From my bed weekend mornings, I can usually tell what the three male inhabitants of the household are up to without so much as sitting up. If there’s a laugh track, they’re sprawled across the couch watching SpongeBob Squarepants. If there isn’t, they’re playing an elaborate civilization-conquering game on the computer, and I say a silent prayer that my husband will remember just how popular Dungeons and Dragons made him before the boys hit puberty.
I’ve given up remarking how outnumbered these very male scenes make me feel. Back when I did, my husband would invariably quip that I wasn’t the only female in the house – there was the cat. At this, he’d snicker so hard he’d shake. Zelda hasn’t been quite right ever since she chewed a large quantity of leaded paint off the bathroom radiator, which my husband thinks makes this rejoinder positively hysterical, a total thigh-slapper to be hauled out at every opportunity. Of course, he also thinks an adenoidal sponge in BVDs is right up there with Chris Rock.
I love the pajama-clad fraternity on the couch, I really do. But I’ve figured out that the best response to being the lone woman in the house during cartoon power hour is to demand the delivery of coffee and then shut the door and doze or read until a civilized hour. They know I don’t care which carbon-eating doom-slinger possesses which superpower. And now that I know they don’t need me to care, we’re all more or less okay with this.
It wasn’t always so. When my oldest was about 18 months old, one of his preschool teachers gave him an orange Matchbox car for Christmas. It had zebra stripes and a name I’ve repressed, and it touched off a frenzy of car collecting that culminated in persistent requests for me to get down on the rug for a game that consisted of assigning each car an elaborate personality and then having them race in a way that was vaguely interactive but, to someone long habituated to adult things like logic and plotlines, also pretty dull.
Yes, I did just describe a game invented by my darling firstborn as boring. It was. And horribly so. Try as I might to remember whether the El Camino flew or drove backwards, all I could think about was what an awful mother I must be.
According to the mommy manuals, my job was to build his self-esteem by letting him know his interests were important. To that end, I should follow his lead in free play. I saw other mothers at playgrounds spewing moment-to-moment narrations of their boys’ games: What a tall tower! You’re going to use the red block next? But the books didn’t say anything about how to cure the monkey-mind in me that set in the second the box of cars was upended. Focus, I’d command myself, even as I started wishing I had gotten a good start on dinner before I sat down to play. Did the other mothers feel this way? If so, they weren’t confessing squat.
And so there were problems. The scant references I could find in the books to being the mother of boys all counseled mourning the girly outfits that would never be bought and nurturing the boys’ gentler, more emotional sides. But the more crucial issue was that my boy – even if he couldn’t keep all of the personalities and habits of his cars straight – was smart as all golly and knew when his mother was faking interest. It made both of us anxious, but neither of us knew what to do – him because he was 2; me because I hadn’t yet realized the parenting books were best used for papier m…ch/.
The usual compromise over the next few months was that eventually the Matchbox cars followed me into the kitchen, and I tried not to step on their owner. One day, the patter that was the backbone of the game stopped. Alarmed by the silence (the Y chromosomes in my house are all snuggled tightly up against the chattering gene), I turned to see my son, bug-eyed and slack-mouthed, staring up at the counter. He beheld the stand mixer – a giant, shiny tool possessed of knobs and attachments and a gloriously loud motor.
Electrified by the possibilities, I grabbed the ingredients for corn muffins and, within minutes, my boy was emptying measuring spoons into the mixing bowl and asking precociously technical questions about baking soda. It was a watershed batch of muffins, followed by even more companionable sheets of cookies, enthusiastically peeled carrots, and erratically zested lemons, not to mention enough macaroni to feed the Iron Range. Suddenly, there was no self-image at stake – not his, not mine – just a kid and a mom hanging out together after a day apart.
Now 7, my boy doesn’t cook much. He’s keenly interested in science, though, and came home from school the other day talking about the bread his class baked. In precise detail, he explained about the yeast, and how it ate sugars and belched out gases. How kneading made the gluten in the wheat springy so the yeast-belches formed pockets. He’d told his whole class, he said, and I could almost hear it – Mr. Science lectures the second grade on proteins. Where, I asked, did he learn all of that? “Mom, duh,” he said. “I learned it from you.”
Sometimes these days, I walk into a room to find both sons and their dad clustered around the Game Boy’s 2″ x 2″ screen. The characters on the screen are the size of ladybugs, but all three players rock and lunge in unison, as if actually buffeted by the action. I can take up a project or walk back out and they scarcely notice, so lost are they in concentration, each with the tip of his tongue poking absentmindedly from the left side of his mouth. Sometimes I escape back upstairs for a while, and sometimes the cat comes along to keep me company.
Beth Hawkins is a Mineapolis-based writer.
