an open letter to my son on how i sometimes raised him like a “girl”

Miles,

Your dad and I are pretty sure that you’ll be popular in high school. I don’t say that to brag. I just see you running through the hallways at church every Sunday with a whole gaggle of peers following you. Or overhear a youth group kid (a legitimate teenaged person who usually hates everything) say how “cool” my three-year-old is. Or notice on your teacher’s notes from preschool the ever-growing list of kids you’ve been playing with on the playground. These things, evidence of your natural, easy charm, coupled with the knowledge that you are predisposed—through genetics and, so far, interest—to become an athlete, lead us to believe that you’re not going to be an outcast if high school in your day is anything like high school in my day. As your mother, I find you pretty handsome, too, and that shouldn’t hurt.

Right now, you play with Thomas Trains and Cars Cars and with golf clubs that you’ve never used to golf with but only as swords. You have one toe that is painted hot pink, two that are red, and one that you describe as “golden.” You ask to help me cook dinner almost every night. We try to keep you away from violence (which is why you must sub-in golf clubs for weaponry), we try to keep you active (even though I am not “outdoorsy” and must force myself sometimes for your sake), we don’t make fun of you or discourage you if you ask to watch the Princess Mousie Ballerina Extravaganza of Pink Sparkles and Cupcake Dreams, or whatever that stupid show is called.

There are people who have opinions about letting little boys watch princess shows or paint their nails, but we tend to think these opinions are unfair. If your sister were to pick up a football, no one would think twice, so why should I care if you want to try on a necklace or two?

This doesn’t mean you spend half of your time with the girly stuff, though. On the contrary, you’re much more often pummeling me with pillows and jumping off the couch and making up games with balls and turning things into bombs—bombs I never taught you about. Where do you learn all of this boy-language, anyway? Is there a secret class at preschool that teaches you to “pew pew pew” with your finger-gun and fart at the table?  I don’t know—and to be honest, this is not stuff that keeps me up at night. I’m glad you have this rambunctious energy and playful competitiveness. I hope you never feel that we held you back from being as much “boy” as you want to be.

The feminist movement has done a wonderful job of helping women and girls cultivate traits that used to be considered primarily masculine: we girls are encouraged to be brave, capable, in charge, confident, sometimes even aggressive. All that’s good about what is—or perhaps sometimes what our culture has decided is—“masculine” is now not quite so reserved for those with a penis. We are better for it. (Heck, even our Disney princesses are better for it! Think of movies like Tangled, Brave, Enchanted. Those princesses don’t sit around waiting for someone to save the day—they do a significant amount of saving themselves.)

It bothers me that the opposite doesn’t seem to be true for boys. The culture doesn’t urge—at least not with the same vehemence—boys to take up feminine qualities. On the contrary, I used to sit through teacher’s education courses, in classes full of women, and wonder why there weren’t more men in the field. The same is true in fields like nursing and social work. It makes me worry about you. I want you to have a slew of options in regard to what might become your vocation. “The list of growing jobs is heavy on nurturing professions,” Hanna Rosin writes in The Atlantic, “in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits. Theoretically, there is no reason men should not be qualified. But they have proved remarkably unable to adapt.”

Nurturing professions, she calls them. Interesting that she uses a word that usually tops the “feminine” side when we play the INNATE GENDER DIFFERENCES game.

It’s been noted that boys are having a hard time finding a “way to be” in our culture right now, and part of me believes this is because we haven’t fully let boys embrace all that’s good about what is—or perhaps sometimes what our culture decides is—“feminine.” It’s done sneakily—just like how we’d accept a little blue in a girl’s room but no pink in a boy’s room.  Or how we consistently adopt male names for female babies (Micah? Noah? Taylor? Evelyn?), but not the other way around. We celebrate a girl who learns how to lead, but I’d argue that we don’t celebrate to the same extent when a boy learns how to nurture. This, my son, is a bit of bullshit.

So while we try our best to not limit the ways you play to just those that scream “BOY,” I want to do more. I want to make sure I’m instilling in you virtues, qualities, personality traits, that will help you to “be” in the world.

Starting with two.

First, I want you to be nurturing. The word, defined, means, “to care for and protect (someone or something) while they are growing.” Even moms—the people who are expected and supposedly “wired” to be this way—sometimes feel like the ability to nurture is a quality that is underappreciated in our world; Daphne de Marneffe says it’s “treated as background noise or unspoken assumption rather than as something explicit, valuable, and important.” But I want you to know that nurturing other people is part of your responsibility—whether you ever become a father or not. In the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, one character—the teacher—says that the most important thing she can teach her students is “that y’all learn to take care of the things that are smaller and sweeter than you.” I like that, but I’d suggest that it’s important to take care of things that are uglier and meaner than you, too. Everybody needs some taking care of sometimes, and if you can do this, you’ll be imaging God in the process.

I also want you to be hospitable. This doesn’t mean that I’d like you to take out a subscription to Martha Stewart: Living or something. I don’t have a burning passion that you become a master chef, or learn to keep house like a pro. It has nothing, really, to do with a house. Jesus, notes Barbara Brown Taylor, didn’t have a house and he was known not only for his practice of hospitality, but his insistence that his disciples learn it, too. The word comes up often in his teachings, and it is usually translated from the Greek word philoxenia. As Taylor explains, “Take the word apart and you get philo, from one of the four Greek words for love, and xenia, for stranger. Love of the stranger, in other words.” This is related to nurturing, I think, because it is another way of caring for people. It means that you should be mindful about the way your actions and your words affect the people around you. It means that you should be a careful driver, a respectful student, a courteous host, an empathetic passer-by, a concerned pillow-pummeler. Be kind even when it’s difficult, even when it’s to a person you have never met or will never meet again, even when you really, really, really want to win the game.

You are lucky, because you have a wonderful role model in your dad. On the day it first dawned on us that you would be popular in high school, his first concern was that we teach you about the responsibility that comes with being looked up to.

“We’ve got to teach him how to be the popular kid who looks out for the unpopular kids,” he said. So go crash, bang, boom with the rest of them, but try not to forget to be nurturing and hospitable in the process. Even if it is a little girly.

boys to men

Here is the immediate context in a long-term process: right before Christmas, a school shooting, killing children who were the age of my twin boys, sitting diligently in their classrooms like mine do every day. My quiet tears at the simplest moments in the following weeks, self-censored, because they do not know, don’t need to know, and feel responsible for their mother’s emotional health. Next, a letter to Santa, written in 7-year-old, erratic hand, “nerf gun and bullets” at the top of the list.  Then, a New York Times piece, hypothesizing, with some flaws, that as we usher in “The End of Men,” we will see an increase in white, young, male-inflicted violence as those creatures, previously at the top of the chain, bluster around without a way to be.

Finally, the Eureka! moment at the ice-skating rink: skating slowly and steadily with my toddler girl, around the outside of the rink as she balances on the tiniest skates I’ve ever laced. In the center, elementary girls practice spinning and leaping on the ice. Between us, mother after mother (I counted three) losing her temper as her young boy barrels full speed and slams into her, all smiles with new grown-up teeth too big for his mouth.

“Seriously?!?!” one mom says, holding onto the boy’s younger sibling.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” another exclaims.

“What’s wrong with you? What are you thinking?” says the latest.

The boys, their grins wiped clean, look down, shrug. “Sorry,” they mumble, if they say anything at all.

*

About the time my own boys’ love affair with Thomas Trains was waning, a friend came over with her toddler. I was hoping to entertain him: “We have lots of great toys for boys!” I said.

My friend corrected me: “You mean you have lots of great toys for kids.”

My cheeks burned and I stuttered, as her son crashed the trains into one another with delight. Right. Obviously. Of course I meant “kids.”  I have a graduate degree in humanities from a liberal university. I am a feminist. I am progressive.

But, no. I meant “boys.” The only train my daughter has shown interest in is “Rosie,” who’s purple, and even then was abandoned because she just has so many…wheels.

In our push to see women as equals, do we sometimes mistake “equal” for meaning “the same,” to the advantage of our daughters and with contempt for our sons?  Some girls are more masculine. Some boys are more feminine. I get this. I love this.

I may love it too much. Because when my daughter wants to break out of “girl” and play stormtroopers or construction workers with her brothers, I cheer. When her brothers want to break out of “boy” and tap dance or paint their nails, I cheer. But when my boys just—heaven forbid—want be boys and slam, tackle, bang, boom….I don’t often cheer. I’m quiet. Sometimes, like the mothers at the ice-rink, I admonish.

And they are left feeling misunderstood and confused and left without a way to be.

*

I remember reading about the high rate of domestic abuse cases among college and professional athletes. It’s despicable, disgusting, unacceptable, we all say. But I had uncles, brothers, boyfriends, who were athletes. Don’t we encourage them to be aggressive, tough, intimidating, on the court or the field? Don’t we cheer for them and pay millions of dollars to see them let loose with their testosterone-fueled, masculine tendencies? And then we shame them for indulging those traits when the arena is dark and the stadium is empty?

Do they need an outlet? Or a lesson in repression? Don’t we need to choose?

I’m speaking to a certain demographic, I know. Not everyone will identify. Some will judge. But others will relate and, I hope, share their own confusion and inconsistencies and we will find a way to let our boys be the many, sometimes predictable and stereotypical, ways to be.