I have taken great pride in understanding my son. I’ve understood his cries since birth, his different facial expressions for sadness, anger, happiness, excitement. The way frustration goes straight to wide-eyed tearfulness and reddened cheeks, rather than the more typical route to outward outrage. I know the foods he loves, the ones he avoids, and that he eats soup with a fork.
I know how he sings in the shower, how he battles Lego armies and now constructs Lego skyscrapers (phalluses), how he gets attached to one pair of pants and shirt at a time and mourns their loss when he outgrows them (or, worse, wears a hole in them). I know how he will respond in a new situation (hold back, observe, wait until the exact right moment to enter, then, perhaps enter, perhaps not), how he will look out the front window for a friend who’s coming to play, almost like an excited puppy perched on the sofa, nose to the window, checking every car that passes for signs that his buddy has (finally) come.
I know his areas of deepest, most tender pain, and I know his areas of immersion in love, safety and containment. Even when I get it wrong, mis-predict his reaction, or mistakenly assert something about him, I know he’ll love me despite my making mistakes about him, how he’ll allow me to repair when I’ve done him wrong. I know how to repair the way he needs me to, so the time we spend disconnected and out of sync is quite brief. I know him.
And most of the moms-of-sons I know also know their sons. They know their moods, their likes and dislikes, and which parts of their personality come from which relative. They know when they wake up, know when they need to see the dentist, know how their child’s body will respond to even the smallest amount of nighttime sugar, what time they need to go to sleep so that they don’t turn primitive.
Yet most women I know fail to understand grown up men – their fathers, their brothers, their boyfriends or partners, bosses or coworkers.
They may know every last detail about their movements, their schedules, their likes and dislikes, but they have no idea why their menfolk think the way they do, why they have their preferences, why they have their longings, their desires, their needs. They compare the actions of their grown-up men to themselves, find nothing but gaps and gulfs, and shake their heads. If only those men could be more like them, they’d make more sense.
So when does the transition happen? When do women go from knowing – intimately – everything about what their sons do and why they do it and having it make perfect sense to them – and, here’s the crucial part – accepting what they know about their sons – to disbelieving and disdaining their adult men for things they no longer understand.
I have two hypotheses, but neither one is great. The first is that women don’t understand their sons or other young boys any more than they understand men; that they apply a female gender-lens to boys and men, yet sons and boys are less masculine because of their youth, so the errors in misunderstanding are smaller. This one’s a bitter pill, as it means I might not understand my son’s motivation, his inner life, his dreams and desires the way I think I do. It means that I might consistently misunderstand him because I compare who he is and what he does to my own lived experience, and although I’m a pretty smart gal, I’m a gal. In this hypothesis, women compare boys and men to themselves, and find small gaps early on.
I know plenty of mom’s who minimize differences between boys and girls, thinking that there is just one template for human children, and those boys – those hard-to-sit-still creatures – fill them with exasperation, not understanding. And then there was the generation of feminist mothers, and their descendants, who tried to stamp out (male) aggression and competition, and insist that boys should be like girls, who are somehow superior because of their non-competitive, non-aggressive nature. Hah, I say – the cruelty of girls is unmatched on this planet, even by lions, wolverines, badgers (who apparently fight while mating) and the unlikely vegetarian hippopotamus, dubbed the most dangerous and aggressive animal on earth. Girls’ cruelty, evident by kindergarten, intensifies throughout childhood and adolescence, and it’s astonishing to me that mothers fear their sons, not daughters.
The second possibility is that women don’t, and can’t, understand testosterone. That before our sons hit puberty, they are actually more unisex creatures, and therefore more easily understood by women. Before testosterone courses through a boy’s body, he talks, he emotes, he shares his experiences. But testosterone pushes him in another direction – into decisive action, quick and necessary tension relief, conquests of physicality, sexuality, power, money, achievement, bonding with boys and men in a masculine world of hierarchy, competition and status. If mothers understand a boy’s need to collect and display rocks and minerals, or Pokémon/baseball cards, his need to have shiny tools (pocket knives and compasses and walking sticks) as physical extensions of penile power, how is it that wives don’t understand this in their husbands? Moms know that sons must be rewarded for putting away their things, for finishing a task completely rather than drifting off mid-task to the next thing that catches their eye, for bringing the last of the dinner dishes to the kitchen rather than leaving a random spoon or glass yet believing they have completed the job perfectly.
Grown up men do the same things yet grown up women get it. Why don’t women understand the deals their fathers cut with their mothers? Why don’t we understand that fathers are supposed to be different than mothers? Why don’t we understand that our men want something different, and will offer us something totally different than, womenfolk? How is it we lack the capacity to accept and honor a guy’s desire to be fully part of the world of men, after we’ve signed our boys up for little league and soccer year after year? We’ve bought them uniforms, shoes with cleats (different cleats for different sports), we’ve brought snacks when it was our turn for the whole team. We’ve hung posters of athletes and superstars in their rooms, bought every kind of toy that other boys their age want. There are even moms who buy their teenage sons condoms just to make sure they have them.
“Just go outside and play” we mothers-of-boys repeat, endlessly. “Hey, it’s nice out – why not get some fresh air.” Time and again we shoo our boys out of our homes, out from under our feet, just to get a moment’s peace, and then we turn around and rage at our mates for not spending enough time with us. We roll our eyes at their interests, desires, dreams, pastimes, and then act like we don’t understand that men experience women as confining or (s)mothering. Many moms make it impossible to for their adolescent sons to be understood and accepted for their non-Mother-like burgeoning adult maleness. There should be no surprise when boys seem to flee these childhood homes and childhood mothers. Most men I know have distanced themselves geographically and emotionally from their mothers. They propel their mothers out of the sphere of what’s relevant in their world sometime around high school, and what remains is a superficial/obligatory/“Yes, Mom” kind of exchange that leaves neither party satisfied.
Perhaps in high school, in place of Home Ec (which I don’t think exists anymore, but perhaps there is some life skills class – maybe just high school psychology classes would be the place), high school girls should be given a one-month trial dose of testosterone, and high school boys the parallel of estrogen and oxytocin. Not long enough to permanently change body tissues or voice, no permanent hair gain or loss, no lasting change in the Adam’s apple. But long enough to let the boys-to-men experience, in their core, the biological pull of pair bonding, cuddling, and the tend-and-befriend response, and the girls-to-women experience the biological thrust of testosterone.
Maybe then we’d have a better basis for appreciating the Male and the Female without confounding, confusing or blurring the two. Impressionist art is not the same as Neo-Classical art – but if we take a class or study up or have a mentor who carefully and slowly explains the two, we come to appreciate and enjoy what each has to offer. We don’t condemn one style for not being like the other. And when we’re looking at a Rembrandt, we don’t wonder why on earth he didn’t use a different color scheme, like we would.