Tell me you have boys
from girl-sister to boy-mom, part two
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How to Spot a Boy-Family
I grew up in a family of sisters, the third of four girls. Then my husband and I had two boys. The world looks different when you go from girl-sister to boy-mom.
A few weeks ago, I explored life as a girl-sister through vignettes of my born family, in an essay called, “Tell me you have sisters”:
Today, I’ll write about life as a boy-mom.
1- I’ll carry my own bags, thank you very much!
When M and I first got married, I would find myself smarting every time he held the door open for me, or offered to carry the shopping bags. How dare he? I was a capable, confident woman who cold could carry my own bags, thank you very much! Did he think I was weak?
Growing up in a family of all girls, my sisters and I did all the chores. We washed the dishes, sure, but we also mowed the lawn in the summer and shoveled the driveway in the winter. We weren’t dainty: We killed bugs! We changed lightbulbs!
M grew up with his brother and his parents, a boy in a boy family. Our family now with our two boys is a mimic of his, one generation later.
You learn a lot about your significant other by spending time with their born family. The first long weekend we spent at M’s parents’ house was over Easter. We had been married for about two months.
We’d just finished some shopping, and we were getting out of the car at home. “Oh, leave that for the boys,” my mom-in-law said off-handedly. “They can get the bags.”
And suddenly it clicked. My husband didn’t think I was a weakling, he was just being a gentleman. Chivalry wasn’t dead, it just lived in Toronto!
2- I can’t with the superheroes
I know more about superheroes than I’ve ever wanted to know. I know that Spiderman has the weirdest villains, and that Batman and Superman, for all their super-ness, just can’t get along.
Early in the pandemic, watching the world collapse around us and looking for a way to entertain our bored 9 and 6 year-olds, we decided to watch all the Marvel movies together. This led to endless iterations of a game I called Avengers pretend.
Eventually, playing with Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America wasn’t enough, and new characters were recruited. The cast of Harry Potter regularly showed up, as did the fellowship from The Lord of the Rings.
“Mama, would you like to play Avengers Harry Potter?” A would ask me, at least 3,987 times a day. And because there were so few other people for him to play with, I often said yes.
Then, Iron Man, Harry, Ron and Hermione would go off to fight Thanos, Voldemort, and Sauron, while Merry and Pippin tried to find a nice little café to eat second breakfast nearby.
The boys had no school, just endless hours to fill with books and screens and backyard play. The adults, on the other hand, were still at work, only that work was now inside the house instead of at the office. In those first few weeks, I wrestled with moments of jealousy when I looked to friends whose workplaces were completely shut down. Friends who could catastrophize and watch the world fall apart without having to log on at 8 a.m. and prepare emails about the enterprise alignment of an IT project for an executive who may or may not read them.
My desk sat in our unfurnished basement, in a house we had moved into a scant 7 months before. I’d be halfway through a bullet about the advantages of a cloud-hosted solution when A would amble down the stairs, having read his books and eaten his food and stared at a screen until his eyes were about to melt, craving that most magical form of entertainment, human connection.
“Do you want to play Avengers Harry Potter, Mama?” and I’d look at the time at the bottom right hand of my laptop and realize I had 7 minutes before another pointless meeting I wasn’t allowed to skip, and I’d sigh and turn to face him.
“Habeeby, I would love to, but I’m working right now. I have to write this email.”
“But you can write it with your hands and talk with your voice at the same time. You don’t even have to get up and do the actual moves. Just talk.”
Even now, four years removed from this story, my heart breaks for him. I can see how it looked to his six year-old mind. Mama, sitting on her laptop for hour after endless hour. Only her fingers moving, and this action labelled with that elusive title: work. Why couldn’t her mouth move in service of play at the same time?
3 - But the clothes…
My sisters all had babies before me, and every one of them had a girl. In my days as an aunt-not-mother, I couldn’t walk into a shopping mall and not walk out with another dress for my nieces. Dresses with watermelon prints. Dresses with flowers. Cotton dresses and frilly ballerina dresses. All the dresses, all the time. This, despite being a member of team pants and tunics, myself.
There is something about a little girl that makes me want to play dress up. Brush her hair just so and place a barrette at an angle through her bangs. Find the perfect shoes. Take a picture. And then watch her run into life and end up covered in grass and jam stains, somehow making the whole look even cuter.
When the boys were babies, I would walk the aisles of Baby Gap wistfully. Where were the equivalently adorable clothes for them? There are only so many sailor suits and “captain adorable” shirts a baby boy can wear before they all start looking alike.
There’s an oft quoted phrase in the Quran that says La yukallif Allah nafsan illa wus’aha.
God does not give a soul more than it can handle.1
I have brushed my nieces’ long hair and bristled at their tears as I do it, shaking my head in wonderment and relief that this is not an every day occurrence.
I have asked my mother again and again, how she dealt with me as a child. I was so dramatic, and now I have zero patience or grace to extend to the next generations’ drama queens.
I have watched one of my nieces spend hours buzzing with excitement that her best friend was coming over, only to give said friend the cold shoulder upon her arrival.
I have remembered the torture of being a little girl in grade school. The mind games. The tears. The dance of are-we-or-aren’t-we-friends that played on repeat all year long.
And my conclusion at the end of all of this? God knew I was, and am, impatient. God knew I could fulfill my obsession with doll-like outfits by showering my nieces with the frilliest and cutest clothes. God knew I needed boys, and he gave me boys.
4 - God Protect Our Boys
Just as we had no gendered chore list when I was little, the boys’ list is also genderless. Mama chases after them to shovel the driveway, but also to change our rabbit Bilbo’s litter.
D and Bilbo are two peas in a pod. I come into his room most mornings and find them sitting on the bed, getting in some TLC.
“Have you fed Bilbo?” I ask. “Have you refilled her water?” and he looks at me in that telltale way only teenage boys can, and says, “don’t worry, Mama, I got you.”
None of this is revolutionary, of course. But life rarely is. You pass along your ideals in daily increments, in the caring of small animals, the taking out of the garbage and the helping mama carry heavy things up the stairs.
My mom-in-law, the OG boy mom, likes to say, Rabbina yikhalillna el-wilaad, which means God protect our boys.
I couldn’t agree more.
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I’m continuing to share resources about the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I’m sharing a few different things because they’re all so good and I just couldn’t choose.
The first is John Oliver’s explainer on the West Bank, which I shared a couple of weeks ago to my paid readers but which is so valuable and informative, I think everyone should see it.
The next is comedian Sammy Obeid’s response to the “but they voted for Hamas” argument2.
This is from Quran, chapter 2, verse 286.
I want to add that I believe that it doesn’t matter who someone voted for, there is no acceptable reason to bomb an entire society to kingdom come.
As a boy mom I share with you the joy of playing in unfamiliar ways and walking in unfamiliar stories. As always, beautiful writing.
I remember when we finally got pregnant - we wanted a girl so badly. Now that we have Myles- she loves being a boy mom. Although we both hate how boy sections are the smallest section in every store we shop for him lol