The following entry was written by Amy Anderson of Mamazine

The amazing Mommybloggers asked me for thoughts about love, and I ended up giving them my thoughts about estranged fathers. What can I say, except, well, blame it on Brokeback?

Thanks to some neighborhood friends we swap babysitting with, my husband and I went to see Brokeback Mountain last night. I was blown away by the sheer visual beauty of the movie (this California girl has seen too little of the middle parts of our country, something I’ve got to remedy soon), and I sure didn’t mind getting to stare at Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal for a few hours. Mostly, though, I came home stunned by what a sadly accurate portrait it was of the ways men are encouraged to stifle their feelings, whether they’re gay cowboys in the 1960s or suburban dads in 2006.

In Brokeback, both men are loving fathers. It’s the contrast between Ennis (Heath Ledger) as a young man kissing and nurturing his (always crying) baby daughters and Ennis twenty years later, trapped in his own prison of emotional distance and unable to have real relationships with anyone, including those same daughters, that breaks my heart every time I think about it. Both men in Brokeback are captives in a male role they couldn’t step outside of without lethal consequences, namely the ideal of the strong and emotionally reticent good provider.

I think of my own dad, a loving, hands-on father when I was younger, now someone several of his ten kids have little contact with. Someone, in fact, whom my mother has a restraining order against. My grandmother, his mom, tells stories about my dad as a shy child with his nose in a book all the time. He was the first in his family to go to college—the only one of his five siblings to do so. “He always did love babies and kids,” she noted as my parents adopted one child after another. I try to reconcile this image with that of the man who leaves my stepfather threatening letters. I can’t.

I stare at pictures of his 22-year-old self, back from Vietnam for a week to see me, his six-week-old firstborn, for the first time and then fly back to continue fighting in a war he didn’t believe in. I think of him returning home months later to his little daughter and a wife who had been waiting for years by then to make a picture-perfect home of her own with her husband and daughter.

The gap between the man the military expected him to be and the man my mother expected him to be was beyond vast. I’d call it schizophrenic. For years, he told us he never saw any action in Vietnam. In reality, he was trying to erase the memories of everything he’d seen in the war. He was trying to be the opposite of the kind of man that war had required him to be. His year spent at war must have contrasted in strange ways to the life he returned to, the one filled with babies and college classes and jobs and the purchase of a first house.

I think those conflicting expectations of men were hard on my dad. On one hand, he was supposed to be tough, constantly on guard for danger, and sometimes brutal. Yet as a father in the 1970s, he was also supposed to be nurturing and loving. Just as Ennis’ abiding love for his daughters stays bottled up inside of him, so too does my dad’s. I know it’s there—I see it in his eyes when my kids rush to embrace him on his infrequent visits—but it’s buried down deep inside of him, warped and misshapen after years of living up to two such incredibly different ideas of manhood simultaneously.

When we left the movie theater yesterday, Chip turned to me and said, “Thank god we live in a different time.” And we do, yes, in many ways. But not as different as I wish it was. I came away from Brokeback Mountain remembering the things I love about men and the ways they’re just as imprisoned by outdated notions of gender roles and love as women are. I thought about the ways my boys have both outgrown the nail polish they used to request, the way the “boy aisles” at Target are still filled with war toys and the “girl aisles” with babies and Barbies.

I think about my father and my sons and my husband, and I want a world where they are free to be their ideal selves, without fear. Is that about love? I think it is.