Motherhood, The Second OldestProfession (4 page)

Who Are Harder to Raise… Boys or Girls?

If you want to stir up a hornet's nest, just ask mothers, “Who are harder to raise—boys or girls?”

The answer will depend on whether they're raising boys or girls.

I've had both, so I'll settle the argument once and for all. It's girls.

With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It's all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.

With girls, everything looks great on the surface. But beware of drawers that won't open. They contain a three-month supply of dirty underwear, unwashed hose, and rubber bands with blobs of hair in them.

You have to wonder about a girl's bedroom when you go in to make her bed and her dolls have a look of fear and disbelief in their eyes.

A mother once wrote me to agree. She said that "after giving birth to three boys, I finally got a girl on my fourth try. At first, she did all the sweet little things I longed to see. She played coy, put her hands to her face when she laughed and batted her eyes like Miss Congeniality.

"Then she turned fourteen months and she struck like a hurricane. When she discovered she could no longer sail down the bannister and make my hair stand on end, she turned to streaking. I'd dress her ever so sweetly and go to the breakfast dishes. Before one glass was washed, she'd strip, unlock the door and start cruising the neighborhood. One day, the dry cleaner made a delivery and said, 'My goodness, I hardly recognized Stacy with her clothes on.'

"As she got older, she opened her brother's head with a bottle opener for taking her dolls and called the school principal a 'thug' to his face.

“I am pregnant again. I sleep with a football under my pillow each night.”

I knew of another mother who said, "Boys are honest. Whenever you yell upstairs, 'What's all that thumping about?' you get an up front reply, 'Joey threw the cat down the clothes chute. It was cool.'

"When my daughter is upstairs playing with her dolls I yell, 'What are you girls doing?' She answers sweetly, 'Nothing.'

"I have to mid out for myself that they're making cookies out of my new bath powder and a $12.50 jar of moisturizer.

“Her pediatrician advised me to 'not notice' when she insisted on wearing her favorite outfit for four months. How do you ignore a long dress with a ripped ruffle, holes in the elbow and a Burger King crown? How would you handle it if you were in a supermarket and the loudspeaker announced, 'Attention Shoppers. We have a small child in produce wearing a long pink dress with a gauze apron, glittery shoes and a Burger King crown'? Our third child was born recently. Another girl. I told the orderly to pass maternity and go straight to geriatrics. I rest my case. God knows it's the only rest I've had in six years.”

Whether mothers want to believe it or not, they compete with their daughters. They recognize in them every feminine wile in the book because they've used it themselves. It worked on “Daddy” when you used it, and it'll work again with your daughter. (“Daddy, you do believe that a tree can swerve right out in front of a car, don't you?”)

Girls mature faster than boys, cost more to raise, and statistics show that the old saw about girls not knowing about money and figures is a myth. Girls start to outspend boys before puberty—and they manage to maintain this lead until death or an ugly credit manager, whichever comes first. Males are born with a closed fist. Girls are born with the left hand cramped in a position the size of an American Express card.

Whenever a girl sees a sign reading, “Sale, Going Out of Business, Liquidation,” saliva begins to form in her mouth, the palms of her hands perspire and the pituitary gland says, “Go, Mama.”

In the male, it is quite a different story. He has a gland that follows a muscle from the right arm down to the base of his billfold pocket. It's called “cheap.”

Girls can slam a door louder, beg longer, turn tears on and off like a faucet, and invented the term, “You don't trust me.”

So much for “sugar and spice and everything nice” and “snips and snails and puppydog tails.”

What kind of a mother...

runs a wedding—in three hours, forty-three minutes and sixteen seconds?

Donna

It was the moment every mother of the Seventies prayed for.

The phone rang and the voice said, “Mom, guess what? Barry and I are getting married!” (Hallelujah!)

Married. Her friend, Sophie, had a son who had short hair, but he wasn't . . . married. Another friend, Eileen, could boast a daughter who still shaved her legs and waited for someone to open the car door for her, but even she wasn't . . . married.

Married. It was like a dream come true for Donna. Just think, soon her little girl would have unpaid bills, unplanned babies, calls from the bank, and substandard housing. All the things a mother dreams of for her child.

Not only that, Donna would become the first mother-in-law in her bridge club. She couldn't believe that after two years of cohabitation, it was finally happening.

Then Donna hesitated. What if this were another “commitment”? I ler mind raced to a meadow. A van painted with serpents. Grace Slick coming from a tape deck. Organic juice out of Dixie cups. Guests smoking the lawn.

As if she were reading her mother's mind, Lynn said, “Don't worry, Mom. It's going to be a traditional wedding.”

Tears welled in Donna's eyes. A real wedding. Stuffed mushrooms, cutaways. A string quartet. Silver pattern. Tapered candles. Barry Manilow. Navel-length corsages.

The bride-to-be's father was less exuberant. “Who's Barry?” he asked.

“I forgot to ask.”

“What do we know about him?”

“What's to know? He's the man who's going to marry (hallelujah!) our daughter.”

“He has some nerve, after they've been living together all these years.”

The invitation arrived within the week. It was shaped like a runner's shoe.

Lynn and Barry

Invite You to Their

Marathon of Nuptials

Saturday, June 18, at 2 pm

at Jackie's Body Shop.

Guests will assemble in Central

Park and run 10 K's with the

bride and groom to Jackie^s place.

Dress optional: Running or aerobics attire.

Donna and Mel looked at the invitation in silence. They were stunned. Mel spoke first. “I his isn't an invitation to a wedding. It's the opening of a gym. We're not going.”

Instinctively Donna stiffened. “May be you're not going, but my only daughter is being married (hallelujah!) for the first time and I'm not about to miss it. Tomorrow the bride's mother is going shopping for her outfit for the wedding, with or without the bride's father.”

The next day, Donna looked at her reflection in the fitting room mirror. She had experienced dizziness in a fitting room on only one other occasion, and that was the day she tried on a bathing suit wearing knee-hi hose. Today was a close second. Plum tights that glowed from the strain of a million fat pockets of cellulite fighting to get out were covered by a pink leotard that rode high over the hips. A matching pink headband tried valiantly to keep her forehead from falling into her eyes. She looked at the leg warmers and prayed she wouldn't have a hot flash. She knew that if she so much as cleared her throat the crotch would bind her ankles together.

Poking her head outside the curtain, she said to the salesperson, “On second thought, I think the groom's mother is wearing this. I think I'll go for the blue velour warm-ups. A daughter only gets married (hallelujah!) once.”

Her last stop was a sports center where a young man fitted her with running shoes. As she peeked into the X-ray machine to check the stress points on her new shoes, she asked, “By the way, young man, how far is 10 k's?”

“It's 6.2 miles,” he said.

On the way home, Donna smiled to herself and mused, “He must have misunderstood. Probably thought I said Circle K.”

Mel knew he was being stubborn, but he wasn't as forgiving of his daughter's independence and life-style as Donna. Around 8:30 pm on June 18, as he had done every five minutes that evening, he peeked through the Venetian blinds and spotted Donna emerging from a cab.

She limped noticeably while pressing her hand firmly on her backside.

“Where have you been?” he demanded.

"Oh Mel, you should have been there. It was wonderful. I started off at the park with everyone else and then I fought off three dogs, nursed two blisters, and finally hitched a ride with a motorcyclist who was going right by Jackie's Body Shop.

"Your daughter looked beautiful. They stood in front of a wall of mirrors and pledged to love one another forever as much as they did today, keep their bodies fit, and with God's love, both qualify for Boston with a 2:42.

"The groom's mother wore a T-shirt that read joggers do it better and the minister had Band-Aids on his nipples to keep his shirt from irritating them as he ran.

"I ate a lot of health food, and met a lot of people— one woman who said her daughter was married in a free parachute fall over Omaha and had to pack her own parachute. We're having lunch next Tuesday. Just before Lynn left she took me aside and said if she continues to run thirty to forty miles a week she won't ovulate and so I shouldn't expect any grandchildren right away. She said that's the first meaningful conversation we ever had in our entire lives.

“Barry is built like the U.N. building and sells air conditioners at Sears. Oh, I was the only one there carrying a handbag, and I think I pulled a hamstring, but Mel . . . our daughter is ... married!” (Hallelujah!)

Hair

Every hundred years or so, the Earth shifts and goes into another cycle. I missed the Stone Age, the Ice Age, and the Glacial Period, but I was here for most of the Age of Hair.

It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.

Like most mothers, I devoted my life to the length of my son's hair. Me would come down for breakfast and say, “Good morning,” and I would reply “Get a haircut. One egg or two?”

We would be standing in church, and as the priest encouraged us to “extend to one another the sign of peace,” I would turn to him, smile reverently, and say, “Get a haircut, weirdo.”

It was all we ever talked about. We argued about barbers and the length of time between haircuts. We argued about the price of shampoo, the limitation of hot water, how he was screwing up our septic tank, and how we'd never unload him at the altar if he insisted on looking like Walter Matthau in drag.

He would come home and try to tell me the barber gave him a Timothy Leary trim.

“It looks more like a King Kong clip to me.”

“What's a King Kong clip?”

“A light trim on your hands and ankles.”

“There's no pleasing you,” he shouted.

“Try!” I shouted back.

I always thought I was fair. I told him, “Hair can be as long, as shabby, and as dirty as it wants to be. It can be braided around the head five times or hang down to the tailbone in a ponytail ... as long as it's on someone else's son.”

The more I talked, the longer the hair became and the more fragile our relationship became.

In twelve years, not once did I give his hair a rest or miss an opportunity to harp on how he had disappointed me as a son.

Then one day he came into the kitchen and said, “When's dinner?”

I said mechanically, “You've got time to get a haircut. It's at 6:30.”

He said, “Okay.”

I nearly fainted.

When he returned, his hair was neatly trimmed and cleared his ears. We both smiled awkwardly. Like strangers on a blind date.

“So, what's been going on?” I asked.

“Not much,” he stammered. “What about you?”

I had no idea what a large part of our relationship had been based on such intimacies as, “I low long does it take you to wash that mop?” “How are you financing your shampoo these days?” “Did you know Attila the 1 Inn once wore that style?”

There was absolutely no rapport between us. His hair had been the only thing that had kept us together . , . the only common ground of communication we had.

I began to remember the good times . . . the time we ragged him about his hair on a vacation from Gary, Indiana, to Salt Lake City, Utah. The time really flew.

I recalled the time I told him I had enrolled him in a Miss Radial Tire competition and he had won.

Oh, I tried new lines of communication like, “You live like a hog,” “There is no boy so tall as the one who stoops to pick up a towel,” and “Don't ruin your dinner with that junk!” But somehow it wasn't the same.

We had lost that wonderful hostility that parents need to relate to their children.

Then one day he came home from school and my face lit up. “What's that disgusting bit of hair around your mouth and chin?”

“I'm growing a beard,” he said.

“And sit at my table, you're not. I cannot believe that's the chin I used to spend hours wiping the saliva and oatmeal from. Why are you doing this to your mother?”

“I'll keep it trimmed.”

“Hah. You show me a man with a beard and I'll show you what he had for lunch. It smells like pizza right now.”

“All the influential men of the world have had beards, like Moses, Christ, and Burt Reynolds.”

“You forgot King Henry VIII, Lenin, and Satan. I'll be honest with you. You look like one of the Seven Dwarfs.”

“I knew you wouldn't understand,” he said, slamming the door.

At least the beard would take us through Christmas vacation.

What kind of a mother would...

wash a measuring cup with soap after it only held water?

Sharon

Everyone said Sharon was a terrific mother.

Her neighbors said it.

She painted the inside of her garbage cans with enamel, grew her own vegetables, cut her own grass every week, made winter coats for the entire family from remnants, donated blood and baked Barbara Mandrell a doll cake for her birthday.

Her mother said it.

Sharon drove her to the doctor's when she had an appointment, color-coordinated the children's clothes and put them in labeled drawers, laundered aluminum foil and used it again, planned family reunions, wrote her Congressman, cut everyone's hair and knew her health insurance policy number by heart.

Her children's teacher said it.

She helped her children every night with their homework, delivered her son's paper route when it mined, packed nutritious lunches with little raised faces on the sandwiches, was homeroom mother, belonged to five car pools and once blew up 234 balloons by herself for the seventh grade cotillion.

Her husband said it.

Sharon washed the car when it rained, saved antifreeze from year to year, paid all the bills, arranged their social schedule, sprayed the garden for bugs, moved the hose during the summer, put the children on their backs at night to make sure they didn't sleep on their faces, and once found a twelve-dollar error in their favor on a tax return filed by H & R Block.

Her best friend said it.

Sharon built a bed out of scraps left over from the patio, crocheted a Santa Claus to cover the extra roll of toilet paper at Christmastime, washed fruit before her children ate it, learned to play the harpsichord, kept a Boston fern alive for a whole year, and when the group ate lunch out always figured out who owed what.

Her minister said it.

Sharon found time to read all the dirty books and campaign against them. She played the guitar at evening services. She corresponded with a poor family in Guatemala ... in Spanish. She put together a cookbook to raise funds for a new coffee maker for the church. She collected door to door for all the health organizations.

Sharon was one of those women blessed with a knack for being organized. She planned a “theme party” for the dog's birthday, made her children elaborate Halloween costumes out of old grocery bags, and her knots came out just right on the shoelaces when they broke.

She put a basketball “hoop” over the clothes hamper as an incentive for good habits, started seedlings in a toilet paper spindle, and insulated their house with empty egg cartons, which everyone else threw away.

Sharon kept a schedule that would have brought any other woman to her knees. Need twenty-five women to chaperone a party? Give the list to Sharon. Need a mother to convert the school library to the Dewey Decimal System? Call Sharon. Need someone to organize a block party, garage sale, or school festival? Get Sharon.

Sharon was a Super Mom!

Her gynecologist said it.

Her butcher said it.

Her tennis partner said it.

Her children . . .

Her children never said it.

They spent a lot of time with Rick's mother, who was always home and who ate cookies out of a box and played poker with them.