The Boy Children

A friend challenged my premise that boys have it easy.

Last Sunday, I had coffee with an old friend who was visiting Los Angeles with her eight-month-old daughter. This friend is basically perfect, in an annoyingly not-annoying way. Which is to say, she is unassuming, warm, beautiful, and never gets on my nerves. What a bitch, right? My favorite quality about this friend is that she makes life seem like a wild adventure, with possibility overgrowing like an invasive species, where if you really want to do a thing, you can simply DO THE THING. Last time she visited LA, her book was just about to come out. A REAL book, published by a REAL publisher, which she promoted on a REAL book tour. The other day, she offhandedly mentioned that she’d started distilling liquor, and when pressed for details, confessed that in fact, this was not just some hobby she was noodling around with in the corner of her kitchen, dropping berries into a bottle of Everclear and waiting weeks for the result. She’d opened an ACTUAL distillery, with an ACTUAL tasting room, and ACTUAL paying customers. Even raising a child seemed fun when viewed through the prism of my friend’s whimsy. Her daughter sat cooing on her lap, full of personality but still well-behaved enough to let the adults catch up. When we wanted to stroll, my friend simply strapped her daughter in an ethically sourced baby carrier so cute I probably would have worn it without the baby just to dress up an outfit. My friend even had the confident abandon to wear dangly earrings, a luxury that’s seemed more like a death wish ever since tiny little grabby hands became a permanent fixture in my life.

*Not my friend’s ACTUAL distillery

During coffee with my friend, I gave her the old song-and-dance about wishing I’d had a girl, wishing I’d had two girls, wishing I’d had a Pickwick Portfolio masthead of girls, instead of the two wild animals who busted out of my womb like it was a breakaway banner, already fixated on cars, guns, and their penises. I often tell people I wanted girls instead of boys because it makes people laugh. But why is this funny? Is it the audacity of talking about two precious children like they’re some shitty serving tray I got stuck with in a White Elephant gift exchange? When I say I wanted girls instead of boys, I assume people know I wouldn’t actually trade away the real human beings I grew in my body and love more than myself. They can’t possibly think I disdain the details of the only miracles of which I’ve ever been a part. Also, who cares what I wanted? If parenting has taught me anything so far, it’s how inconsequential my preferences are.

The other reason I joke about wanting my children to be girls is that my children are, in fact, boys. White boys. And while they have yet to reap the benefits of their genetic jackpot because they’re 5 and 3, they’re part of a group that has been doing so for the last 300,000 years or so, so we can give them a little shit, right? But my old friend, who chose to listen to me like we were actually having a conversation and not simply giggle at the shock value I was trying to incite, saw things a little differently. “I don’t know. Boys of this generation seem kinda lost.” (I paraphrase.) Did her modest throwdown hurt my feelings? It didn’t not hurt my feelings. My friend has her own experience helping raise young men, and given that I’m still at the very beginning, it’s far more extensive than mine. She talked about watching young men retreat from environments where they’re encouraged not to overshadow people who’ve had less power, about feeling afraid to be labeled the chauvinist without knowing what they’re doing wrong. She talked about witnessing young men not wanting to take up space. And that’s not what we want, right? We just want everyone else to feel allowed to take up space, too, right? And yet, when it comes down to it, there’s only so much space. Not cosmically speaking, of course, which is maybe why all those rich white guys are trying to move to Mars.

The day after having coffee with my friend, I took care of my three-year-old and one of his preschool friends. His mother and I were doing a little childcare bartering to survive the three weeks of winter break when the capitalist monster still needs to be fed but no one has anyone to watch their kids while they feed it. My son’s little buddy is only two, and delightfully delicate compared to my three-year-old tank. Seriously, picking him up after lugging around my children was like carrying a balloon! At nap time, this poor kid, who’d been a champ thus far despite what I assume was a very confusing situation, started to cry. My son lay next to him, resting his head against his friend’s, and tried to console him. I thought about these tiny creatures who will someday be young men. They’ll probably get drunk. Most likely say something offensive about a girl’s body at least once or twice. Hopefully not become so entrenched in toxic masculinity they feel inclined to play lacrosse. But for now, they are just babies, vulnerable and tender, like most of us are before we learn not to be.

I know it’s my job to ensure my boys don’t become horrible. But like most jobs, there’s only so much control I wield over the final product. After all, my five-year-old already has some little dick at school in his ear telling him, “boys are better than girls because boys can do anything and girls can’t.” So here’s my working theory: the best I can do is encourage my children to be curious. Because let’s face it, curiosity is a huge time suck. Who has time to belittle women when they’re studying the farming techniques of the Incan Empire? Who can squeeze in racism when they’re trying to read the complete works of Stephen King? Life happens to us every day, but we begin to take control when we try to understand it. So that’s what I’m going to tell my kids, and hope their curiosity leads to empathy, and intelligence, and adventure, and not down a Q-Anon rabbit hole.