationship with him due to fear of abandonment, secondary to his prominent religious scripts and the societal norms and values that he grew up in. These fears grew over the years as


Context 169, June 2020


they grew increasingly insular and less trusting of the world that was changing around them. What did he know about the changing societal discourse surrounding homosexuality? What did he think or feel about homosexual people? Unfortunately, I was never brave enough to talk to him – I purposefully used the word brave as I did not take a relational risk (Mason, 2005) – due to the fear his then not wanting to know me being too great a risk for me and my family. Gay shame has been described as,


“Growing up in a society that still does not fully accept that people can be anything other than heterosexual and cisgendered. It is the damage done of growing up strapped inside a cultural ‘straight jacket’” (Todd, 2018). I’ve no doubt that my grandfather held traditional beliefs close to his heart, but would those beliefs have altered the way he viewed his own grandson? When I look at the way he cared for my grandmother, without judgement and with genuine affection, I sincerely doubt it. But I will never truly know. So how much did I join with him? My


grandfather often said to my mother, “The boys should arrange the financial affairs when I am gone”. So, although he had this view and appeared to privilege women’s voice, he thought differently about the male position in relation to money and arranging his estate. I did join him by being considerate of his religion and status as someone I looked up to by not disclosing my sexuality. I privileged our relationship by withholding information about my sexuality; however, by not being explicit about my sexuality, I didn’t offer the opportunity for any vulnerability to enter my grandfather’s relationship and mine. Brown (2013) argues that “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy and creativity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path”. Linking this to ‘joining’ and the co-creation of meaning through language (Pearce & Cronen, 1980), I could be potentially defining our relationship differently if I had used ‘speech acts’ to be curious about what he thought about his grandson being homosexual.


Joining in supervision


I have reflected on the lessons I have learnt through my grandfather’s influence


and have seen parallels in my position as a supervisor with females, namely in how I attend to voice privilege. During my training to become a


systemic supervisor, my reflecting team members were female. Attending to the development of the team along with their individual needs, and the needs of the family, which Boston, (2010) describes as being the “Three faces of supervision”, certainly influenced my supervision posture. Boyd (2010), in writing about voice entitlement, states “Trainees come with a narrative about speaking that is deeply embedded in their cultural, gendered and educational experience”. Making the link between my


experience of witnessing a man’s quiet voice and women having a more prominent voice leads me to privilege the voice entitlement of females, possibly, as my manager once said, to the detriment of voicing my own ideas. I attempted to join my all-female


supervision group in our first meeting by discussing the link between our personal and professional selves. On reflection, this could have had a greater focus on voice entitlement and how we would negotiate and attend to whose voices gets privileged, especially in relation to the influence of the other social ‘graces’ (Burnham et al., 2008) including employment and education. Linking to power and my position, there were times when, as a supervisor, I intervened; however, I hope that, although this first meeting felt ‘clunky’, the intent was the start of joining and co-creating. As a homosexual male in the position


of a supervisor, I have wondered how this differs from that of a cisgender male regarding the perceived ‘masculine’ element of male supervisor that arguably can be viewed as more assertive or directive. Sells et al. (1997) found, where the supervisee and supervisor were male, the ‘verbal behaviours were more task focused (less relationship orientated) compared to female supervisors that had male supervisees’. On reflection, due to my anxiety of


‘getting it right’ as a male supervisor, especially at the start of the year, I possibly stayed longer within the domain of production (Lang et al., 1990) and may have appeared as being constrained by the course obligations and the process of the agency context.


31


Refl ections of joining from boy to man to therapist: Infl uenced by a Joiner


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