Between Mothers and Sons: Women Writers Talk about Having Sons and Raising Men - Hardcover

Patricia Stevens

It is the late 1980s, an unseasonably hot Saturday afternoon in May, with only a few weeks left in the school year. A water war is about to erupt in my backyard. Six boys ranging in age from ten to thirteen are dividing into two opposing groups. My sons, one on each side, will use their own personal rivalry to keep the battles escalating.

Before the first shot is fired, however, the boys sit in a shady spot on the grass and draw up the rules of conduct. They choose weapons. Each side has access to two battery-powered plastic Uzi's that can shoot a stream of water for a distance of twenty feet or more. They have a few ordinary water pistols and these, they decide, are acceptable weapons, though for a conflict of this magnitude, nearly obsolete.

Sitting at the dining room table near the open window that faces the backyard, I can hear their entire operating plan as I write out checks to pay the bills. Soon, my older son appears inside the house and begins rooting around in both of our junk drawers. "Do we have any balloons?" he asks. But before I can answer, he has opened the hall closet and is rummaging through a box on the floor.

"No balloons in there," I say.

"Advertiser bags," he says excitedly. Though his younger brother no longer delivers the free weekly paper filled with classifieds to every house in the neighborhood, we still have a large cache of the very thin clear plastic bags that had been an essential part of the paper route. My son runs into the bathroom, half fills one of the bags, and ties off the open end. Yes! It holds water but is thin enough to break on contact. Once he is outside again, another arms control agreement is carefully negotiated. Each side is limited to a specific number of preloaded Advertiser water bombs, but all combatants can refill their Uzi's and water pistols from strategically placed buckets at any time. There are also boundaries: our entire front and back yard; another boy's yard, which is two doors down; the unpaved alley that runs behind the houses on our side of the street.

After the boys fill the buckets and all their weapons from the hose in the backyard, they go off to their separate bases of operation, where they spend another fifteen minutes planning strategy. Then the war begins -- the shouting, running, hiding, shrieking, and the splattering of water bombs -- and soon all six boys are wearing soppy shorts, clinging T-shirts, and dripping hair. By this time I am at the window taking in as much of the war as I can. I feel the joy of seeing them completely delighted and absorbed by child's play on this perfect day, but I also feel more than just a physical distance as I stand back and watch this world of boys. A water war was something that I had clearly missed as a child. If my older brother's friends had tried to organize such a match, I would have either been excluded from it or quickly overpowered. If there were battles in our girl world, my friends and I fought them either with words or calculated silence. If we squabbled too long or if someone ended up in tears, my mother would use her dictatorial powers to call off the war and send the other girls home. It never occurred to my friends and me that we might fight for fun, that we would admit to a battle of any kind.

* * *

That day in May marked the first of several backyard water wars, but it was also the first time I had consciously envied my sons' obvious "otherness." Although before that time I had certainly admired what I saw as their boyness -- both sons at two and three fearlessly racing their Big Wheels down our steep driveway; Jeremy at nine building a tree fort completely without adult interference; Jordan spending hours each day after school fishing for crawdads in the creek -- I had little experience with, or interest in, any of these activities myself. Although I am certain there were girls from my generation who enjoyed digging in the mud, racing their bicycles, or collecting slimy, fat night crawlers to skewer on the end of a fishing hook, I was not one of them. Content with my girl world of jump rope and jacks, paper dolls and playing house, I saw no need to cross a gender boundary and had little reason to believe I might be missing something on the "other side." As an adult, however, this particular inexperience often left me puzzled over the habits of my sons and their friends, particularly their methods for satisfying a need for physical contact. Why, when more than two boys were together in my living room, did they have to spend so much time wrestling and rolling around on the floor? This behavior always left me in a state of agitation: Can't you stop that for just one minute?

My sons were born during the 1970s, a time when a large part of my self-image was in the process of being torn down and reconstructed under the light of the feminist movement. For a time I belonged to a consciousness-raising group, and the members of this association all believed in the same basic tenet: with regard to nature versus nurture, the scales tipped substantially on the side of nurture. As we sat around one another's living rooms on Wednesday nights (after cooking dinner, doing dishes, and getting the kids into their pajamas), we talked about two issues: our bodies and how to take care of them, and our men and how to get them to be more like us. There were six of us; we were close in age, from twenty-nine to thirty-five; and each of us had at least one young son, a toddler or preschooler, whom we were raising in our own image. It was the adult men who were the "other" -- or so we wanted to believe.

Despite the obvious physical differences between them and us, when our sons were small, we believed that everything was environment. After all, we were in the middle of a revolution; we were finally asserting our power; and as we fought out the gender war, we were seizing control -- blazing the trail for ourselves, our sons, and the future women in our sons' lives. The boys we were parenting would be cooks, housekeepers, caretakers, and good listeners; we would train them well -- to be just like us. And even though most of us climbed into bed with one every night, an adult male was the enemy, and we would do whatever it took to stop our little boys from ever straying into the enemy camp.

At the co-op nursery school my sons attended, parents were required to work three hours a week. Except for the last year I was there, those parents were all women who thought of themselves as "enlightened" moms: We were raising our preschoolers by the unisex method. The girls (by God) would be doctors, astronauts, chemical engineers, and gourmet cooks; the boys would be gourmet cooks and doctors, astronauts, and chemical engineers. There was only one problem with this ideology: at the co-op nursery school, most of the boys stayed clear of the play kitchen, and most of the girls avoided the Tonka trucks. After much discussion among the parents, Barbara, the school's director, decided that each child should be encouraged at "free time" to become engaged in an activity that she or he did not ordinarily participate in. Parent helpers would usher the girls, who spent most of their time at the dress-up corner pretending to be princesses and brides, over to the Legos and send the boys, who always gravitated to digging outside in the sand, over to the dollhouse. This plan failed miserably, of course, as the three- and four-year-olds could not be persuaded to alter their daily routines, but no mother would dare to suggest that the cause of the failure might be some inherent gender...differences.

* * *

As time passed, and I could see that my sons, despite me, were developing a number of stereotypical masculine interests, my rigid ideology gave way. Getting older, getting divorced, and acquiring more life experience helped in this process, but I credit my sons with moving me toward a more humanistic view. Each of my sons, in his own way, made me see that by trying to create a dream child in my own image, I was also creating mile-high hurdles and asking him to jump over them. It took many years and a great deal of painful conflict to learn to be aware of, to respect, and to honor my sons' unique and separate identities. The challenge for mothers of sons is to realize that because we do not share a sexual identity, that because we have not grown up in a male body, we cannot presume to understand everything there is to know about our sons' world. There is as much to learn from the experience of rasing young men as there is to teach young men about what it is to be female.

The idea for this anthology came to me one quiet Sunday afternoon when, with both of my sons in college, I decided to tackle a project I'd been avoiding for years. From a dusty storage room, I brought two large cardboard cartons filled to overflowing with the boys' old schoolwork down to my living room and began sorting. I planned to end up with two much smaller boxes, one for each son, that would be representative of his school years. I saved only a small portion of the worksheets and timed math tests (the ones with the perfect scores, of course), but I lingered over each piece of art and writing: my older son's second-grade journal, illustrated to show that his father no longer lived with us; a bound collection of fifth-grade empathy cards expressing concern over the accident in the school yard that resulted in my younger son's broken arm; cartoon drawings of warplanes dropping their bombs on a company of stick figures below; construction-paper Mother's Day cards, complete with white-paste-encrusted paper doilies.

Behind each item was a story, and in the days and weeks after I had finished this project, I began to think more and more about how my life over a period of twenty years (thirteen of those as a single parent) had been shaped by these two male children. While they were at home and I was completely occupied getting through each food-shopping cycle, each soccer or baseball season, each school year, I did not have time to step back and se...