Well, it’s officially been ten years of raising little girls now, a decade at the front lines of staying at home. It went so slowly at times, yet so quickly overall. I’ve learned so much, yet remain an idiot. I gave up a lot, but got so much more in return. I’ve been overjoyed, befuddled, amazed, frustrated, and enlightened.
One long string of lessons, really, from playdates to sleepovers, daycares to different schools. It’s been quite an education being surrounded by girls and women. An education of what girls are just as much as the reminder of what boys are. And aren’t. In the end, the differences between girls and boys are as simple as can be. Exceptions, anomalies? Sure. But for the most part, they are very different. The genes write the play. And yet…
There are a host of expectations, for boys and girls, that all of us accomplish daily. As much apologies as expectations. Girls being girls, boys will be boys. Draped in princess dresses sipping tea, shirts worn as headbands in an imaginary gunfight. How much of a stereotype is innately true, and how much of it is merely what we perpetuate? I wanted a Baby Alive more than anything at age 5. Mostly because you fed it and it pooped in a diaper, but the fact remains I really wanted a doll more than anything. Lilah tackles her boy friends on a dead run while screaming a banshee war cry half the time. They’ve even asked me to talk to her about it. The stereotypes still remain, but remain from what? Our distant genetic past that we continually recreate and reaffirm?
Girls are mean and manipulative. Traits likely borne from their persistent subjugation for millennia, forced to affect their world with whatever weapons are left from the hairy troglodytes that carry the clubs of death and golf. You find yourself smaller and oppressed? Learn to pull the strings, of the heart and straight into the traps dug out of the same earth the boys supposedly have mastered as their own. Girls doubt themselves, make bitter enemies out of life-long friends, and insert emotion into the most banal and sterile subjects, such as fingernail color and algebra. Luckily their manipulation is extremely effective on us knuckle draggers. It has ruined many a man’s life but saved the planet more than a few times. As some wise person once said, a man will kill you, but a woman will wreck your life.
Boys are assholes and idiots. I had always suspected we were, have been called both many times by women, but never came so face to face with the facts over and over again. We’re the ones that push toddlers off of swings, pull the wings of flies, and convince the mentally weak to eat sand at recess. We jump out of moving cars, lick elevator buttons, and try to get bad grades because it’s “cool.” If it weren’t for women the species would have died out long ago, from sheer bravado and ignorance. Tracking the woes of the world today mimics a timeline of our eon in charge. Even the foremost of our conquering spirit is robed in the finery of pride, bravery, and ego. Clear that forest, take those people, write all this down in a little book and memorize it as your new religion for I just heard it all this minute! And get me my woman while you’re at it.
And yet, how different are we at birth? It appears to me that there is too much blamed on nature and not enough on nurture. The scientists that we love to acclaim find the specifics of genomes more comforting than what we actually do to our young. Genes are identifiable, quantifiable. Blameless. Shifting the focus away from the myriad of mistakes we make raising them, not to mention what we continually heap on both genders through our ever-changing, yet ever-constant society. The sins of our forefathers and mothers revisited upon this generation, just like it was revisited upon us. And then we point to genetics, as if it is innate behavior rather than the simple formula of shit running downhill. They did it to me, so I’m gonna do it to them. Monkey see, monkey do. There’s the genetics! We see, we do. It’s done to us, we do to them. There’s the genetic compulsion, the genotype that is expressed in the myriad of destructive phenotypes.
We men are not genetically predisposed to be assholes. To debase women so they have less value, and despise each other and themselves. They’re just long, long, successful patterns, passed down from generation to generation in a stretched string of very effective douchebaggery that we continue to be saddled with today. Sure, today the edges are softer and the pill is chewable, but it’s the same load of crap. And we’re not genetically required to repeat it. We’re just genetically prone to repeat what our parental figure did. What was done to us.
It’s easier to label our compulsion as genetic drive. It takes the ownership out of it.
10 years of watching the same kids and writing down the shit they say and do has provided some fascinating little case studies. How they were at the start, where they went. In general, how they turn out is not surprising in the least, when you look at how they are brought up. Take River, for example.
Back in the teacher Mary days of parent participation, River was a menace. Cute as hell, but a menace. He was a pusher, a puncher and a biter. Born to a hippy Mom and a mostly absent father, he was saddled with the parenting style du jour, ensuring that his negative behaviors were never really pounced on. Some lazy interpretation of Love and Logic, it seemed. Lots of positive options that the little bastard was supposed to eventually take to. He never did during the two years I knew him, at the age of 4 and 5. He would torture some other little thing in the class, punch them in the stomach and take their toy, and then smile at them. Smile the whole time the nouveau behavior mod scene would be played out in front of him.
His Mom, (and she was not alone in the modus inferiori!) would console the victim, while completely ignoring River. Layer compassion on poor little Greta, with back turned to the grinning Damien behind her. Over and over again. No negative consequences besides the short period of shunning. Victim gets hugs, bad boy gets ignored during the process. He was supposed to learn compassion for his prey and feel shame, as he was being shunned. He would see his bad behavior and it’s effects, and innately want to correct it.
But what if a little tyrant doesn’t give a shit? What then? What a load of feel-good, ineffectual crap! At least with him. He smiled through it all, watched the whole scene unfold with a look of obscene pleasure on his face. As if he liked this part most of all. All the attention he had caused, this whole scene, all because of him. Not even any real trouble, just ignored for a couple minutes. Sweet! Being a bully is great! I’m bullying my Mom too, it turns out.
Perhaps it was the miniature shunning session that did it in. Not a bonafide shunning by my standards. My parents showed me that real McCoy a couple times growing up, and let me tell you, a real shunning session leaves a mark. I can’t remember what I did. Something horrible like set fire to the cat. Something where the police were called, or my being sent away was a distinct possibility.
I don’t know if their shunning tactic was a generational thing, or if they took some lessons from the neighboring Amish to the East during some trip while we were little. Perhaps Mom, in a fit of evil genius, borrowed the social ploy and morphed it into some next-level child-rearing technique. Whatever the genesis, the outcome was brilliant. Painful, but brilliant.
An entire day of shunning sucks. A lot. Especially as a kid, when a day is so much longer anyway. A day when you’re young is a lot larger portion of your life so far. Like dog years, kid hours can feel forever. And when you’re being properly SHUNNED? Damn. You wander around the house like a guilty ghost, an invisible leper doing his penance. And while it was brutal, it was incredibly effective. Twice was all it took. By the time the sun went down and the shunning was over, there was no better release than once again being recognized by my parents. Crying and apologizing and not even a hint of a thought of being able to go through that horrible shit again.
Two minutes of shunning? I could handle that! Nothing at all! I might even relish it a little bit. A short, refreshing break. And smiling River felt the same way. If you’re gonna shun, you gotta make it a good one. Ignore the little bastard long enough that he at least starts feeling uncomfortable, if not downright despondent. I get that “watching the victim being lavished with attention and sympathy” is supposed to make him feel bad. That works a lot better on a more mature mind, one that has been taught more of the right vs. wrong schematics and can recognize their faults upon detailed examination. Doesn’t work with an angry little booger-eater.
So now it’s 6th grade. Light years away from the sweet confines of Teacher Mary’s preschool of fun. Playdough and dress-up and tiny snack tables replaced with the vagaries of middle school come too early. Peer pressure and makeup and vice principals with giant, crossed forearms.
I saw River across the quad at an “all-family” pizza lunch. Didn’t recognize him, but something was very familiar…
“What’s that kid’s name?” a friend leaned in in a whispered scowl.
I couldn’t remember. Dammit! Hadn’t seen him for years. Must have been…
“I coached him on my baseball team a couple years ago. Couldn’t get him to do anything at all, practice or the game. Mom just…let him do whatever he wanted. Dad totally checked out if he even showed. Mean little brat,” he added.
“That’s River,” Sophie swooped in to add, always listening to us now, in the same leaning, soft scowl. “He’s mean and gross. He hits kids and eats his own boogers.”
The quick cruelness of girls. The gross meanness of boys. And us, the fearful, ineffectual parents of this next generation.
I remembered hearing about the divorce. Dad that just left. Mom, inept but passionately so, stuck with 3 kids. One of them a boy that had gone feral. River that hits and eats his boogers. Poor Mom. Poor little River.
It’s no mystery how our kids turn out the way they do. It would be so much easier to swallow if it was more of a cosmic game of chance than it is. There’s luck, for sure. Genetics and hormones and all manner of things out of our immediate control. But most of it is what we feed them, tell them, and show them. And don’t.
I’m doing it too. We all are. Messing our kids up daily. Making sure our insecurities and faults live on as another desperate birthright. Put another dollar in the counseling jar for me, please! We just can’t pretend it’s a surprise when they turn out the way they do. We have to take ownership of more than our genes.
All humans are 99.9 percent genetically identical, they say. Boys and girls aren’t that much different, it turns out. And we all could be booger eaters. The bully, the fire starter, the weak and the willing. As with so much, the ingredients in all of our kitchens are pretty much the same. A lot depends on who’s cooking that day.
Wanted to say how much I loved Boys and Girls. Great read, thank you. You are not off the hook, keep trying to be a kinder and more understanding MAN. And do not eat boogers any more!!