Category: Humor

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Raising Boys

I am the mother of two boys.  TWO BOYS.  This is, most of the time, almost incomprehensible to me.  I know nothing about boys.  Seriously.  I was afraid of them most of my childhood, except for my first best friend who was a boy.  He was awesome.  Hi, Allan!  I was crushed when Allan moved away.  Crushed.  I got over it and grew into a very socially awkward girl who always felt flustered around boys.  Still do.

And here I am the mom to two of them.

I worry about this sometimes.  I see the moms on my Facebook feed and they’re off to sports events all the time — baseball and soccer and football and hockey.  I’m bored to tears with sports.  If my boys get into sports, I’ll figure it out, I assume, right?  Sigh.

Maybe I’ll have the kind of boys that tend towards things like nature or architecture or urban planning.  Wouldn’t it be cool to have a son who geeked out on cities?  Does that even exist — city geek kids?  Surely it must.

I don’t know.

My fear of raising boys, honestly, comes from a place of stereotypes. Sports, superheroes, rough and tough wrestling.  How does the poem go?

What are little boys made of?
Slugs and snails
And puppy-dogs’ tails,
That’s what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And everything nice,
That’s what little girls are made of.

This little ditty was drilled into me during childhood.  I don’t like snails or slugs and am allergic to puppies.  But sugar and spice?  Yes, those things I like, I understand.  They’re ingredients, it’s simple, really.  And ‘everything nice?’  Who doesn’t like nice?  I love nice!

Ugh.

Stereotypes are never a good thing.  They can be instructive, of course, but you can’t feed into them for your sole information source.  And if I buy too much into the stereotypes of boys, well, I’m doomed.  If I can vehemently disagree and understand that being a girl is not all about princess frou frou and pink and purple that the marketers try and tell us it is, logically, I have to embrace that being a boy is not all about superheroes and sports, either.

I do believe on some fundamental level that boys and girls are different.  Not better or worse, stronger or weaker, than one another, just different.  I may get reamed for this, but it’s science, you know?  Testosterone and estrogen result in different features in us humans.  I think we have hyped up those differences to the extremes with the way we, knowingly and unknowingly, genderize our kiddos, but they are still there.

Now this doesn’t mean that girls can’t be rough and tumble athletes and boys can’t be quiet and sensitive, but it does mean that, personally, as the mom to two boys, I think I am in for more of the rough and tumble than I have personally experienced in my own life to date.  I’ll be honest — that will be a challenge for me.  I am, you see, a dainty flower.

Today, driving home from school, I spied out of the corner of my eye my five year old son leaning over in the back seat.  At the next light I looked back and saw my boy, hand cupped beneath his mouth, drinking his own spit.  Happily and with pride.  Last week, he came home from school covered in mud, head to toe.  BAH!  This, I think, is my future in a nutshell — mud and spit.  Ha!

Here is the mud. I will spare you the photo of the spit.
Here is the mud. I will spare you a photo of the spit.

I am a lucky woman, indeed.  But a lucky woman who needs to prepare herself for years of mud, spit, toots (see, I can’t even bring myself to say the F-A-R-T word — I hate that word), penis jokes, sweaty socks and the whole lot of it.  Imma start now, cause if drinking spit out of your own damn hand is any indication, I have much to learn about raising boys.

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2014 Oscar Fashion Commentary from a Middle Aged Mom

I’m back!  I had so much fun doing my middle aged mom commentary for the Golden Globes, I’m back for the Oscars, which is basically the Golden Globes for a select few 63 year old white men, something they like to call “The Academy.”  Pffft.  Even old white men like to see pretty ladies all gussied up.

This was a safe year for Oscar fashion.  I think the most risque thing was seeing Liza Minelli without a bra and Pharell Williams in short pants.  The trends were nudes (so many of the starlets looked like they were coming off a college art modeling class), bedazzled frocks, and dark lips.  Some of it worked, some of it didn’t — at least from this middle aged mom’s point of view.

So here goes, without further delay, my picks for the hits, the misses, the meh, and a few men thrown in for good measure.  Enjoy!

And if you like it, share this sucker.

 

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Ten Things That Are Better with Children

So yesterday I wrote about ten things in life that are simply harder when children are part of the picture.  Things like airplanes, restaurants, public bathrooms.  You know the drill.  But that’s only part of the story, isn’t it?  Cause those of us with kiddos know that there are a lot of things kids make better.  So, so much better.  Richer, happier, more joyful.

Kids simply are capable of things that adults have lost.  ‘Tis a damn shame, honestly, that we lose some of the wonder of childhood as we rack up the years.  When we parent, we get a second go around with that wonder.  Another date with joy is how I think of it, but only if you are open to it.  That is the secret — to relinquish our years and responsibilities for some moments and reclaim all that we owned in our childhood.  So, without further ado . . .

Ten Things That Are Better with Children

10.  Holidays.  I don’t care what faith you are, what you celebrate, but kids make those holy days and celebrations better and more meaningful.  My husband and I are both pretty much Scrooges, but being with little ones during Christmas helps us find our inner humbug squasher.  And then there’s Fourth of July fireworks and parades.  Memorial and Labor day barbecues.  Even loaded holidays like New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day are easier and more pleasant when the focus in on children.  And if you stop and think about the utter privilege of instilling traditions and memories that will last for lifetimes — whoa.  That is some powerful stuff.

Better1

9.  The Dollar Store.  This is the one store where I get to say yes, a hearty, emphatic YES to my son.  It is our post dentist treat, our holiday mecca, our let’s get a few things to pass the time on a cold snow day headquarters.  We both love it here and being relieved of the pressure of more, buy, need, we can just enjoy it together without any stress.

8.  Weather.  Kids love weather.  Hot weather, cold weather, snowy weather, rainy weather.  Kids love it all.  And being absolved of the responsibility of weather — the cleaning of a flooded basement or the scraping of ice that is clinging to the windshield on a below zero morning, well, sure, what’s not to love?  There is such a pleasure in weather that kids take — the thrill of careening down a snowy hill, the sloshing of boots in a shallow puddle.  Watching our kids enjoy those things lets us back to those moments we discovered weather ourselves.

7.  County Fairs / Parades / Carnivals.  One of my favorite days of last year was with my sister and our two sons at the Boone County Fair.  Elephant ears, the Tilt-a-Whirl, sliding in a burlap sack, cheesy plastic winnings from gaming booths.  So.  Much.  Fun.  Serious hard core fun.  And yes, I think as an adult on my own I would have enjoyed the day, but there was something about the hugeness of my boy’s eyes as the attractions kept piling up that just made it better for me.  And the happy nap he took, smiling in his sleep, as we drove home, him clutching a blow-up SpiderMan close to his chest.  Heaven.

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6.  Friday Nights In.  It’s probably no surprise that I’m writing this on a Friday, as evening descends.  I’m not feeling the weight of having to cook dinner.  There are no lunches to worry about packing.  Nope.  Tonight is free time.  The kids can stay awake a little longer.  I stress significantly less.  It’s just cozy.  There is no expectation to hit the town, or even desire.  On Friday nights, we are all happy to gather together and just hang.  I have everything I need with me.

5.  Olympics.  That damn Putin and his gay hating ways are not making it PC to enjoy the Olympics this time around, but there is nothing that will keep me from enjoying a few of the events with my littles.  The last time around, summer of 2012, Mary Tyler Son was just three, but he still talks about the parade of countries and the pyrotechnics of the opening and closing ceremonies.  I have ridiculously fond and clear memories of watching these with my own folks as a child.  It’s such a rite of passage — something the whole family really can enjoy together.

4.  Birthday Parties.  I love them.  Love, love, love them.  Truth be told, I love birthday parties even without the kiddos.  But when you’re planning a kid’s party, well, swoon.  It is such a special time.  Mary Tyler Son and I like to hit Pinterest together after he settles on a theme.  And yes, I love a theme.  And no, this was not something my Mom ever did for me and my sibs, but hell it sure is fun, if a little overboard.  Not only do I love the joy it gives the little one, but I adore getting to feel like a rock star in my child’s eye.  Fun, fun, fun.

3.  Your Parents.  I love seeing my children interact with their grandparents.  One of my greatest sadnesses is that my Mom never got to meet any of my three children and my three children never got to meet their Baba.  I also think that as we age and have our own children, our parents see us differently.  The relationship, ideally, evolves to accommodate the added generation.  It is an opportunity and an unrecognized gift that our kids give us.

2.  Public Transportation.  When you live in a city, you probably have a love/hate relationship with mass transit.  I rarely use it these days, but have a great fondness for it, as my Dad worked in transit for most of my childhood and early adult life.  I even worked alongside him a few summers as an intern at the agency that employed him.  But kids almost universally LOVE public transit.  The trains!  The buses!  The platforms!  The questionable odors!  Ha — one of these things is not like the other.  Kids don’t see (or smell) the bad, they only see the good.

1.  Sprinklers.  The best $4.99 I’ve ever spent was at the local Ace Hardware for a tiny, flat sprinkler head that easily fits in my pocket.  When the boy was a little one, I always made sure to pack it on summer outings.  It’s amazing how quickly a naked baby turns a good summer party into a great freaking event.  The magnitude of happiness a child can find running through a simple spray of water just astounds me.  The rainbows, the warmth, the simplicity.  It is sheer bliss.

So there you have it.  My life is so much richer for the kids that inhabit it.  My guess is your’s might be, too.  Pay attention to what your kids give you, the joy they bring.  Savor it, work to cultivate it in your own life.  Enjoy those fleeting moments, because it is the memory of those moments that will keep you company as you age and gray and pass that life baton.