Boys Will Be Boys
Now that my sons are old enough not to be embarrassed—and one has Þnally married—I can tell the truth about their history with women. Including me.
(Page 2 of 2)
"The wrapping? Who do you think selected the gift?" I said, wondering if I should invite her in some Christmas morning to see the caliber of gift-swaddling my sons offer. By overruling my teenage son's impulse to give his best girl a Blockbuster gift certificate, I like to think I am teaching him something about what might please a woman. Perhaps I have only taught him that gift selection is beyond him. That was not my intention.
In a household of males, the teaching cannot be subtle. Take something as basic as "Women would like to be remembered on their birthdays." It doesn't take long in a houseful of males to know that you have to post the date on the refrigerator early. Once they all could read and write, I instructed my husband to back off. No more purchasing the card for them and extracting the signatures. (They always signed their last names, as if it might be used in court.)
That first year of my "Let's see how thoughtful they are on their own" experiment was a disaster. As my birthday approached, each time the older two left the house, I bade them farewell by saying, "I know you're really going to buy your mother's birthday present, but you can pretend that you're going to play video games if you want to." The eldest, Jack, in a moment of real martyrdom, promised he would accompany me to church since my birthday fell on Sunday. When the day arrived, he woke up late and mumbled that he'd come in his own car. Of course, he was a no-show.
Returning from church, I fixed Sunday lunch and waded into the pile of laundry that invariably accumulates on weekends. Any boy who passed me in the hall heard me remark that my car needed washing and I would consider that a lovely birthday gift. Jack was nervy enough to ask for help in using my computer. He probably didn't even hear my teeth grinding as I sat beside him. At five o'clock I baked myself a birthday cake, which they happily consumed.
Later that evening, I exploded on all of them, including hapless William, who had just returned from a weekend Scout camp-out. I told them that I didn't want to be misunderstood, so I would not be speaking to them subtly or metaphorically. I told them that I felt totally unappreciated and rather lousy as a parent who had brought up such thoughtless males. (Note how quickly I began to assume responsibility for their failure.) My wrath seemed to take them entirely by surprise. I saw that fuzzy look come over them that says, "What is she talking about? What is it with women? What does she want?"
They averted their eyes, so I grabbed their chins the way I once did when they were errant toddlers with three-second attention spans. "What do I want? I'll tell you what I want, and you'd better listen up because this is what all women want. I want to be surprised, not by a lavish gift, but by evidence that someone observed and loved me enough to know what would lighten my load and brighten my day. My car is filthy, for starters. Your insistence on taking over the Sunday laundry chores would delight me, even if you didn't sort the clothes. Somebody could make me a cake. A cake mix is fine. You can all read and set the oven at 350 degrees. Two of you who went to church last week heard me exclaim over the John Rutter Requiem on the way home. I think I even wondered aloud if it might be available on compact disc in the classical section of the music store. Your mother writes. She never tires of nice paper and interesting pens. I didn't even mind the year that you collectively decided that I wanted a Whitman Sampler box of candy, except that you ate the best pieces and left the lid off the box on a low table so that Rosie [the dog] devoured the rest and threw up all night in the living room."
Blindsided, William ran to his room and returned with an offering of his much prized "fake snot." Drew kicked at the carpet and said, "Sorry I blew it, Mom." Still in the throes of adolescent rebellion, Jack, who has been with me longest and consequently retains the greatest capacity to wound, provided the capper for the day. Returning to his homework on my computer, he said over his shoulder, "You can draw some money out of my savings account tomorrow and get yourself something nice." I retired to the front porch, howled at the full moon, and had a good cry.
In subsequent years, all they seemed to retain from this scorched-earth display was the Whitman Sampler idea. I must have been too effusive the year it was bestowed, giving them the idea that they had this gift-giving stuff knocked. Apparently this is the way the male brains in my house work: If she liked the gift last year, she'll like it again next year. (At least they remembered to put the chocolates out of the dog's reach.) Their Christmas gifts to me became similarly predictable. Although I can't remember expressing any affection for the artist, I inexplicably received Norman Rockwell wall calendars. One year they waited too late to get the Norman Rockwell and had to settle for Native Americans. Mothers of sons eventually slip into thinking this is somehow endearing. I know their wives will not.
Tears, of course, are the teaching tool of last resort. My sons are confused, frightened, and repelled by them. I hope I used them sparingly enough to retain their effectiveness. All of my boys learned to recognize what they called "the cry point" and cautioned each other to back off before the dam broke. I acknowledge that I contributed to the confusion, however. Once, many years ago, when I had retired to the bathroom to repair my tearstained face, a consequence of some thoughtlessness on their part, one of my three knocked on the door to make amends. In his small hand was a little tin box with a message taped to the top. He had intended to write, "It's for you, Mom," but in his first-grade dyslexic scrawl, it came out more poetically, "Tis for you, Mom." Inside was his treasured Eisenhower silver dollar. To his utter bewilderment, his gift brought more tears.
IF THEY FOUND GIFT-GIVING AND crying so baffling, I despaired of their ever understanding that women would also like a little romance. They, of course, thought that my advice was absurdly dated. My husband, John, and I offered counsel from an era when men had to take risks and do the pursuing, when nice girls not only didn't, they didn't even call.
I still think it's instructive to tell my sons our corny courtship story: John was dating my beautiful blond roommate at UT who broke his heart by saying one evening, "You should go out with Prudence. You're too smart for me." We met six months later at a wedding. He was the groomsman who took me down the aisle of the church where we married three years later. Noting that I had come to the wedding unescorted, he seated me and whispered, "If you'd like a ride to the reception, I can take you." We danced the night away at the reception, and after too much champagne, he lectured me on the rise of the right wing in American politics. The next day he drove to Mexico with an old friend to whom he confided that he had met the girl he intended to marry.
My groom, who still calls me Great Beauty, employed a lot of imagination in that sixties courtship. Once, I found a cryptic note in my college dorm mailbox. "Contact a man named Jace in the basement of the University Co-op. He will instruct you further." The man named Jace, a student clerk in the campus bookstore, handed me a matchbook with some rhyming lines scribbled in the cover, something about "the source of wisdom holds your next clue." After some puzzling, I remembered a statue of Athena in the back yard of my sorority house. Propped in her hands was a small portable radio with another message attached, something about "Bring this with you. The play's the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king . . . James, that is." That clue was biblical, but the "James" also had a 007 meaning, since James Bond movies were all the rage. I was not romantic or sentimental enough to have saved all of the clever clues, but I remember that the game ended with his waiting for me in Eastwoods Park beside his faded blue VW Bug with a picnic. "A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou?" No, we weren't that corny.
My sons maintain that this is all fabrication. They think that I won their father as a consolation prize in a poker game with Elizabeth, the lovely blond roommate who became their godmother. Despite daily evidence to the contrary, they refuse to believe that the man who embarrasses them by standing in the front yard watering the dogwoods with his boxer shorts hanging beneath his Bermuda shorts can ever have been the perpetrator of such romantic devotion.
THESE YOUNG MEN ARE NO longer under my roof. If I wince at the occasional jerky boy behavior that remains, I also glory in their sporadic grown-up thoughtfulness. They have always been funny and spontaneously affectionate. The Whitman Samplers no longer appear on my birthday. Even the bookstore gift certificates, which are always welcome in my house, have been replaced by a genuine effort to locate a book I've been longing for or, better yet, one they found provocative and worthy of discussion. They know the power of flowers to cheer and disarm a woman; they even know not to send the standard FTD bouquet. Aside from the hilarious practical jokes they inflict on her, they are attentive to their surviving grandmother, Jane. They listened patiently to their grandfather's genuinely funny tales (funny the first time, at least) of life and love as he knew it in the twenties. After what seems like decades of forced thank-you notes, I am certain that they know that life requires gratitude. They can offer it now with wit and grace. If this has been long in coming, I beg forgiveness. Remember how outnumbered I was in this good ol' boy locker room.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
