And then there were the boys. They were loud. One disruptive boy could send
the whole lesson plan down the toilet. Their papers were crumpled, and they
forgot to turn things in. “Miss Whiston, everyone knows you don’t like boys
very much,” a particularly gutsy student told me one day. What? That was
ridiculous!
Sure, I kept a professional distance from the boys because I
was a young teacher and I didn’t want any tinge of impropriety on my career. Word
on the street was that at least two of my young colleagues were teetering on
the edge of that very precipice at the time, and I wanted no part of it. It was
just easier to get close to the girls. I understood them. They liked me. They
kept track of what outfits I wore, noting to me in a most “helpful” way when I got
to my first clothing repeat. I could read their handwriting. They cared about
their grades. Pulling late night
sessions in the windowless yearbook office was easier with girls around, too.
Oh. Crap. I guess the accusation was correct.
But as I got my teaching legs and that 5 year age difference
crept up to more than a decade, I became much more at ease around the boys. I
loved how the brightest, most awkward ones would stand by my desk, jostling
each other to be the first to tell me something. Maybe they’d encountered one
of our vocabulary words out in the world. Maybe they had a pun to share. Girls
were not yet digging these boys, so
they weren’t self- conscious about being brown-nosers hanging around the teacher’s
desk. By the time I stopped teaching, the afternoon before Jack was born, I was
as comfortable with the boys as the girls.
Jack. At our 20 week sonogram, the technician announced, “It’s
a boy.” What?! I got teary, and not in a good way. I didn’t know what I would
do with a boy. My fondest childhood memories were of special moments with my
mother, and I hoped having a girl would mean we could somehow put balm on the
painful scar of losing my mom too young.
What if this baby… this
boy…and I couldn’t share those
experiences together? I like words. I don’t like running around. I’m totally cool
with potty humor, but I wish someone would just go ahead and paint the football
neon orange so I could at least pretend to follow the plays. Besides, isn’t it
much more fun to talk about the outfits and the cheerleaders' moves and the band
than actually watch a game? And the lists of baby names scrawled in my high
school notebooks were all for girls. For some crazy reason, I’d convinced
myself that only another vagina was going to come out of this vagina.
My sister, 9 months ahead of me on the parenting journey
said, “At first you’ll pray to God for A child. After he’s born, you’ll
realize you had prayed to God for THIS child.”
And she was right.
Jack and I were made for each other. He wasn’t rough and
tumble. He was charming and funny. He loved words and word play. He was loyal
and smart. Our bond strengthened during long days together while Tim worked full-time
and went to law school, but it somehow felt as if it had been there since the
beginning of time. I read to him incessantly. Our house was small. Our world
was small. No cable tv, no smart phones, no blogs. Sometimes it felt too small,
but most days it felt just right. Just mom and Jack, seeing what the day held.
As I grew as a mother, and grew to love Jack even more as I
got to know him, I thought back to my teaching days. I knew I would be a better
teacher now that I was a mom. That doesn’t mean all teachers have to be moms,
but I think parenting gave me
important perspective on homework and balance
and boys that I sorely lacked before. I sent up a silent apology to all of
those frazzled moms of boys for assigning their sons Pride and
Prejudice over summer vacation and so many touchy-feely journal
entries.
I thought of the quirky boys who encircled my desk. The ones who
would come up with weird facts and present them to me as a gift. Who, despite
the surging of hormones and the burgeoning facial hair, still seemed like enthusiastic
little boys inside. They reminded me of
Jack, and I loved them.
I hoped that when Jack grew into himself and took his own
charming quirkiness off to high school, he would encounter teachers who got a
kick out of him the way I did. Teachers who would see his brains and his charm
and his bursts of enthusiasm as a plus not just a hindrance to the day’s schedule.
In 6th grade, I got a glimpse of this possibility.
His science class was studying rocks. On his science teacher’s birthday, he found an ugly hunk of rock on the
playground. After recess, he presented it to her with flourish, saying, “Here. I found you a
Common Rock for your birthday.”
And his teacher, seeing that this common rock came from an
uncommon boy, took it home and put it on her mantel.
