My Boy

Recently I've been thinking about the challenge and blessing of being the mother of a little boy. Till recently, in my mind, he's just been a baby...but all too quickly he has become a little boy baby and soon the baby will have to drop from his title altogether (although not very soon, thankfully!). 

It fascinates me how, although he is only 7 1/2 months old, you can already see his little masculine side coming out.

He's tough - he can topple over from his sitting position and smack his head on the floor and he'll just look up and you and blink a few times, confused, but not disturbed at all.

He loves a challenge - he owns a giant toddler plastic three-wheeled motorcycle that is his absolute favorite. He likes to lie beside it and pull on the pedal, eat the wheel...whatever he can do to own that bike, he tries. He like figuring out his toys, and reaching for one thing after another, without caring about it once he's mastered the challenge of grabbing it.

He's destructive - knocking down block towers, dumping out bags of toys, etc, are already his favorite things to do. I envision explosions and bonfires in his future.

He loves adventure - his daddy does a human roller coaster with him that involves swinging upside down and around. He has come to equate daddy with wild, crazy stunts...you can tell in his eyes when Nate holds him that he expects to be dropped upside down!

 

I began to realize the vast male-female differences before Nate and I started dating, and once we were married they were magnified again. However, now they are written in the sky for me to see! Mommies are not much like their little boys!  Someone (a man) recently told us, "Girls are so much easier to raise than boys!" It made me realize that this is because our society is so feminized. We don't live in a man-friendly culture. Men aren't encouraged to be men...strong, valiant, adventurous. So we try to fit our boys into a girlified boy mold, and the result is that they go crazy. It's hard to train boys to be boys in a culture that wants them to be nice, neat cultured men when they are born with a wild heart's desire to be a cowboy or a soldier or a pirate.

Teaching in kid's church has also opened my eyes to this. Boys need freedom - to have fun, to be crazy, to face a challenge. They need to know that they are respected, even when they are little boys. What a challenge as a woman and a mom!

My heart's desire is to be a mom who lets her son be a boy, yet trains him to behave appropriately and responsibly, to help Charles chase his dreams and tackle challenges and learn to depend on God in the process. It's amazing to see my husband thrill to have a son to teach these things to, and I want to support that with my whole heart. What a privilege I have been given, to be the wife of one godly man and the mom of his son, two fun-loving, affectionate, adventurous men!