I guess I'm just a bad boy
Dealing with with future men
In the before times I tried to avoid doing much negative self-talk in front of the kids. I find forcing people to give you compliments and tell you you’re not that bad is an annoying character trait and also I don’t think that’s something kids should have to do for their mom. Plus, our younger one tends to indulge in this—when he’s in trouble he’ll shout from his room “I guess nobody likes ME!!” or “I guess I’m just a BAD BOY!” (“I guess” is one of his burn-it-down sentence starters, like when he’ll tell his brother “I guess you just don’t want to have a good time.” )
But the pandemic came, and after over a month of that, we had two and a half days of oppressive rain last week, which was like a weighted blanket of depression. I crawled right into self-pity. I started doing my version of “I guess…” in front of the kids and my husband, which tends to start with “Sorry.” “I’m sorry you don’t have a better teacher right now. I wish you did.” Also, “I’m sorry I look like this and don’t take care of myself anymore.”
Then I felt sorry for myself that I was doing this. I guess I’m just a bad coronavirus mom.
Finally, Thursday the sun came out and like zombies we all came crawling out of our tombs. My friend Megan rode her bike by with her son to drop something off for my older kid. Megan has two boys exactly the same age as mine and we have a very cathartic shorthand. We have a facial expression we exchange a lot and if it had a caption I think it’d just be: “Idiots.”
“I couldn’t deal at all today,” I confessed to Megan from a quarter block away. I told her about the self-talk.
“‘No, Mommy. Don’t say that Mommy, you’re the best, Mommy’” Megan filled in. She apparently had had this exact same type of conversation with her boys. I started to laugh.
“Also yesterday I started saying I’m fat and old and ugly,” I said.
“‘No Mommy, you’re the most beautiful lady in the world, Mommy,’” she said, playing the role of our kids. In a few moments I was laughing, hard. This is why friends are so important right now. You need to be able to get the things in your head outside of your face to someone who has been there. The thing that had made me want to cry earlier was now making me laugh just by saying them out loud.
In the spirit of mom friends, today I chat with journalist and nurse Jennifer Fink, another mom of all boys—hers are ages 14, 17, 19, and 22. She has a newsletter of her own called the Building Boys Bulletin about her work as a parenting writer and mom. If you’d like to subscribe to the bulletin, Evil Witches readers get a 25% discount—from $60 to $45 for a year— by going here.
After I had two sons I found myself drawn to mothers of older boys, curious to hear their secrets and their tricks, convinced that they somehow know the spoilers to this movie that I am just in the first act of.
Sometimes it feels like people can barely conceal their sadness or schadenfreude for mothers of all boys. You must have gotten a lot of comments over the years about “going for the girl.”
With each subsequent kid it gets worse. By boy #4, we knew, based on the ultrasound he’d be a boy, and we didn’t tell anybody else until he was born because of our experiences with #3 and we were getting those pitying looks and “Oh that’s too bad.”
People say the stupidest things—the first outing after I had the youngest one, I had a bunch of younger boys with me, including the newborn in the carrier, and I'm at Wal-Mart and someone says, “So you're gonna try for a girl, right?” I literally just pushed this kid out.
I would sometimes take both my kids to the grocery store and someone would come up to me very sympathetically, like “I’ve been there,” or “You must have your hands full!” and I’d think “...but they’re actually being good right now…”
One of the things I tell boy moms is that you need to find other boy moms, because they’re getting the same looks from the other boys’ moms.
What’s the state of lockdown with older boys?
You know when toddlers go on food jags and they just want to eat crackers for 3 days and you worry about it and the pediatrician is like “It all evens out”? Two days ago the 19 year old didn’t come down for supper and had fallen asleep. When I talked to him, the day before that he’d downloaded a new video game and played it for 24 hours with no sleep and was exhausted. But while I talked to him, he was hooking up his boat to go fishing. Over the course of a week or a month, it all evens out. My 17 year old is pretty much nocturnal now. He’ll wake up in the afternoon and doesn't attempt school work until at least 8 or 9 at night, but that works for him. It’s interesting to observe them in the wild.
The downside of being with all boys to me is when they are all here for dinner—there’s 3 of them around my table now [with the oldest out of town] and only one of me, and so there’s a lot more ganging up. They’re talking about their stuff which is totally stupid and not necessarily interesting to me, or they’re ripping on each other, or they’re picking on me, so sometimes you can feel a little bit left out.
One of the things that’s been fortunate is that since their dad and I got divorced 10 years ago, they spend half the time at their dad’s house and half of the time at his house. They have someplace else to go.
How much do you try to monitor what the younger ones do online at this age and with everything going on?
I let it all go a long time ago. Back before the internet was what it is is now and before everyone had cell phones I tried to control it a lot more. For my oldest son, I had quarters that I had colored on with magic markers that you could redeem for time on the computer. But what I didn’t know how to account for was boy #1 is playing the game while the other 3 are watching him, and everyone’s just sitting watching all day everyday. You can say I’m lazy, or practical. It’s not a good use of my time to be the referee with that.
For the most part now they do a pretty good job of self-regulating. Sometimes they binge hard, and they sometimes do other things. My youngest one has always been exposed to content that his oldest brother never was at that same age. It’s hard when you're a family to drastically limit exposure.
How do you mitigate with living with all boys, and their mess and their noise and the constant eating?
It gets worse before it gets better. Little kid piss and shit is one thing. High school soccer player cleats are a whole other layer. Some of it is that your standards continue to drop, and you learn techniques from other smart moms—I knew one mom who always kept a stick of deodorant in the car, especially when her kids were in early puberty. She could toss it to her son before he got out and say “Here, put this on.”
I’ve learned that it's been so important to carve out spaces where I can go and get away. A few years ago, I got a comfy recliner in my bedroom. It’s a totally worthwhile investment where I can go and be away from it.
If there is one thing I think I should have done more of when my kids were growing up, it’s insisting that they help with chores and meals. When you don’t lay that foundation all along, that gets really hard. I fell into this partly because this is what I saw growing up, and partly because it’s easier to do it myself than to show them how to do it my way and fight with them.
It can be its own form of work, figuring out which parts of housework kids can actually do. Do you have any advice on how to be “the girl” for your boys, what to tell them or not tell them about how women think and feel?
That’s where I think having all boys is harder than if I had a mixed family. They are all experts at boy puberty. My youngest one especially, he’s seen his brothers go through it. He could tell by his third brother, when he started getting crabby, he was like “Oh, here we go.” He knew what was happening. It’s a lot harder to bring up and talk about girl puberty and what happens to women when it’s not really a relevant thing to them. I’ve talked to them broadly; I’m a health writer, and because of my On Boys podcast I have these books and I’ve interviewed lots of people about consent and sex and talking to your kids. My kids want to hear none of that from me. The nice thing is that life and the news gives us lots and lots of reasons to talk about how women feel, like, maybe don’t send a dick pic to someone.
Do your boys notice or care about pop culture and marketing and apparel and such that says “Girls are the future,” “Girls run the world,” etc.?
My guys have noticed it, and have complained about it, and do feel marginalized by it. I’m raising white males who kind of can feel persecuted. That can feel crazy to me and to you, since everybody in power is a white male, which is what we’re talking about. Our kids don’t have the context we have. My boys have only grown up in this world where they see “girl power” shirts for girls, but they don’t see that for boys. They go to school in classrooms they can figure out quickly that teachers like girls, and it's always the boys who are getting in trouble. They become very conscious of these messages. The real message is that some men are bad and do horrible things but it gets oversimplified in their minds to “men are bad.” That’s been a very challenging thing to navigate as they get older, especially as a woman. I need to have respect for their position and let them be heard and at the same time try to convey the context.
Tell me about Building Boys Bulletin.
I’ve been doing “boy things” for years; I realize that part of the reason why I’m the mom I am is that I’m constantly reading these articles and in touch with these experts. I’ve learned so much about boys and their challenges and how they think and what they work and that’s influenced me and made me a better boy mom. I share a lot of that info on Twitter and on Facebook , but they’re always changing their algorithms, and any one person who sees me won’t see most of what I post. Building Boys Bulletin is a way for me to share directly with other parents of boys, without a middleman or algorithm getting in the way.
Do you think that having boys has translated into having more or better friendships with men?
I think I've always preferred to have men as friends rather than females. I have long appreciated the fact that guys tend to be less dramatic about stuff, what you see is what you get.
If they’re mad, you know they’re mad, and then it’s done. I prefer that. I know it sounds terribly anti-female. I’m the oldest of 4 brothers, and a sister; you’d think I probably should have been prepared for this. But I still wasn’t prepared to be a mom of boys. It’s totally different when they’re jumping off YOUR couch.
If you’d like to subscribe to Jenny’s newsletter, Building Boys Bulletin, Evil Witches readers get a 25% discount—from $60 to $45 for a year— by going here.
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