Looks like I was right to be concerned

When Drew was first born, I was terribly terribly concerned that he was a boy. I thought “Geez, it’s cute, but what the hell am I supposed to DO with it?” Coming from a family of all girls except for Dad, I felt a little like someone who had grown up with a dog but was suddenly handed a goldfish.
In one particularly distressing moment, I was opening some mail shortly after Drew had arrived. There was a nice greeting card in a blue envelope – a congratulations card! On the front flap of the card was a little sketch of a crib, covered in blankets like a little tent with a hand drawn sign that said “No girlz alowed!”. I think I cried for a half hour. That was my greatest fear – that’s what I was terrified of. Being shut out of some all boys club, only by MY boy. Not scared I wouldn’t love him enough, but that I would love him SO, SO much, but someday he would look at me and see just a girl. Now, of course, I realize how silly that all was, that he will never see me as a girl, I will just always be Mommy. And I can’t imagine my life as anything other than a mom to my rough and tumble boys, full of match box cars and dinosaurs.

But I was in the bookstore yesterday (Ahhh………the pleasant oasis of a half hour at the bookstore!) and I stopped by the parenting section, just to browse. I noticed a large segment of books dedicated to raising boys. Bringing Up Boys. The Wonder of Boys. Raising Boys. Raising Boys To Be Like Jesus. (!?!?!?!) Raising Cain (What is with the religious theme?) Don’t Screw This Up Or He’ll Be A Serial Killer.

Ok. I made the last one up. But here I had spent the first three months of Drew’s life convincing myself that all my concerns about him being a boy and my implied culpability at being to blame if he grew up to be a crazyperson were all just silly worried rantings of a post partum mind! The parenting section of the local Barnes and Noble seems to have a differing opinion. The authors of these books seem, based on breezy glances at the back covers, to believe that it IS something different to raise a boy, and that it WILL be my fault when, as a teen, he is either so absurdly hyper masculine that he joins a high school biker gang and holds up local liquor stores or conversely demands tickets to every traveling musical production that hits town and refuses to leave the house without his Little Orphan Annie wig and patent leather Mary Janes. Either way, IT’S ALL MY FAULT.

Meh. As I turned to leave, the weight of my two precious boys future perched squarely on my shoulders, I noticed they also had a similar section for girls. Relief! If I was struggling to find balance between motorcycles and Playbills, then my girl mom friends had to worry about Heidi Fleiss versus Heidi Klum. And I stopped being worried. I don’t really suppose there IS much difference, not really. I don’t need to know how to raise Boys. I need to know how to raise Drew and Zachary. And as it happens, the only experts on that are them.