Not ready to give this up: Maxon and I in May, 2010
My older son Maxon and I have been butting heads lately, and we're fighting more than usual. Last Wednesday we argued multiple times: Maxon lied about brushing his teeth. He gave me a hard time about practicing guitar. He was mean to his brother. He argued about whether or not he should be able to sing "screw you" in song lyrics he's writing for his band. He shot a Nerf arrow through my dining room, shattering a glass bulb from our light fixture. He lost my hand mixer, which he had taken to school for a baking project. He begged for pizza and French fries for dinner, but when we brought the food home after Parkour, he said he wasn't hungry. Apparently, the half bag of Goldfish that he consumed after midweek Hebrew was too filling.
After the last argument, I thought I'd try and talk to him.
"Do you notice we're arguing a lot more lately?"
"Yeah."
"Every day. Multiple times a day."
"Yeah."
"It makes me feel sad, honey. I don't want it to be this way."
"OK."
"Do you have anything you want to say about it?"
"No. Goodnight."
Then, after that unsatisfying dialogue, my almost 11-year-old son went downstairs to bed.
So I cried hurt mommy tears into my sleeve and I wondered: Is the boyhood honeymoon over already? Is he building the walls that will barricade him throughout his teenage years? Is he over me?
Because people do say that happens – especially with boys. I have been warned by too many people about the emotional deficit that I should expect from having sons.
Since I had my boys I have been haunted by individuals who can't understand why I didn’t try for a girl – manicurists, women at mommy groups, relatives, friends of my parents, hairdressers, my dry cleaner, to name just a few.
In fact, the first time I got the question was in the delivery room, my youngest son barely five minutes old.
“You going to try for a little girl now?” the nurse asked me.
Because when your vagina looks like a boxing glove, there's nothing more appealing. The only thing I wanted to try was an IUD, which has been spectacular.
My mother-in-law is in on this also. So I asked her, what will this magical daughter do for me that my sons will not? Will she keep my hair from frizzing? Stop me from aging? Give me three wishes?
“It's just different,” she told me one afternoon. “Daughters are yours forever. Sons leave you."
Her son was in the next room, by the way.
"What's the phrase?" she asked. " 'My son is my son until he gets a wife, but my daughter is my daughter for all of her life.' ”
I looked this nonsense up. Wikipedia says it is an old proverb attributed to the English novelist and poet Dinah Maria Mulock Craik. Craik, if she did write this, is talking out of her tuchus, since she never had a son and adopted a baby girl.
I can confess that I did not anticipate so much affection, so much undiluted love from my sons. It's humbling, that love. The way it overtakes them, in the middle of some other activity, and brings them bounding into my lap like Labradors. They tackle me with their love, pop out of the bushes with it, body slam me with it.
And even though I don’t believe in any of that son-biased nonsense, sometimes – like after a week of arguments with a terse tween who appears to want nothing to do with me – I hear these warnings fresh, and they try their hardest to hijack my better judgment.
When I went back to Maxon's room that night, it was dark and he was already asleep. I felt badly that we didn’t have a nicer exchange before he went to sleep. I sat on the edge of his bed, and when I touched his head, he roused. He looked at me and took my hand, pulling it near his chest.
"I love you, mom," he murmured.
"I love you, too."
"I love you more," he said before falling back to sleep.
He will assert his identity, I thought, smiling. He will keep things from me. He may distance himself from me. And not because he is a boy.
Who knows where his life will take him — our sons may move across the planet or across the street. I just hope I do a good enough job so they can grow up to be spectacular men who prove that idiot proverb wrong.