Before my son was born, I only had part time parenting experience, and that was with step daughters. My twin nieces, whom I sometimes cared for while my sister traveled for business, are girls.
My mother had three girls, and her only exposure to boys was infrequent times with her brother’s three sons, close in age to the three of us. She said she always felt like she was starving them when they stayed with us. She was used to cooking small meals for picky eaters. They ate everything that couldn’t outrun them.
Before you get all irate at me for making gender assumptions, know that I’m a feminist who wrote papers about just such labeling, and the predictive quality of stereotyping, in graduate school. I bought my son a barbie doll when he asked for one at age three. But here’s the thing, real little humans come along and blow all kinds of theories out of the water.
The first lesson came with diaper changes, starting when I didn’t know how to put one on him when we got home from the hospital. My step daughters were nine and twelve when I started dating their father. Diapers were long in their past. My nieces were ten years old and diaper designs were different a decade later.
Once I figured out diaper geometry, though, I then had to learn to dodge and shield. From the unexpected onslaught of pee coming straight at my face while I was changing his diaper. I’m sure I imagined him giggling gleefully while raining up on my parade.
As I think about it, a lot of what I learned about parenting a boy had to do with penis stuff. I let his Dad, and a male nurse friend, talk me into having him circumcised. I am so sorry, son. I was then, and much more so now, an advocate of leaving a penis the way it came into the world.
The first doctor botched it. Little Man wouldn’t stop bleeding. The circumcision was at eight days. When he was nine days old we rushed to a pediatric emergency room, for a surgeon to correct the first one, under anesthesia this time. The surgeon wore huge magnifying glasses with a headlamp. Very reassuring. But all’s well that ends well.
Except when he was two or so, he told me his penis felt funny. And then he said it hurt. Terrified that I had ruined my son’s penis for life, we went back to the pediatric surgeon. He examined his handiwork, asked my toddler a question or two, and announced that his penis “felt funny” because he was getting toddler erections. Who knew? Dear God, what next.
So many things, but let’s stay with the penis motif for a bit. In Middle School he asked for a jock strap. He played basketball, and I presume he’d seen them in the locker room. Not having a man around to ask to get him one, I pulled on my big girl panties and went shopping. You will absolutely not believe how naive I was. It can be presumed I had seen a few penises in my time. But I hadn’t seen my son’s since he got old enough to bathe himself. I don’t remember what criteria I used to pick out a packaged jock strap, but when I got it home and we unwrapped it, we discovered one that would fit his Dad. And that’s saying a lot.
I thought it was hysterical. He was not amused at the time, although now he sees the humor. I offered to try again, and he refused. As far as I know he didn’t wear one until maybe college.
There’s more, but it occurs to me that he might not be comfortable with the world (or at least my thousand or so followers) knowing details about his genitalia. And I really want to meet my grandchildren, that I hope he has one day. And if they’re boys, I’m ready this time.
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This post was previously published on A Parent Is Born and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Unsplash