I had a Bad Mother moment late last spring. My youngest son’s baseball game was almost over. His team had taken a big lead in the beginning of the game, but the other team persevered and closed the gap until his team slipped to having only a one-run lead going into the final inning.
I couldn’t take the stress. I caved, leaving before the game was over, claiming that I needed to take his older sister home.
We’re talking 12-year-old boys, here. Not big stakes baseball. But for my son, for whom baseball has become his obsession, and who fully believes he will be drafted by the Washington Nationals someday, it was big stakes.
But mostly the stakes for me were that my son’s heart might be a little broken from a bad outcome. So I left. Thankfully, my departure must have allowed for good juju, because they toppled the other team, 13-10.
Not my most outstanding parenting moment. But there’s something about a boy and baseball and his dreams that just kicks me in the gut.
Boys in the 9-13 year old range are perched on the edge of adolescence, yet they are also adorable and winsome. They want to please. They want to love. They want to grow up to be pitchers and batters and basketball players and firefighters and astronauts and teachers and daddies and racecar drivers and painters and writers and running backs and soldiers and explorers and presidents all the things that little boys think they can be. Their dreams are on their sleeves.
While I understand girls, having been a girl, and love them and think they’re strong and powerful and wonderful, and I have a girl, and I love her and think she’s strong and powerful and wonderful, as a species, it’s little boys who capture my heart.
Being a mom to two boys has broadened my understanding of what makes a little less than half the population of the world tick. It has brought me into intimate contact with poopy language, dirty jokes, violent video games, sports metaphors and smells I didn’t know existed. It has given me insight into linear thinking, the ability to shrug off insults and the ability to get right back into the game, be it a sport or a friendship, without letting the most recent mishap get you down.
When I carpool neighborhood boys to and from soccer practice, I get a really close look at their inner workings and what they think about. It is, in this order: sports, cars, music, sports, jokes, girls, dungeons and dragons, sports. I’m sure the order will shift as they get a little older, but that’s the general idea.
An early “feminist parenting made easy” book made me think I would be a different kind of mother to my boys. That I would insist on gender neutral colors, gender neutral language, gender neutral everything. That my children would all play sports, and all play with dolls. After all, I was weaned on Free To Be You and Me.
Little did I understand the hard wiring. And not just gender-related hard wiring, although that seems to be fairly entrenched. But each of my children has chosen their own path, despite my best efforts to keep Barbie out of the hands of my daughter and guns out of the hands of my sons. Those things are just the beginning.
The sweet summer movie “Boyhood,” follows the life of young Mason as he moves from being an adorable 8-year-old boy, through the throes of his adolescence and to his departure for college. The filmmaker, Richard Linklater, filmed the movie over 12 years, using the same actors. We watch Mason’s face go from being round and still flushed with a little baby fat, through his awkward teenage years with defining eyebrows and peach-like fuzz and acne, through to the moment when you see him as a young adult, with a lean and hungry look, ready to grow into his features.
You watch his heart break over and over again as his mother and father both make some bad choices that have an enormous effect on his life as a boy. And you watch him come out on the other side, an almost fully-baked adult, despite the missteps and pain along the way.
My boys both grabbed my heart from the very beginning. The oldest and the youngest. Each with his own space in the family, and his path to blaze. Each with his own personality, needs and ability to love and be loved. As I watch my youngest enter adolescence, and look more and more like his older brother, I am amazed by this cocktail of genes, hormones and pure luck that has carved these two incredible boys out of thin air.
Perhaps it’s the mythology of men being emotionally bankrupt and unable to reach their feelings, so that when they do, it topples you. But while I have one very stoic son, I also have another who is sweet and cuddly and social and empathic. My boys both inhabit and explode the cultural myths.
I think about how they were both once little boys, toddling along in their boy-dom, exploring and growing into their masculinity, and how, as their mom, I have had such an eye-opening experience watching them. As someone who grew up with only a sister, and for whom boys were mostly a foreign experience – often an infuriating, frightening and confusing one – I am grateful for the chance as an adult to witness boyhood up close, and to learn to appreciate all of its sights, sounds and smells ... including the socks.
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