Boys! Give me boys!

Before I had children, I said to myself: "Better boys than girls. Boys are easy." But raising three young sons is wilder than I could ever have imagined.

by Jennifer Allen

May 4, 2005 | Sunday -- husband's working, sitter's off. It's you, all alone with the three of them, your three young sons, running you ragged in a burning barefoot marathon on a treadmill set on High-Speed-Panic. You feel like a cartoon character, flattened out into one dimension, as you are dragged -- feet, legs, belly, chest, neck, head -- backward, through this machine that sucks you in and spits you out all day long. You may wonder aloud, Hey, how do you stop this crazy thing? Wonder all you want, no one is listening -- they're all boys, remember? You talk to yourself from a second-person stance, but you cannot help it, can you? Because when you are the mom of three small boys, who has time for me, myself, or I?

Certainly not you, not now. Right now, you have a six-year-old in a Tae Kwon Do uniform wiggling his top tooth loose with his tongue. You have a three-year-old in an inflatable Hulk costume making farting sounds. You have a six-month-old in a swollen diaper standing in the stroller and chewing on the straps of what was once your favorite and finest Italian silk bra. You have all of them all around you: the sole, freak female in the house, sitting on the potty, pleading, "Can I please, please, have some privacy, please?"

Your boys, these sons, think they have a right to your body morning, noon, and night. If you lock them out of the bathroom, they will panic, shriek, shrill, and cry -- as if you have locked them out of your very heart. They will kick the door, thrust themselves against it, and then rattle the doorknob, yelling, "Mommy, Mommy, Mom!"

You tell them you hear them. You tell them, "I'm sorry, I can't right now," and the two older ones reply, "I'm sorry, I can't right now." And when you ask them, "Are you mocking me?" they yell (so loud the baby yelps), "Are you mocking me? Are you mocking me? Are you mocking me?" So you do what you must -- and quickly. You wipe and wash. You apply peach-blossom lip gloss to ward off that pale post-partum menstrual look you have when you are passing clots the size of your liver, and when coffee and Advil and an occasional free-floating handstand cannot keep your cheeks rosy and glowing and girlish looking all day long. You open the door, check on the tooth, you zip up the Hulk, you give the baby a big peach-blossom kiss on the nog, and off you go, out of the bathroom and into the hall.

Each one grabs hold of the sides of the stroller, which is moving so slowly and awkwardly across the sticky carpet that you accidentally bang the baby's head on the door heading into the bedroom and he cries. He's got a big welt near your lipstick kiss. You tear off your sleep shirt and then your nursing bra and hand it to him, and he is immediately contented, calmed, chewing on Mommy's all-night-long-night-sweats smell. You then undress entirely because you refuse to be a mom who is still wearing pajamas in the yard in the bright morning suburban California sun. They close in around you and gawk and gasp and gape as you slip off your night drawers. There you are -- naked, nude, undone. And there they are -- staring at your dicklessness. You try to change the scenery by swiftly slipping into your rather stylish and mentally uplifting boy-short undies and matching halter bra, and saying, "Isn't this a pretty color?" But no amount of pastel can distract them from the fact that you are clearly, physically, not one of them.

You are certain the baby is eyeing this new halter bra and thinking, "Why has she kept that one from me?" The other two remain in pure boyhood shock, with their hands down their pants and that ten-thousand-mile-away stare you've seen thousands of times on boys and grown men alike. "Do you have to go to the bathroom?" you ask, and they quickly remove their hands from their pants. Sure, they see you like this nearly every day, but today they ask you, "What is that?"

So you must come up with an answer, a word, a name. "It's a ki-ki," you say, and it actually sounds logical because "ki-ki" rhymes with "pee-pee." Then you immediately regret this coinage for such a significant item of future personal exchange. Because you know that you have dreams of taking them all to Hawaii one day, and you already dread sitting in a restaurant and hearing the commentary when they read the menu and the list of things that begin with "kiki" -- kiki burgers, kiki dogs, kiki pie. "Ki-ki?" they say, and you say nothing because what more is there to say? Enough has already been seen, revealed, in you, the first female vision they have ever laid eyes on.

And now your own questions begin: Are my breasts big enough? Are my thighs thick enough? Surely my waist is narrow enough? Am I, in total, womanly enough to be the standard bearer of sexuality for all their long lives ahead of them? Thankfully, your self-conscious and overly psychological questions become completely inane when they both scream and squeeze their penises and say, "A ki-ki, ew, ew, I don't want one of those!" And then, and only then, will they leave you. They will charge out of the house and onto the grassy front yard for a quick Hulk/Tae Kwon Do wrestling match, while loudly informing the entire neighborhood -- jogging by, walking dogs, trimming lawns -- "Mommy has a ki-ki! Mommy has a ki-ki! Mommy has a ki-ki!"

Look at them, united. The world makes sense to them now: They have a pee-pee and you have a ki-ki. Now it's a game -- boys versus girl. They charge back into the house. They both push the baby in the stroller, and the baby drops your nursing bra and its frayed elastic strap gets caught in the stroller wheels and you don't even try to save it because it's served you long enough and well enough through these three sons. The boys forge on, pushing the baby into the bedroom they all share, and the Hulk shuts the door. You stand there for a moment, noticing all the crayon marks and snot stains, and are about to get some Clorox to clean it all up when the Tae Kwon Do Master opens the door and puts up a sign that reads No Grils and No Moms and then slams the door shut. Sure, you feel a little hurt, but you get over it. You must. These boys, they will break your heart if you let them. These boys, your sons, they will love you one instant and hate you the next. Why? Because you're their mom, the love of their life and the bane of their existence. And if you're going to stand there and wipe tears from your eyes because they've locked you out, well, then you're missing out on some serious self-serving quiet time.

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