About Boys
Boys are delightful creatures. I don’t understand them, but I love them. I have two boys. And from my interactions with them, I can tell you that, for all that is said about how women’s minds work strangely and how incomprehensible women are, boys have got women beat by a country mile.
An example. My older son (11½ years old) went off to Boy Scout camp for a week. It was his first “solo” flight – the first time he’d been on an overnight without a parent or other relative to keep an eye on him. The packing list specified “stationery,” so I sent a writing pad and a handful of stamped envelopes, along with an index card listing my address, his dad’s address, and the addresses of both sets of grandparents. The week came and went – no letters.
When he got home and we were unpacking his stuff (which, by the way, went out nice and clean, but came back uniformly filthy and smelling like something that would have frightened the Swamp Thing), I asked him about the letters.
“Oh,” says he, “I only wrote two. One to you and one to Brother. But I wrote them on the first day and I forgot to mail them. See, I was trying to find something in my pack, and I piled all my stuff on my sleeping bag, and the letters were underneath all of it … so I didn’t see them again until I was packing to go home. So I ran down to the Trading Post to get them in the mail.”
(Of course, I am trying not to break my ribs while holding back laughter at this point. A girl would have written a letter a day, minimum, and they’d have been mailed the same day they were written.)
So I’ve been anticipating my letter all week. It came yesterday. A single, folded sheet of half-size paper (5½ x 8½). There is writing only on the top quarter of one side of the sheet. The letter says, and I quote it in its entirety:
Mom I’m on my last pare of socks and I am having a grate time. Love Caleb.
I opened this letter in the car, while sitting at a red light on my way to have lunch with the boys and my mom. I nearly had to pull over to the kerb for a bit, because I could not stop laughing. What I had expected, of course (since I am a girl), was a nice, chatty letter about his first experience of camping without a parent along, and maybe a note that he missed me. What I got was typical Boy. Clear, concise, and to the point. No nonsense; no mushy stuff.
So I was curious to see what he’d written to his brother. Isaac also got his letter yesterday. I (foolishly) expected something telling his brother what he was doing at camp, how much fun it was, and how much he would enjoy it next summer. HA!
Isaac How are you doing I’m having a grate time.
Again, short, sweet, to the point. No mushy stuff. No wasted words. (No punctuation, either, but we’ll overlook that and the sloppy spelling. Even though the editor in me cringes and the homeschool mom in me wants to bang her head against the wall.)
This is just how the minds of boys work. Girls use words and lots of them. Boys want things simple and uncomplicated. Long epistles aren’t going to come from their pens, because they haven’t the patience or the focus to sit still and write.
But don’t let the dearth of words fool you. Boys feel things, and they feel them deeply. I have had conversations with my boys that astounded me by their intellectual depth and intensity. We still have discussions about the grandparents who have “gone to live with Jesus” and how much we miss them, though it’s been about five years since the most recent death in the family. The boys were very young when my paternal grandpa, who had lost both of his legs, passed away. Yet they still talk about “Grandpa with no legs” and will go up to perfect strangers in wheelchairs and strike up a conversation that usually starts “My Grandpa had a chair like yours….” (Yeah, they know it was great-grandpa, but that takes too much effort to say, I guess.)
And Caleb has been very “huggy” since his return from camp. We’re a naturally affectionate family, but it seems like Caleb is trying to make up for the week of missed hugs and kisses and bedtime tuck-ins.
And pokings. Poking is apparently a Boy way of showing affection and giving attention without getting all mushy or having to get in someone else’s personal space. I can’t get the boy to kiss me (not even on the cheek), but he’ll poke me black and blue. He won’t always let me hug him, but I can poke him without provoking a protest. Why? I have no idea. I am a girl. I like hugs and snuggles and arms around my shoulders and kisses and holding hands and stuff like that. Boys utterly reject most of those things, tolerate hugs, and prefer Poking.
Boys are natively aggressive, even violent, and, if deprived of proper weaponry, can be profoundly creative. When mine were small I briefly considered banning toy weapons. Briefly. You don’t have to be around a boy five minutes to know that they can make a weapon – usually a sword or a gun – out of anything. Their fingers. A stick. Lego bricks. A leaf. A random piece of wire. A fork. A dead bug. A pencil. A spoon. A piece of cardboard. I kid you not. It’s like it’s hard-wired in their genes. “I am Boy. Give me weapons.”
Boys seldom like to read. I’ve known a few who did, but they were strange creatures, pallid and uninteresting or annoying know-it-alls. I think it’s mostly the sitting down and being quiet part of reading that is the problem. The first book I was able to get my son to read without resorting to coercion and open bribery was The Dangerous Book for Boys. He reads his Scout manual and books about bugs and animals without complaint. Anything else, put it on CD or forget it.
There are so many other things about Boys that make them enjoyable and exciting to watch. Boys make a lot of noise, but only in fun. (I don’t worry about my boys until they get quiet. Then I panic and run to find them before they kill each other or blow something up.) Boys aren’t afraid of much. Boys don’t generally cry much, and when they do, it’s usually over a tragedy. Boys don’t mind getting dirty, and are attracted to mud puddles the way moths are attracted to lights.
I think it’s probably a good thing I had boys. I wouldn’t know what to do with a girl. There’s never a dull moment with boys. And that’s probably just how it should be.