Planting Dandelions (10 page)

If a trace of wistfulness lingered, it evaporated completely when my second son was born. He was a big baby, nine pounds and change. I felt virile, in mind, if not in clobbered body. I was a mother of men.

My one indulgence in what might have been was an insistence that the baby would be christened in a cathedral-length heirloom gown of Irish linen and lace. Patrick, though long outside the fold, grew up Southern Baptist, a denomination that takes a dim view of infant baptism and cross-dressing. He was nervous about the whole thing.

“This is the only chance I will ever have to see a child of mine in a white gown at the altar,” I said. “Deal with it.”

It was clear to me that a daughter wasn't in the cards after all, and I was at peace with it. It amplified my growing sense that two children were enough. It had seemed all along like we would have three, but it had also seemed all along like they would be girls, so I wrote it off as fantasy. When I came up pregnant the third time, on the minipill and still breast-feeding, we couldn't help but harbor faint, pink-tinged hope that anything was possible. Very faint. I chose not to learn the baby's sex in advance just so I could pretend he was a girl, until presented with irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

We greeted that evidence in good humor. “I guess this is what I get for being boy crazy all my life,” I quipped to visitors. My obstetrician assured me we'd have to go through another two or three boys to get to a girl, based on his own clinical observations and a waggish bedside manner. We asked for a referral to a good urologist. Whether he was right or wrong about the long odds, our family was complete.

It is as it should be. I am the household goddess and queen bee. A girl would present a challenge to my monopoly, as well as my acquired skill set. Little girls are now as strange to me as little boys once seemed. Whenever I babysit one of my friends' daughters, I am at an absolute loss. I'm used to boys coming over and running off with the herd. The girls stay at my elbow, looking up at me expectantly. They want to talk. I never know what to say. “Crayons?” I offer, as if holding out a pack of cigarettes. “Something to read?” It's awkward, like having a foreign exchange student over for tea. Boys are the devil I know.

A very deep dive into the toy box might bring up a disheveled Barbie or remnant pieces of a fiesta-colored tea set to amuse the young mam'zelle, artifacts of my sons' preschool years, when I bought toys according to affirmative action practices, maintaining a careful balance of yin and yang. The inventory was composed mainly of purposeful, primary-colored toys that were gender neutral, European brands that sounded like something you'd find on a cheese board.
Brio en croûte.
There were, in the beginning, a very few pieces of Chinese-manufactured injection-molded plastic, in the way that the farmers of Australia, in the beginning, had very few rabbits. And there were an even number of so-called boys' and so-called girls' toys. There was a yellow enameled metal dump truck. There was a tool set. There were dishes. And a baby doll. “Alan Alda made me do it,” I told Patrick, when I brought it home, swaddled in pink. It was a brown baby doll, for added multicultural value. My husband, six years older, and raised in the American South, did not grow up listening to
Free to Be . . . You and Me
, the feminist-themed all-star children's album from the seventies. I belted out the chorus of the duet Alda sang with Marlo Thomas. “William wants a doll, 'cause someday he is gonna be a father, too . . .”

Patrick left the room. “It's all right to cry,” I sang after him, breaking into another number.

My son was tender and responsive toward his baby, but only when nudged. He was much more interested in the pleather-corseted fashion doll we called “bondage Barbie,” a German knockoff I'd come across before he was born, and acquired as a bit of kinky kitsch. He literally drooled over her, preferring her firm but rubbery legs to any other teether. It was “William Wants a Doll,” as reimagined by Camille Paglia.
Free to Be . . . You and Me
meets third-wave feminism.

My middle son showed no interest whatsoever in the baby doll. The youngest seemed to regard it as a competitor in an increasingly strained ecosystem, and kept dropping it on its head. I finally gave it away, along with the chewed-up Barbie clone. Determined to preserve some measure of equal opportunity for toys in our home through all developmental stages, I bought a yellow Easy-Bake Oven at a garage sale, knowing my four-year-old would love baking up child-size cakes and cookies. I was right. He was beside himself with anticipation of on-demand dessert. We raced off to the toy superstore to find utensils and mixes, which were shelved among the child-size carpet sweepers and plastic fruits. A plastic playhouse was on display in the center aisle, with red shutters and bright yellow flower decals.

“Hey,” I said to my son, “that looks pretty neat.”

He drew himself up haughtily, clutching his cookie set in its hot pink packaging. “That's a
girl's
toy,” he sniffed icily. “I don't play with
girls'
things.”

If I couldn't prevent my kids from developing gender biases in the first place, at least I was confusing them. That was something, considering how little ambiguity there is in children's marketing today. Walking into a toy store, you'd never know, unless you remembered that for a brief, shining moment in the late seventies and early eighties, it was sexist to suggest a toy was just for girls, much less label it so. Christmas catalogs in those days showed little boys puttering in plastic kitchens, and little girls hammering nails in birdhouses. A generation later, the advertising and packaging of “girls' toys” has never been more explicit, and froufrou is enjoying a renaissance that makes the baroque era seem austere. I don't think it's men who are to blame for this incarnation of girly-girl, though. I suspect it's driven by moms of my generation who didn't get their fill of boas and rhinestones as children. That's where rationing gets you.

If that's the case, I have probably ensured that my sons will be card-carrying members of the NRA (if not private militias) by drawing the line at the most traditional pastime of American boys: gunplay. For years, not even water pistols were allowed under my watch. Toy swords and plastic light sabers are okay, though a light saber can deliver a pretty good bonk to the head, and I was a bit disturbed when the boys used scissors to trim the foam blades of their swords to a point that could take an eye out. But swords are artifacts, and light sabers are fantasy. I don't lose sleep wondering which of the neighbor kids' dads might be Jedi weapon enthusiasts or weekend pirates. In another country, in another time, I might also view plastic pistols and M-16s as unobjectionable props for a child's warrior play. But we live in the southern United States, and there are real guns all around us, in the cabinets, closets, and garages of our quiet suburban neighborhood, and not just the hunting kind. We live in a state where it is necessary to post signs reminding people not to bring guns with them into schools and libraries. Where a child brandishing a toy pistol was shot dead by police a few years ago. Where accidental deaths of children by guns are common, and where children have opened fire on other children with automatic assault weapons. For me, that takes all the fun out of “Bang, you're dead.”

In the beginning, I naively thought I could keep my kids in a bulletproof bubble. Not only were guns banned from our home; the word itself was taboo. A gun was That-Which-Cannot-Be-Named. One day, when my oldest son was two, he built an L-shape with some LEGOs and aimed it at me. I squinted at him.

“What's that?”

“It's a pffffer,” he said, knowing what it was, but not what to call it.

I promptly confiscated it.

“No pffffing,” I said, firmly.

As he started preschool, and began to make friends whose parents I didn't know well, it became apparent that a strategy of denial was about as realistic and effective an approach to gun safety as abstinence education is to birth control. Parents who don't want their children to have sex or smoke cigarettes or use drugs and alcohol need to talk to their kids about sex, cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol. I needed to talk to mine about guns. Early, and often. Opening up that dialogue had the effect of easing up domestic weapons sanctions—ever so slightly—over time. Sci-fi-style ray guns, when given as gifts, have occasionally been allowed, though they have a way of quietly disappearing after a while. Permission has been granted to carry water guns, too, once a squeeze toy would no longer cut it. “They're water
squirters
,” I insist, as we walk out of the dollar store with neon pistols. The older boys even get to shoot BB guns on the Cub Scout practice range. They've been drilled through and through on safety issues, and I can only hope they'll develop an appreciation for the moral ones. I don't try to prevent my kids from playing with their friends' toy machine guns when they are visiting in someone else's home, but I am very comfortable explaining that it's not something we do in ours. My children are the gunplay equivalent of social smokers.

The impulse to arms is something I naively thought I could squelch altogether, but even in my mild-mannered crew, the force proved strong. I've never bought into “Boys will be boys” as an excuse for aggressive behavior. It's a bullshit excuse for anything but armpit farts in my opinion. But a few years on the playground convinced me that boys have an innate drive to express physical valor, to a degree not shared by most girls. I saw it in boys who were taught to be tender, and I saw it in boys who were taught to be tough. To pretend it wasn't there was to deny something essential about my sons' nature.

Before, I had been adamant that differences in how boys and girls played were one hundred percent manufactured. I knew the cultural conditioning was too broad and too deep to completely immunize my children to stereotypes, but I believed that with enough diligence I could give them a healthy resistance. Patrick, a self-described beta male, was mostly an ally in the cause. He didn't tease about the dolls and tea sets, he didn't tell the boys not to cry, and he was unrestrained in physical and verbal expressions of affection. If he raised an eyebrow over a baby doll or a sparkly pony, it was raised discreetly and wryly.

My husband is like most guys of our generation: nurturing, sensitive, open with his emotions, and having to improvise modern fatherhood without any kind of useful precedent. Once, when I was pushing him to spend more hands-on time with the kids, Patrick threw up his hands in honest frustration, and said, “But I'm already a hundred times more involved than my father was with me.”

“I know you are,” I said, with real sympathy. “And it's still not enough.”

We were both exaggerating to make our points. But the core feeling of his statement was true, and I think is true, for most fathers today: They are already doing so much more, and it
still
doesn't feel like enough. It doesn't help that nowhere in popular culture is there an up-to-date map to get us through this new landscape. It's like trying to navigate the interstate system with a road atlas from 1956. With your kids fighting in the backseat and the wife saying, “Well, just
ask
someone.”

But who are they supposed to ask? The bumbling idiot dads on television? The evangelical men's groups who want to play
Father Knows Best
? The New Age drumming circles that seem just as nostalgic and contrived? Those don't lead the way forward. And as much as I would like men to take it from Oprah, mommy blogs, women's magazines, and me that
mother
knows best what kind of husbands and fathers they should be, it's not really for us to say. Women can only speak to what it is we think we need from men, and honestly, I'm not too clear on what that is half the time. Be sensitive, but not a sissy. Be strong, but don't cross me. Be totally available to your family, but don't let your career suffer. Be unconditionally supportive, but show some backbone once in a while. Get in touch with your feminine side, man up, and leave the goddamn toilet seat down. Is that really so hard?

I think maybe it is.

I was lucky to be a little girl in North America in the seventies. I felt lucky. Women like Marlo Thomas and Gloria Steinem, and my mother, saw to that. If I ever encountered discrimination based on my gender, it never penetrated the circle the feminist movement drew around me with stories, songs, and mantras that affirmed my equality, and maybe, inadvertently, inevitably, took it a step further. I knew I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up: a scientist, a writer, a dancer, a mother. A mother of girls, of course. Because girls were celebrated, not boys. Girls, as I understood it, were better. As a kid, I didn't understand that the message I was getting was one of correction. I never got the earlier memo.

I bought the CD version of
Free to Be . . . You and Me
for my boys before they could talk. I was eager to have Marlo and company back me up on dolls for boys, and the righteousness of a good cry. I still love it as memorabilia. But my sons don't seem to connect with it. I don't think it speaks to them. They know it's all right to cry. They know mommies and daddies can be almost anything they want to be (except, respectively, daddies and mommies, according to one song, which did not anticipate the coming of the pregnant man—do I hear a
Free to Be
. . .
He or She
follow-up?). The subtext of the album is that gender is all in the eye of the beholder, that there is nothing inherently special about being either a girl or a boy.

Years before I had my own kids, I took a walk through the woods with a friend and his son. The boy could not stop picking up rocks along the path and throwing them. I was annoyed. It was a beautiful day. The setting was serene. Why couldn't the child just appreciate the natural surroundings? Why did he have to disturb it? What was the fascination with rocks, anyway? We were nowhere near anything that could break, but in my mind, the rock-throwing was an act of mindless vandalism, typical of the masculine impulse to possess and alter the environment. Just another form of territorial pissing, I crossly thought.