back to my december prompts

[topaz119]

For jenna_thorne: The House of Boys – Thoughts on being a woman with sons.

The short version? I love it until I don’t.

I mean, partially it’s that I’ve never been a particularly girly girl. I wasn’t exactly a tomboy (that implies much more athleticism and love of the outdoors than I had) but I didn’t get into the stuff that’s deemed ‘feminine’ by our particular culture. And I’ve also really been around boys/men disproportionately all my life. My undergrad degree is in electrical engineering, which, yeah, if women are under-represented in technical fields now, I invite you to contemplate the ratios in the 80s.

It also helps that I truly always have been into comic books and sci fi, and am conversant enough in several sports for all of that to not be totally boring dinner table talk.

Though I have to say that Oldest was home with his girlfriend today and we (she and I) got into this in-depth discussion of ballet, which was glorious and something I usually don’t get to indulge in while running kids around to the dentist and Costco and Target.

I think the hardest part is how that cultural expectation of the wife being super-supportive of her man gets amplified with the boy children, too. I’m definitely talking external expectations, not from the guys in my actual house. I do live in the South and while we’re in the big city, the rest of D’s family definitely isn’t and I think they’re a little taken aback when I don’t go to watch the games he coaches or anything. That, plus the idea that boys should grow apart from their mother—it’s okay for girls to be ‘best friends’ with their mothers, but if that happens with boys, they’re ‘Mama’s boys’, aka a fate worse than death. I’m ‘ruining’ them if I want to talk to them more than once a week. Ugh. Have I mentioned how much I hate cultural expectations?

I do think one of my proudest moments as a geek woman was when they independently turned to me and said, ‘Seriously? Padme died from a broken heart? Way to trash that character, George.’ You have to take your teachable moments wherever you find them, right? (Also, at some point #2Son linked me to this bit of fan theory which I have now accepted as canon and lalala, can’t hearrrr your counter-arguments.)

So I do love it most of the time, but I really fight hard against how things are 'supposed' to be, which is really tiresome but worth it.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I was so disappointed at Padme's death that I have never gone anywhere near those movie again until that link. Which cheers me up immensely. So thank you to your #2Son!

[topaz119]

It was an excellent find and I was so happy he thought of me! I'm very happy to pass it along!

[jenna_thorn]

That makes sense. A lot of sense, actually.

I'm female but not femme, so I'm a bit relieved to not have to learn how to pluck eyebrows in order to teach it and so forth, and hugely happy not to be the designated parent to rebel against ever since Bear started Young Stag age, but sometimes he's just wholly alien to me, and I wonder if maybe a girl in the house wouldn't be.

The South is bad, but that attitude is all over. My Mother-in-law (Iowa) still brings up how astonished! shocked! she was to learn that Himself changed diapers, because my f-i-l never did. But my hubby is more egalitarian than his father and his son is more so than he is and that's progress, albeit on a generational timeline.

Heh on Padme, and their reaction. Good kids. Our recent one was Bill Cosby and we floored my mother when Bear brought up victim-blaming and why a woman might not want to go public with her story and how brave the ones who did are.

[topaz119]

I have days when I know they're all speaking English but the words make no sense. Those are usually the gaming/e-sports days. I also am not a fan of the 'make noise just cause we can' attitude that prevails.

[jenna_thorn]

For me it's the fart jokes. the fifteen year old and the fifty year old both love fart jokes.
I.... do not.

[topaz119]

Oh, ugh, I'm not fond of them either. I have pitched fits about that sort of stuff ending up at the dinner table (or when I'm driving people places), so they mostly keep it out of my hearing now, I guess. (I am not foolish enough to think they actually listened to my descriptions of why crass behavior is not acceptable and stopped.)

[sperrywink]

Interesting thoughts!

[topaz119]

Just sort of riffing off the top of my head--I don't know if they make much sense!

[hamsterwoman]

Thank you for the link to that article about Padme -- very interesting, and I like this hypothesis MUCH better!

Also, I love reading about different family dynamics, so the rest of the post was interesting as well :)

[topaz119.livejournal.com]

Oh, that post literally saved Padme for me. I was so happy when he texted me that link!

[hamsterwoman]

I shared it with my son the other day (well, I told him what was in the post, I still need to send him the link) -- he's the big Star Wars fan among us -- and he was dubious, but I'm hoping the full-post evidence convinces him.