I<\/span> knew I was a true boy mom when I had a moms\u2019 night out with a group that included a concert pianist, a businesswoman and a dentist, and we found ourselves talking over the portobello mushroom appetizer about our six year old sons\u2019 arm-farts.\u00a0\u00a0 I don\u2019t know a lot of girl moms who\u2019ve had that conversation.\u00a0 I also don\u2019t know too many moms of girls who\u2019ve had to issue such pronouncements as, No farting at the dinner table<\/em>, or who suddenly yell out, Hey, who\u2019s been peeing on the toilet seat in the powder room?<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t a role that came naturally to me at first; I was slowly seduced by the world of boys.<\/p>\n

My friend Leah goes further, dividing the world of mothers into \u201cboy moms\u201d and \u201cgirl moms,\u201d with moms of children of both sexes serving as bystanders in this other, lesser known, mommy war.\u00a0 Leah says the girl moms sneer at her three rambunctious boys, as well as her failure to rein them in more.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen those sneers put into words on urbanbaby.com, a website with a discussion board for parents. \u201cWhen I see rowdy boys acting up daily, ugh, it makes me think about single-sex schools,\u201d said one girl mom.\u00a0 Another one actually preferred a co-ed school for her daughter, so the girl could \u201clearn to deal with nonsense.\u201d\u00a0 Their comments reminded me of the way my younger son Isaac boiled down the difference between the sexes when he was three years old: Boys have a penis, girls have a giant<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I have to admit, we girls do loom large in those early years.\u00a0 Our verbal superiority manifests itself right from the start.\u00a0 Watching three year olds play together in the nursery school gym, I already could see its impact on the politics of rejection.\u00a0 When my other son Max wanted to play with a boy who didn\u2019t want to play with him, the boy would just keep running around the gym.\u00a0 Tired of trying to keep up, Max would finally give up and find someone else.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t know he was being snubbed and didn\u2019t take it personally.\u00a0 When he wanted to play with a girl who didn\u2019t want to play with him, however, she made sure he knew it was personal: I <\/em><\/strong>don\u2019t want to play with you<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The differences would hit me again later, every time I walked into Max\u2019s second grade classroom.\u00a0 The girls sitting quietly at the table reading books with lots of words on the page, the boys vroom-vrooming on the floor with multicolored matchbox cars.\u00a0 The girls chatting, the boys yelling.\u00a0\u00a0 It was easier to relate to the girls, being one of them myself.\u00a0 It reminded me of the days when I was the one reading dutifully at the table.\u00a0 I had thought of myself as an intellectual early on, and school was my ticket out of lower middle class life in Brooklyn.\u00a0\u00a0 I took myself seriously in a world that didn\u2019t always take girls seriously.\u00a0\u00a0 And I was proud of the achievements that followed, of my Ph.D. in clinical psychology, of making it into Manhattan, which had been the Emerald City of my youth.\u00a0 What would have happened if I\u2019d spent my time vroom-vrooming like the boys?<\/p>\n

Besides that, my boys so often mortify me, especially in front of the girl moms.\u00a0 When an eight year old Max stood at the exit of the Einstein exhibit at the Museum of Natural History one day and announced to anyone in earshot, \u201cWow, nothing can escape a black hole!\u00a0 Not even a fart,\u201d I turned red and wished I could fall into a black hole myself.<\/p>\n

But I had to admit, the mortification grew on me over time.\u00a0\u00a0 And I found my fellow boy moms telling similar stories, as we gradually came to admire behaviors we were supposed to be stamping out.\u00a0 One friend, Michelle, once disciplined her young son Keith with a time-out, only to hear him passing the time by burping the alphabet from A to Z.\u00a0 She had to turn her face away, so he couldn\u2019t see her turn red from laughing.\u00a0 Leah envied her sons\u2019 ability to wake up in the sweats they\u2019d worn to bed, which were the sweats they\u2019d worn all day, then run out to play with their friends without ever thinking to change their clothes or stressing about what to wear.\u00a0\u00a0 And, really, that was a pretty funny line about the black hole and the fart.<\/p>\n

Maybe at first it was a war of attrition for me, but one day, it became more than that.\u00a0 Last June, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it was hard not to fixate on the toxic treatments that lay ahead.\u00a0 Then, after a double mastectomy, painful weekly reconstruction and biweekly chemotherapy infusions, I suddenly grew tired of the seriousness of life.\u00a0 I was ready for some fun.\u00a0 I was ready for boys.<\/p>\n

Oh, how I\u2019ve grown to love the noise of boys.\u00a0 The way they run around, look like a mess, never caring that their pants are Ed Grimley-short, or that their shirts are ripped at the sleeve.\u00a0 I love the way they can just show up at the park and start up a soccer game with strangers; or how they live for the day they can whip out their gameboys and start helping kids they\u2019d never met get to higher levels in Super Mario Brothers.\u00a0 Or the indescribable look on Max\u2019s face when he heard the real name of a famous fashion designer.\u00a0 \u201cLip-SHIIIITS??!!!!\u00a0 Lip-SHIIIITS???!!!\u201d as if his whole life was worth living for that moment alone, and the moment he\u2019d bestow his newfound knowledge on the other boys.\u00a0 Not only the name itself, but the potential for jokes about having one\u2019s mouth and ass referred to in the same name would surely render him King of Disgusting Stuff for the day.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve even learned to love the way my boys belched complete words like \u201cape\u201d and \u201cox,\u201d\u00a0 the same words I\u2019d heard belched out by their dad after many a carbonated drink.\u00a0 The same dad who has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help thinking their noise and mess will be so much more one day \u2013 a sense of freedom, a sense that the world is a place to enjoy the fun of simply being alive, rather than just a springboard for oh-so-important achievements.\u00a0 Besides, sometimes, it\u2019s that very sense of fun and vitality that paves the way for those achievements.\u00a0 Isaac, for instance, started taking piano lessons when he was five, so he could play Hey Jude<\/em> like Paul McCartney.\u00a0 At age six, he was playing Thelonious Monk <\/em>with the same gusto he lavished on his arm-farts.\u00a0 As a four year old, Max aspired to be a professor of nose picking when he grew up, then he decided to be a Taoist monk, lecturing the grownups on the way of the Tao and the yin\/yang. And they would listen.\u00a0 Now, at age eleven, he\u2019s honing his talents in mathematics and cartooning.\u00a0 He draws comic strips with lots of blood and inappropriate dialogue, while calling out the first fifteen Fibonacci numbers.\u00a0\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what either boy will end up doing with his adult life, but I know it\u2019ll be interesting.\u00a0 I hope it\u2019ll stay fun.<\/p>\n

I hope my boys will know the difference between those kinds of achievements and the kinds we parents brag about on urbanbaby, like how early they learned to read, or whether their admissions test scores were in the 99.9^{th<\/sup> percentile as opposed to only the 99th<\/sup> (believe me, it happens).\u00a0 And I hope they steer clear of the kinds of achievements that are just a more socially acceptable form of aggression, like being able to brag about which top schools they get into, or the fancy neighborhood where they live, or amassing the most money.\u00a0 Why aim so low, when they can aim for fun?\u00a0 For feeling alive and free?\u00a0 I hope the girls learn the same lessons as they grow up.\u00a0\u00a0 And I hope it doesn\u2019t take them as long as it took me.<\/p>\n}

When I came home after one of those chemotherapy infusions, five year old Isaac met me at the door, with ten year old Max standing behind him giggling; both were sharing the same evil grin.\u00a0 They were always there to greet me on my chemo Tuesdays, grin in tow.\u00a0 On this particular day, Isaac looked me in the eye very seriously and said, \u201cMom?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, Isaac?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDid you know I like big butts and I cannot lie?\u201d<\/p>\n

I wondered what other inappropriate songs Max was teaching him, but didn\u2019t ask any questions.\u00a0 I also didn\u2019t think about the waves of nausea that were going to hit me in the next couple of days, or how much hair I\u2019d find on my pillow the next morning, or whether I was going to die in my forties.\u00a0 I just laughed.\u00a0 My treatments are finished now, I\u2019m still alive, and the boys are still making me laugh.<\/p>\n

I hope my boys never succumb to my attempts to civilize them.\u00a0\u00a0 For one thing, Isaac\u2019s been working on an arm-fart\/burp combination that\u2019s going to be a killer, and I wouldn\u2019t want to miss it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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