When my youngest son was about four weeks old, I sat on a bench on the pool deck at the Y.M.C.A., the baby in the crook of my left arm while he sucked hungrily at the bottle I held in my left hand. With my right hand and my teeth, I adjusted goggles for my 3-year-old, who was embarking upon his fourth or fifth swim lesson.
I heard a voice nearby with a familiar greeting: “You’ve got your hands full!” Immediately, my son was explaining to a woman who appeared to be in her 60s that this was his new baby brother, that he also had two older brothers, and that they had all been to visit the baby in the hospital before they saw him at home.
“Four boys?” she asked me. I nodded. “Wow, you really have your hands full.”
My new companion went on to tell me that she, too, had four boys. They were in their 30s, all married, with children of their own. She told me what each did for a living, where each lived and how many children each had. She talked about her boys, now men, with zest and enthusiasm, clearly delighted with the lives they had built.
Pool Lady has what I so fervently hope, work and pray to have in 30 years: four independent, married, productive, good fathers who, it makes me tear up to remember, used to be my four babies—unfathomably adorable and earnestly winsome and proudly blowing bubbles in the pool as they held the wall and kicked. Once, barring a tragedy or a war, a mom like me would have simply expected this outcome. Three or four kids were the norm, most boys grew up into men, and mothers of several became grandmothers of many as a matter of course.
But today, as almost everyone across the political and cultural spectrum is now aware, boys in the United States are flailing andfailing at much higher rates than both American girls and past generations of American boys. Those of us concerned about the nation’s sons, and our own, have a plethora of problems to preoccupy us:academic underperformance,chronic underemployment,porn-brained cyborg-sexuality, and profoundloneliness and isolation. Moreover, in my experience, when we talk about the problem of “failure to launch”—that is, the inability or unwillingness to achieve adult independence from one’s parents, habitationally, financially, emotionally or otherwise—it is tacitly understood that we are talking predominantly, if not exclusively, about sons.
So it’s probably rational for me to be flooded with anxious questions about the endless tomorrows I cannot see, none of which have accessible answers but all of which have practical, urgent implications for how I parent my boys today.
This essay is not a prescription for how to raise boys or a panacea for the societal problems that ail them. Those are well above my pay grade. It is merely an attempt to be honest about the questions that preoccupy this #boymom, as well as about how my incomplete answers to those questions are shaped not just by having four sons—now ages 10, 8, 4 and 1—but also by having no daughters.
Are We Doing Anything Right?
In observing the wider world in which my sons are coming of age and reflecting on my husband’s and my strengths and limitations, I think we might be getting three things mostly right for our family of boys.
First, we eschewgentle parenting and embody presumptive parental authority. Our predisposition toward order and respect and our unapologetic clarity about who is in charge has served our boys well. Not just because they are generally well behaved, though they are, but because the early and unyielding expectation of obedience has, in more recent years, opened up space to converse and connect with our kids in ways that we could not with less well-behaved children.
Second, we approach intellectual and spiritual formation through alow-tech household with limited screen time. We try to prioritize lots of reading, regular chores, a balance of organized sports and outdoor free play, and open conversation. When our kids have nothing else to do, they go outside or reach for books. At the same time, unlike some parents who share our tendency to avoid technology in the home, we have not banned screens. Plenty of our family time centers on movies and sporting events, and we are about to allow a video game console. We do not hide anything from our kids about current events or how we believe they should be interpreted. Many films, news stories and even baseball games have provided conversation starters for weighty topics, from mercy and justice to death, as well as political and interpersonal dynamics.
Third and finally, we send our kids to Catholic school. In this way, we retain far more control over the “inputs” our kids are getting than would be possible if they spent 30 hours a week at a public (or nonsectarian private) school. At the same time, we provide them with more varied and more potentially deleterious opportunities for interaction with peers, with non-family adults and with technology than would be possible if they were homeschooled. Our sons are consistently in the company of many other people—experiencing wins and losses, coping with frustration or boredom, avoiding or giving in to temptation—in an environment shaped by neither amoral chaos nor parental control. We can see the foundational formation of that habituated wiring beginning to bear fruit. So each month my husband and I spend many hours as parent volunteers for clubs, communications and events, pouring ourselves into our boys’ parochial school and its community, which we see as an indivisible part of pouring ourselves into our boys.
What Can We Do Better?
Among the mantras my husband and I have been repeating to our boys since our older ones were little is this one: “We speak our feelings and live our virtues.” In other words, we’re allowed to feel angry or frustrated and to express it, but we’re not allowed to be rude or dismissive to others because we are angry or frustrated.
At school, sports practice and the grocery store, our boys do a pretty good job embodying this mantra. At home, not so much.
Of course, tantrums come with the toddler territory. And of course, if you have strong-willed sons 20 months apart and about the same size, tackle-induced injuries, basement walls with head-shaped dents, and endless arguments over whether or not that was a foul ball are the price of doing business.
Yet my husband and I are acutely aware of the need to be intentional in helping our sons learn, as they approach adolescence, that home is not an emotional free-for-all. In this endeavor, we do not find today’s iteration ofsocial-emotional learning helpful. It seems to focus on the elimination of feelings like frustration rather than stressing the value of strength to act virtuously no matter how frustrated one feels. Thus, it can inculcate fragility.
Still, we also believe that a more demanding kind of social-emotional learning is crucial, especially today and especially for boys; and we struggle with the nuanced application of this aspect of our sons’ formation. We both come from demonstrative, ethnic families (I, Italian and Jewish; he, Liberian) in which, when we were young children, the intergenerational, extended family model was on its last legs. In that world, parental authority was diluted among many adults who interacted mostly spontaneously. Hence, each individual’s operatic volatility could be taken in stride because there were often so many other people around.
But our sons do not live in that kind of a world, and neither will their own future children. So it is imperative that our boys’ management of their emotions within the home and the family mature over time into a much closer approximation of their current behavior outside the home. Right now, the hardest part for them is “living our virtues.” Tempers run hot, after all, among those who share a bedroom. Soon, though, they will be adolescents, when “speaking our feelings” may become the difficult part. And just like thoughtless volatility, overdetermined serenity can lead to loneliness by way of failure to connect with others.
So I often need to take some deep breaths myself. Clearly, we have our work cut out for us.
What Is God’s Vision for Me?
When Pool Lady told me about her grown sons, she mentioned that two lived nearby and two lived far away, where their wives are from. “It’s wonderful,” she glowed, “grandchildren. The ones who are here, I see, usually, twice a week. The truth is, though…when you have boys…you’re always the other grandmother.” She paused. “But that’s a good thing; it means my boys are blessed. They all have wonderful marriages.”
I pretended to find this reflection revelatory. But really, this gendered reality had hit me the moment I learned our fourth child was another boy.
I am not the kind of woman who backed into marriage or motherhood, because I am not the kind of woman who backs into anything. Always a Martha, never a Mary, I am, as I have always been, burdened by the multiplying cares of carrying out my own expanding vision. From the time I was in high school, I knew that I was called to have a family—a household—along with, if I could figure out a way to make it happen, a meaningful career.
Today, at 37, that 20-plus-year-old vision—a big old house with a full slow cooker on the counter and several boisterous, healthy kids chasing each other with neighboring children in the twilight until I call them in for dinner—is my daily life. No, it is not always so picture-perfect, not by a long shot. I’m not one for crafts, my cooking is basic, and I’m terrible at getting the laundry folded and put away. I’ve had to zig and zag professionally in ways I never intended, and I work into the wee hours much more than I’d like. Still, I am blessed to be living what I once prayed for.
Since we brought that fourth boy home from the hospital, I have felt the brutal ephemerality of every moment.
Of course, I know that many parents of girls as well as of boys, especially those who have several children, harbor pre-emptive nostalgia with what is likely to be the last baby. And I’m sure that if I had a girl or two among my children, I would have, too. But it would not be quite the same.
Sure, I might discipline a daughter with greater leniency, and possibly consider a broader range of options for educational and other decisions. But more importantly, if I had a daughter, I would probably persist indefinitely in the comforting idea that motherhood changes in form but never in substance. I would feel as though our home would have a central role to play, and an implicit sense of place from which to play it, long after the kids grow up. As it is, I feel the fundamental transience of our household.
Yes, I know that binary contrasts between daughters and sons seem traditionalist and essentialist and, therefore, perhaps to some, unenlightened. All I can say is that I’m telling the truth as I observe it to be, not as I wish it were. In circumstances where safety is scarce, we save women and children first. On sinking ships, for example, women with grown daughters have traditionally climbed into lifeboats alongside at least one of the people they love most. Meanwhile, women with only grown sons lose them. While this sobering thought may be of little consequence for most of us in today’s world, it is premised on primal realities with more prosaic—and more universal—ramifications.
When it comes to sons, maternal success and maternal obsolescence seem to walk hand in hand. For a healthy woman my age to rely on her mom as a primary source of support and connection, as an individual independent of her father or her husband, can be fruitful and sweet. But for a healthy man my age to do the same, as an individual independent of his father or his wife, is an indication that something is going less than successfully. So, for a mother of sons, success means growth but also dilution. To be there for grown sons in a healthy, functional way, a mother must recognize her role as a circumscribed one, both dependent upon and defined in large part by others.
Mary by the manger—full of grace—is the central figure in the Nativity story, putting herself at risk that her son might live. Mary at the foot of the cross—full of anguished, helpless love as Jesus endures torture to fulfill the destiny that takes him away from her—is her son’s most loyal follower unto the death that he endures so that all humankind might live. The model mother starts by giving over her body. She ends by getting her human self, body and soul, out of her son’s way, to serve and be served by others, so that he can give the love in which she raised him to the world.
Maybe, with the gift of four healthy boys, I am learning some humility: It was always God’s vision, not mine, that I was building toward anyway. Maybe he really does have a plan for me that stretches beyond my own for myself. I can’t begin to envision it, though.
And maybe that’s a start.
