Boys and Girls

This is for all you moms out there who aren't sure what to expect when you get a boy or girl. I think the contrasts can be pretty much summarized as follows:

Boys like to play games with high probability of ending up with X-rays and sutures. Specifics of the games vary, of course, but they frequently include pouncing, pummeling, spitting, throwing hard objects at either inanimate or animate objects, jumping out from nowhere to scare other player to death, climbing on rooftops and shouting to pedestrians, leaning out of roller coasters at ninety-degree angles and yelling, "Hi, Ma!" and sneaking off to the mini-mart for sodas and junk food. This is their idea of fun, so don't try to change it. Just be prepared to start coloring your hair a little earlier than originally planned. If you want to socialize boys to be more tame, and convince them to try to help you make dinner, don't kid yourself that they are going to end up like Wolfgang Puck, devoting their careers to concocting new ways to cook Portobello mushrooms and goat cheese. They are just there for the knives.

When I was a young mother, I refused to buy my boys any toy guns or knives. Like a good student of the 1970s, I wanted to give peace a chance in my house. Ha! What a chump! Although my policy has not changed, and I still cannot bring myself to buy toy weapons, my efforts have been for naught. My boys have created toy guns when they needed them out of whatever materials happen to be around the house: hangers, Legos, tree branches, soda bottles (the one liter size makes a nifty AK-47), and my grandmother's antique candlesticks. So if you persist in maintaining that you can socialize boys to subsume their naturally occurring, testosterone-driven swashbuckling and not buy them toy guns, go ahead.

Girls like to play games that end with a high probability of injured feelings and detailed reenactments of their playmates' most galling insults to their persons. Necessary equipment for girl-play includes hairstyling implements, purses, telephones, high-heeled shoes, nail polish, magazines of alpha males and beautiful women, and their mothers' jewelry boxes. Their games ideally end with marriage, children, and credit cards with generous spending limits. (If you don't believe me, please reference the 45,000 contestants who lined up to qualify as a wife for the far-less-than-perfect stranger on the show "Who Wants to Marry a Alleged Abusive Barely Qualifying Multimillionaire Who's So Cheap He Reuses Baggies?")

If this depresses you, it shouldn't. Society has always required hunters and gatherers, as well as nesters and fortune hunters. See, our software hasn't changed, just the dimensions of our motherboards.

For you skeptics out there who don't believe me, you are probably not a parent yet.


(Judy Gruen: Carpool Tunnel Syndrome)