I’m Still Reckoning With What My Mother Told Me About Watches

Since my childhood, my mother has stressed that she firmly believes a man should have two things: A good watch and a good cologne. I’m 34 now and firmly believe that gender is a harmful social construct, and masculinity in particular, with its codes both spoken and unspoken, is a violent force that may well be beyond redemption. I also have four different colognes and own six watches. I suppose my mother wins this point. Fight it as I may, the masculine cool I associate with a good watch continually draws me in. It has for years. Decades, even. I knew when Biggie instructed all the true playas to wave their Rolexes in the sky on "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems" that watches set you apart – that just having one marked you as distinctive, and having an expensive, highly coveted one made you enviable. My mother wasn’t as concerned with masculinity as she was with respectability. Nearly every Christmas, from the time I was ten, she bought me a new watch (and cologne), switching over from the rubber and plastic models to leather straps and metal casebacks as I grew into my teen years. When she got me a square-dial Guess watch with a brown leather strap, I thought I must be becoming a true adult. These were gifts as lessons, or perhaps aspirations, about the kind of man she hoped for me to become. For her that meant the kind of man worthy of such a watch – clean-cut, polished, well-educated, well-dressed, well-spoken, well-paid, successful, professional, and (lest we forget the actual function of a watch) on time. I am … some of those things. My mother's and my definition of well-dressed are worlds apart (she keeps wondering when I'm going to buy a pair of "slacks" and still doesn’t quite get what makes a pair of Jordans so fly), and she would probably prefer I have a degree to show for the four years I spent in college. But I am a professional (writer, teacher), and after ten years I feel comfortable enough with my accomplishments to say that I'm successful. This doesn’t mean I'm well-paid – there’s no such thing as a well-paid millennial, unless you founded Facebook or were once the lead singer of Destiny’s Child. It means, for me, that I have carved out a career for myself that, while challenging, makes use of my talents in service of ideas I find important, and also leaves space for my ambitions to grow. Outside validation has also come, namely in the form of a major literary prize that I won last fall, which came along with $50,000. Twenty percent of my reason for mentioning this is bragging (I was raised on hip-hop, excuse me if I talk my shit for a minute), but the other 80 percent is because the first purchase I made with my prize money was a watch. A Hamilton Khaki Field Day-Date, to be specific. It’s my first "nice" watch. I say "nice" here, not because I don’t believe it's nice – Hamilton is a brand that's well-respected among horological enthusiasts, and more importantly, I love the green dial and camo strap – but as a way to distinguish it from my previous watches. I've never been without a watch; I feel truly naked when I'm not wearing one. But I also didn’t know much about watches until I decided my prize money needed to go toward something better than what I had been wearing. I looked around for a few months before buying, bookmarking links to different Seikos, Tissots, and Frederique Constants (stuff within my price range) into a designated folder. I came back to them over and over, to see which ones still captured my attention after repeat looks, and more importantly which felt the most like me . I went with the Hamilton because the green dial was eye-catching and felt a bit adventurous, and camo is my favorite print. Altogether, the watch combines my current interests while still looking forward to embracing new ideas of who I could become. It’s an everyday wear – goes well with jeans and a henley, or a hoodie when it’s chillier – but stylish enough to stand out and make people notice. And it doesn’t feel out of place with my new cologne obsession, Maison Margiela’s Jazz Club. I liked watches for a long time, but didn’t know there was a world outside the unattainable (the aforementioned Rolexes, whatever Audemars were losing time in Jay-Z lyrics) and the so-called fashion watches (a term I hadn’t heard until I started my research dive, yet constituted every watch purchase I had made up to that point) sitting under the glass at Macy’s – no disrespect to Macy’s. I knew enough to know that I had never owned a “nice” watch and wanted to mark my success by finally getting one. I read all the “best watch brands” lists I could find; I learned new terms like complication, bezel, chronograph, lugs, movement, power reserve, and so on; I purchased something more expensive than probably all of my previous watches combined, but I knew that I would cherish for the rest of my watch-wearing life. In the process, I gained a greater appreciation for watches, not just as time-telling devices or fashion accessories, but as products of human ingenuity, craftsmanship, and keepers of tradition. Because as any ardent watch lover must admit, we no longer need watches for their primary function. I wear a watch every day and am still guilty of checking my phone or laptop screen when I want to know the time. What we value in watches now is their beauty, of course, but also respect for this centuries-long craft of accurately capturing one of our most precious resources in an accessible, wearable, readable package. Designing and making watches requires tremendous skill, patience, obsessive attention to detail, and precision, all in the service of knowing when you are in the world. It is a marvel of human accomplishment, a tradition that grounds us in our reality. It is also as much an existential tradition as it is a technical one. A watch gives insight to who you are, or rather who you want to be, or perhaps even more so to who you would like others to see you as. I want my Hamilton to signal my great taste and impeccable style, but also an ability to take what can seem ubiquitous and ordinary appear new and revolutionary with a fresh perspective; I want my G-Shocks to make me look effortlessly casual and cool, even when I’m an anxious mess on the inside; I want my Seiko Presage, with sky blue dial, to show serious sophistication. We define ourselves through the things we desire, consume, and possess. This is less judgment than observation. What I’ve always found curious is how watches became part of the equation in defining masculine pride. Watches, like everything else in the world including people, have no intrinsic gender but have become gendered. More curious is how wristwatches, which were once considered feminine luxuries, as men long favored pocket watches, have come to be associated with the type of manhood that my mother hoped (still hopes, I’m sure) for me to someday embody. It all began to make sense upon learning that men largely switched over to wristwatches as a result of WWI . Keeping precise time on the battlefield was a necessity, but pocket watches were an inconvenience, so it became more common, even required, for soldiers to wear wristwatches. The veterans returned home, still favoring their wristwatches, and the association with femininity faded away as the public began to see them on the wrists of these heroes of the hypermasculine endeavor we call war, then emulated them. The technical need begat the existential desire. You may never have to carry a rifle and kill an enemy, but sporting this non-lethal tool of combat could signal your preparedness and willingness to do so. And here we are back to my conundrum: The innovation of this thing I love is directly linked to something to which I am morally and politically opposed. I would not consider myself a total pacifist, but my generation has had our country of origin be at war for the majority of our lives. I have seen a public grow indifferent to its effects, accept vague and contradictory reasons for its continuance, and little care given to the lives that have been lost or the mental and emotional strain it has placed on those who survive. I digress, but not without a point. It is difficult to reconcile these feelings wedded to their history with the joy watches bring. It is uneasy to long for something so closely linked to nationalistic violence. Watchmakers are still proud of their heritage that’s tied to  wartime innovations, and lots of watch collectors are equally as boastful about their pieces with military specs. It’s difficult to not be reminded. And even if I can separate that out for a moment, it remains that the tradition of expert craftsmanship still runs parallel to a tradition of watches as an expression of patriarchal, hypermasculine values, as exhibited in the marketing and promotion of watches for decades. Mid-century ads for men’s watches were often aimed at housewives, imploring them to treat their heads of household to something that would reinforce that status, while the commercials and print ads I remember from the ’90s were mostly of impeccably dressed male models with both watches and women worn as accessories. I want distance from these ideas in order to enjoy the thing, but they are what have given the thing meaning. Still, my love persists. Part of it is because of their association with masculine cool, something that eluded me in my youth. But my love has grown deeper than that: I love watches because of what they can do for an outfit, what they represent in human achievement, and because time itself is so precious, and wearing a watch is a way to keep just a little. I have no real answer for how to meaningfully resolve this, but I can say where my thoughts are currently. I am, however reluctantly, a man. It is the most accurate descriptor based on how I am perceived and the privileges that affords me. And there are parts of that I embrace (I’ll always like shirts that broaden my chest and shoulders, and I’ll probably yell a little louder than is warranted when LeBron tomahawks), whether that’s because I really like those things or because I was raised to be a boy that liked “boy” things. There are other parts that I cannot accept, and those are what I work every day to undo. Those are the parts that have long caused harm to others, sought power and dominance above all else, have been selfish and violent, and denied others their full freedom of self-expression. I do all that I can to understand, then renounce and repair, the parts of being a man that have (and continue) to trample the rights of others to live freely. I also accept the messy, complicated parts of my attraction to masculine traditions as a way to further unpack, redefine, and remix what manhood means. I don’t have it all the way pinned down, but I know that I would like for manhood to be something focused on how to care for other people, and wearing a watch can, at the very least, reflect how seriously we take other people’s time and do our best not to waste it. I won’t castigate myself for looking longingly at a Longines Heritage 1945, or a Grand Seiko with GMT complication, but will recognize my desire for what it is, flaws and all. Then I’ll wear my watches and go about becoming a man – perhaps not the kind that my mother wanted, but one I hope is worthy of emulating. Mychal Denzel Smith has authored two books of nonfiction including, most recently, Stakes is High. Illustrations by Najeebah Al-Ghadban Shop Talk Happy Mother's Day! Our colleagues over in the HODINKEE Shop have put together a curated selection of watches, straps, and other accessories to make her feel extra special this year. Discover the HODINKEE Shop Mother's Day collection right here .The problem isn’t that I disagree with her. It’s that I fear she may be right.