Me and the Boy

 I was a “boy’s boy” growing up— sports, occasional fist-fights and the smug certainty that mine was the superior gender (despite Suzanne Anderson beating me in arm wrestling in 4^th grade). The one cliché that didn’t apply was building and fixing things, an aptitude that continued to elude me my whole adult life. 

 

By the time I got to college, the feminine side of my psyche, nurtured by Whitman, Chopin and a growing interest in teaching young children, began to grow along with my hair and embroidering flowers on my bell-bottom jeans. I took a class on Feminism and two years after graduating college, got a job at an elementary/preschool where most of my teacher colleagues were women. A few years later, I had two children, both girls. Who later filled our house with their friends, also girls. As a music teacher, I found myself wholly at home teaching the girls and puzzled about how to reach the boys. Especially as the school grew to a Middle School. 

 

By the late 80’s, Robert Bly, Michael Meade and James Hillman began organizing Men’s Retreats, noticing that men embracing their feminine sides was an important step, but fell short of the possibility of embracing a positive masculinity. So by 1990, I joined a Men’s Group of mostly men who knew each other from the school with the hope of investigating what a non-toxic masculinity might look and feel like. 35 years later, we’re still trying to figure it out!

 

But somewhere along the way, I noticed my relationship with the boys I taught shifting. I somehow learned how to appreciate their energy and help turn it into a positive musical experience. When my granddaughter Zadie was born, I was thrilled and delighted. Familiar territory and happy to be in it. By the time my grandson Malik was born, I finally felt ready to grandparent a boy. 

 

And here we are, my wife and I up in Portland caring for the grandkids for five days and loving every minute with them both. But particularly appreciating my comfort with Malik— playing cards, playing basketball (he beat me in HORSE!), watching the Warrior’s game. He also makes his own breakfast and lunch, reads voraciously, can be wholly tender and sweet alongside his boyish swagger and confidence. 

 

I’m fully aware that the very notion of masculine and feminine, even discussed as different energies within both boys and girls, has been called into question and sometimes downright dismissed. I also noticed early on that in staff meetings, the women teachers would agree that this was all socially constructed and then in their casual conversation, those parenting boys and girls would confess, “They’re SO DIFFERENT!” It seems logical to me that nature’s choice of division of labor through creating two sexes in mammals would have some effect. 

 

Simply put, the energies needed for killing animals and nurturing children are different. Long after such division of labor is actually practiced in a world where both men and women go to the office, those energies would still be present in our ancestral cellular structure. Not one iota of this means excusing men from child-raising and women from kick-boxing. But it seems wise to start the conversation of balancing the two energies from the foundation of  where they both begin. 

 

But I’m not going to solve that here. Or anywhere! I’m just happy to have a chance to bond with my grandson. That’s all I really wanted to say.