In our family, penises are standard-issue equipment. We have four of them, or rather, they do, my husband and our three sons. I am the odd woman out, the minority. It’s not how I was raised. I had a sister, a mother, and a father. No brothers. Females were the ruling class, and I was part of it. I don’t remember ever plunging ass-first into a toilet bowl in the house where I grew up. Not much was constant or predictable about life at 20 Armstrong, but you could reliably count on the seat to be down, day or night. It was there for me.
In my adult home, vertical is the default position for the toilet seat. Patrick and the boys seem to view it as a kind of Murphy bed. Available if needed, but otherwise up and out of their way. If there were toilet seats with spring-loaded hinges that snapped down like mouse traps, I would install them. Instead, I give shrill demonstrations in seat raising and lowering, which have a deterrent effect, but not in the way intended. The boys become reluctant to raise the seat in the first place, and pee all over it. Every time I have to wipe the fixtures behind them, which is every time they go, I wonder why we don’t just rip all the moving parts out. The technology—seat hinges and flush lever—is evidently too complicated for them.
I’ve heard that some European public toilets are simply self-flushing stainless-steel closets. I wish IKEA would figure out how to flat-pack one. They could call it the PIPÜ. The boys could have that, and I would have my very own bathroom, a sanctuary of glistening ceramic, with a deadbolt on the door and a toilet seat cemented to the rim. I could even put a rug on the floor, right next to the pedestal, which in reality has to be wiped down at least once a day with window cleaner.
“I just wiped here this morning!” I yell. “Seriously, how hard can it be to control a penis?”
Patrick shrugs. “Pretty hard, sometimes.” There’s no point in getting technical. The kinesiology and pneumatics, if he could explain them, would be lost on me, a stranger in a strange land. No matter how long I live among penises, I’ll never really understand them. I’m like a mechanic who services imported cars but has never actually been behind the wheel of one. I don’t know how they handle, first thing in the morning, bursting to pee. Apparently, like a fire hose.
The boys love to hear the story about the time I was changing one of their diapers on our bed, in the dark, when Patrick woke up shouting and flailing. I froze where I stood, a clean diaper dangling from my suspended hand. Was he having a nightmare? A heart attack? After a few seconds of incoherent cursing, he became conscious enough to realize, and convey, the source of his distress.
“The baby! The diaper! Cover the baby!”
“Huh?”
I looked down to where I had positioned the baby horizontally on the bed. I could just make out the last droplets of a stream that had arced impressively over his own head and splashed down on his father’s. I flung the clean diaper over the source, but it was too late. I threw another over Patrick’s face, trying to be helpful.
“Always,” he sputtered, “cover that thing during changes.”
Well, how was I to know it would go off like that?
Ten years later, my son still regales his younger brothers with “the time I peed on Dad’s head.” They hoot and slap the ground. Way to get one over on the alpha male. More, and worse, potty talk inevitably follows, accompanied by pantomime where indicated. Somebody farts. Then everybody farts. More hooting. More farting. I pretend I am Jane Goodall, living among the chimps. It seems less beneath me that way.
Today, the smallest male was observed urinating off the front porch, I mentally narrate from behind a blind of laundry. At feeding time, one of the troupe passed gas loudly, which caused much excitement among the other juveniles.
“Wait!” someone shouts. “I’ve got to go pee!” There is the pounding of sneakers through the hall, the crash of the doorknob as it hits the inside bathroom wall, a forceful hiss that fades to a tinkle, footsteps receding, the screen door slamming shut.
I am conducting an experiment to see if the subjects can be taught to raise and lower a simple hinged mechanism, I tell myself as I open the bathroom closet, reach for the window spray and paper towels, and turn to face the toilet.
So far, it is unsuccessful.
“I have a son,” I said, for the first time to anyone.
Through the telephone, there came a soft, trembling sigh, a breath of pure tenderness. “Oh,” said my father, calling me by my baby name, “Kiki.”
Moments before, giving birth in my own bedroom, I had never felt more a grown woman. “Kiki,” he said, and I was four years old. Look what I made, Daddy. It’s a surprise.
It’s a boy.
“A boy?” my mother said. She was as shocked as I was. Babies in our family were girls. What other kind was there? “We like to keep it a mystery,” I told the ultrasound technician when I declined to learn the baby’s gender. But there was no mystery. I’d always known I would have a girl. We referred to our child as “she,” exclusively, right up to the moment I saw her penis.
I couldn’t believe it. “A boy!” I said, laughing. “Oh my God, a boy!”
I have a son.
Saying those words made me feel mighty and mythic, like an empress or a pioneer. I embraced them. I was head over heels in love with my new man. I could wait a little longer for a girl.
I was pregnant again the following year, and my dreams of a daughter were reawakened. I monitored my body for any variation from my first pregnancy. Differences in weight gain, nausea, appetite, heartburn, muscle aches, cravings, or aversions were all evidence that I was gestating a girl. I researched sex determination to learn if there were factors of conjugal timing or position that might have tipped the chances in an X chromosome’s favor. What I learned was that it was wholly up to the sperm to deliver the goods. Human eggs come only in grade XX. It’s an X or Y sperm that gets the deciding vote on gender, and the odds are inherited through the father’s line. It was all on Patrick.
I added up the chromosomes. Patrick had only a brother, and between them, they had sired only sons. I scrambled a branch higher up the family tree. His father had only a brother. I went to visit my father-in-law, intent on shaking out an aunt or two. As he walked me through ancestral gravestones, touched that I was taking such a keen interest in his roots, my hopes withered. It appeared that my husband’s family had lost the recipe for girls somewhere on the wagon trail. His paternal line had produced a grand total of one girl in the last century, a statistic so anomalous that her birth was either a miracle or the fruit of adultery. In either case, Patrick was not directly descended from her, so our odds were not improved.
I had to know. “What is it?” I asked the ultrasound technician, peering at a blob on a screen. It was like sexing an earthworm. I couldn’t tell which end was which, let alone identify the parts in between. The technician pointed to a tiny peninsula, dangling in the amniotic sea. “Definitely a boy. No question.”
If there was a spark of a chance that the technician didn’t know a foot from a penis, I didn’t permit myself to kindle it. The baby was healthy, and very much wanted. That’s what mattered. His brother would have a buddy. And I wouldn’t have to buy new clothes. Not one sweet, pink, smocked, eyeleted scrap. I was keeping a running list of girls’ names on a piece of notebook paper, carried over from my first pregnancy. I tucked it away with my memorabilia as a keepsake for the boys, a roll call of their ghost sisters. Good-bye, Sophia Faye. Good-bye, Ruby Evangeline. Good-bye, Genevieve Leigh. I guess I thought I would give birth to a line of Royal Doulton china figurines. Royal Doulton can have the names. Given my sons’ DNA, it’s highly unlikely that our family will ever have need.
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 th
e 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.”
Planting Dandelions Page 7
