I just started reading this book, I mean literally just started (I think I am on page 9) and already I really want to talk with someone about it. As the mother of two boys, I spend a lot of time trying to understand them, trying to figure out how to be a parent to them. It's odd, I have 8 younger brothers (6 adopted) but somehow I don't think I ever really figured out how to nurture the emotional life of a boy. Being candid about your body, no problem, but being candid about your feelings is a whole other problem.
The thing is, we were raised by parents who didn't display a whole lot of feelings. Don't get me wrong, my mother was very nurturing and she liked to smile but the only emotions she seemed to display were love/happiness and anger. My father was a person who liked to bottle his feelings. He rarely showed any strong feeling at all-occasional frustration/anger when fighting with my mom, occasional laughter at a movie, but other than that he was just the way he always is. I came away with a strong desire to not have feelings, feelings are a weakness someone can use against you.
My husband is by far the more emotionally healthy of the two of us. He has great volumes of love and joy, he shows frustration and anger (though he does that rarely), he can be anxious, excited, (sigh, I can't even name very many emotions, that really is quite sad). And so I run into a dilemma. I do not think my boys being emotionally stunted will be the result of their father, I think I will be the cause. And we are fighting a losing battle in that regard, their father works long hours and they are home with me all the time.
When Tain, my oldest son, was born, I felt he healed me in so many ways. He made me a better person. Then he turned two. He became aggressive and obstinate and impossible to please. This lasted until he was three and a half. I would lament that he was not naturally empathetic, I wondered how you taught a thing like empathy. He was, and still is, a child where words don't come easy. For most children, you say something is beautiful and over time they associate beauty with that word. For Tain, I found myself trying to describe what "beautiful" meant. So we tend to stick to concrete words, words like floor and car and leaf. He would get upset if I tried to tell him he was angry when he was. How do you teach emotional language to a child who has extreme difficulty understanding that which he cannot see? How do you teach emotional language to a child that argues with you whenever you try to put a label on a feeling?
Tain is four now, and a very pleasant person to have around. I think my favorite thing is his ability to compromise, if he wants something his brother has, he will try a trade and if that doesn't work, he will ask me to set a timer so they can take turns. I am really proud of him and he loves to hear me say that. He stifles his tears. I tell him it is okay to cry but I must have really taught him that it wasn't (he did go through a stage where he cried about everything. LOUDLY) because now, even when I tell him it is okay, he just sniffles and then swallows it down. And I feel a huge burden of guilt. Is it already too late? I know I carry around the remnants of the stage before. I am quick to get frustrated with him, I don't have the patience I should. I wonder if I am losing my taste for parenting and my children are suffering the consequence.
Rowan is 22 months old. He has always been more emotionally intuitive. He is very verbal. But he isn't as easy to parent. I worry about Tain because I don't want him to grow up like me emotionally and he and I are so alike. I worry about Ro because he is an enigma. He is so much like his father, but without his father's command of language. I don't understand what makes him tick, he cries easily, he gets his feelings hurt easily. Tain responds to scolding with anger, Rowan responds with tears. I think both feel the same way, though, and I feel that I need to not let little things get to me. So I wonder if I, like the boys in the book, have a giant well of anger that needs to be addressed. After all, girls may technically be more emotionally developed (according to the book) but it still isn't okay to be angry and resentful if you are a girl.
I really believe that the issues I face are not gender specific. I believe I would be in the same exact place if I had daughters instead of sons. We are not a family that suffers from cultural stereotypes. My mother was an amazingly strong woman, a force to be reckoned with, the leader of our family. My husband's family was more traditional but his mother is a person who gets things done, she is the emotional conduit of the family a person of big feelings: big laughs, big tears. I really don't like crying. I don't like doing it and I don't like having it done at me (isn't that aweful? But it is how I feel, that someone is crying AT me, expecting me to take those feelings, do God-knows-what with them, and make them feel better. And that makes me angry and irritated). Obviously I need some sort of professional help with this. If you know what your problem is, why is it so hard to change it?
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