A Dangerous Business

Raising boys is a dangerous business. It's mentally dangerous for the parents, but it's physically dangerous for the boys, if our many trips to the ER are any indication. Emergency--a strange word, when you consider the root is "emerge" (which is what the ER has been shorted to--as in, "Didn't I see you in Emerge last night?"). A quick google of the word turns up several synonyms, among which are "flow, gush, spurt"--I assume this is the connection. After all, we made many trips to the ER with boys gushing and spurting blood all over the back seat.

We learned things along the way. For instance, never wash the blood off--it gets you past the desk in record time. If you need to, slather on some ketchup. Also, be prepared to endure some hard looks and questions when you drag a toddler with facial lacerations into the ER at 2am. Apparently falling face-first from the top bunk into a pile of lego sounds dodgy at that hour. Don't take it personally--the tired staff are merely doing their job. Another good idea is to send chocolates to the nurses on their birthdays--remember, it's all about building relationships.

Our ER champ is Primero. He and Cuarto were neck-and-neck there for a while during childhood, but Primero's adult stint as a chef put him ahead--apparently sharp knives, a hurried atmosphere and improperly-grounded appliances make for perilous working conditions. He pulled ahead of Cuarto and has retained the top position since. Tercero is a distant third—most of his trips to the ER were garnered in his teenage years, doing things that are best left unsaid. Segundo, always the most watchful of the four, never went to Emerge, although he did snap a finger tendon once poking a brother (I forget which one—these sorts of incidents were too numerous to keep track) in the ribs.

It was Primero who introduced us to the world of emerge/ncy. By the time he was five, he was a seasoned veteran. His first visit was when he smashed his face against the bathtub, opening up an impressively spurting gash that refused to stop bleeding. We bundled him up (he was our only child at that point) and hauled him into the hospital--Jack repeated his personal best of 20 minutes from our house to the ER doors, first accomplished when I was in labour with Primero. Luckily, it was a slow night, and the ER doctor stitched up the wound in record time. I was impressed with his sewing skills--he was good. Primero didn't even have time to shriek.

The second time was the infamous Skil saw incident. Jack was building the first of many additions to our house (see blog post “The House that Jack Built”) and had left his Skil saw up on the top of a framed wall, its cord dangling down. Three-year-old Primero, wandering around chomping on a carrot, found the end of the cord and yanked. The saw fell smack on his upturned face.

I was in the house, changing Segundo’s diaper, when Jack ran in, white-faced, clutching Primero to his blood-soaked shirt.

“What happened?” I yelled. Jack lay Primero down on the floor and began digging in his mouth. There was blood everywhere. “What happened?” I yelled again. Jack shook his head and just kept digging.

Jack pulled something small and bloody from Primero’s mouth. “Oh my God, he’s bitten OFF HIS TONGUE!” I shrieked. Jack looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “It’s a carrot!” he said. “I didn’t want him to choke! Geez, what’s the matter with you?” He threw the bloody chunk (in my defense, I maintain that the carrot was the size of a three-year-old’s tongue, it was lacerated and bloody—any jury would agree with my initial reaction) into the toilet and scooped up Primero, who by now was screaming bloody (pun completely intended) murder.

“Grab the baby—we need to get this kid to emergency!” We threw baby Segundo into his car seat and strapped Primero into the back. This was before children required car seats until they graduated from high school. As Jack hurtled down the highway (we did a lot of that back then), I sat sideways in my seat, patting Primero’s arm, trying to see if he was going into shock. Jack, hunched over the wheel in his blood-drenched shirt, zoomed past cars as if they were standing still.

We reached the ER in new record time. Jack easily broke his In-Labour-With-Primero record that day. In fact, the Primero/Skil saw trip record would stand unbroken for the remainder of our time in Herbert—for all I know, it’s unbroken to this day.

The ER nurses, seeing the blood, hollered “This way!” and scurried ahead, showing us to an empty cubicle. In no time, a doctor was there, peeling away the towels we’d wrapped Primero’s bleeding face in. The sight made me clutch Segundo even harder than I was. He squawked in protest. As the doctor began washing away the blood while listening to Jack’s narrative, Primero’s little face became visible. “Oh my God!” I said.

“Believe it or not,” the doctor said, “there’s very little real damage. I think the carrot absorbed most of the impact.” Jack looked at me. “It looked like a tongue.” I muttered. He kept washing away more blood. And more. And more. “Head and face wounds always bleed the most,” he said cheerfully. “We’ve got a small puncture in the lip—likely from the tooth behind. Also, the tooth is a little loose, but it looks alright for now. We’ll stitch up the puncture, and he should be okay.” As he began sewing, I recognized his technique—it was the same doctor we’d had on Primero’s first visit. The guy was good.

Primero would go on to have more trips to Emerge, but none would be as dramatic (thank God!). Segundo, thankfully, was a different kid altogether. As a child, he always assessed situations before he acted—it saved him a lot of blood over the years. While Primero would always be a leaper instead of a looker, Segundo never leaped until he’d looked very carefully indeed.

As a child, Tercero was too smart to get hurt. He only started injuring himself when he became a teenager, which is when kids undergo a kind of brain-death anyway, so it was understandable. Cuarto, on the other hand, was a lot like Primero, but without the same opportunities for injury. By the time Cuarto came along, the house was no longer a major construction zone, although the finishing would not be done until it was time to move (a pattern that we have since followed slavishly). Cuarto’s trips to Emerge were less dramatic.

His first was when he shoved a piece of hard rubber ball (they were called “Teeny-bouncers” for those who remember) his brothers had left lying on the floor after they’d shattered it with a hammer. He shoved it in so far we couldn’t get it out, even with tweezers. So, off to the ER we went, although no speed records were broken that day. As the doctor blew up the balloon catheter (the only thing that would pull out the fragment), Cuarto’s eyes bulged along with his nose. All I could think of was the scene from Total Recall, where Arnold Schwartzenegger digs up his nose and yanks out some kind of tracking device. “How much do you want to bet he never does THIS again?” the doctor said, as he carefully pulled out the piece of Teeny-bouncer. He was right.

Cuarto would visit the ER several times—falling on Lego in the middle of the night (“Where did you land?” asks concerned parent, wanting to know what anatomical part was hurt. “ON THE FLOOR!” wails injured and literal-minded child); punching a hole in his middle finger (the bird-flipping digit) while slamming a pocket door; chipping a tooth shovelling snow while holding the handle in his mouth; almost losing his boys while straddling the picket fence and its opening gate—he has an interesting scar to this day because of that one; and other more minor injuries. As you can see, Cuarto’s childhood ER adventures trumped Primero’s, although none would come quite as close to panic and sheer terror as Primero’s adventure with the saw.

Of course, all the boys had their scrapes and scabs, sprains and minor lacerations. Every fall, when I would take them to Doctor Heather for their pre-school check-up, she’d check their shins for bruises and abrasions. “If I don’t find these, I get worried.” She said. “That means the kid isn’t active enough.” Doctor Heather never had to worry about the boys. She’d send me home with some worming medicine (“Worm pets and kids in the fall!” she’d chirp), and that was that until next year.

I often think of Doctor Heather looking for signs of life in kids. I know some parents today (and there were those back then, too) who freak out if their kid trips and falls. I admire those parents who react with equanimity to the many trips and falls their children take, and who so teach their kids that life has its ups and downs. I think of all the injuries The Little Moron Club endured—falling out of trees, off roofs (wait a minute—that was Joe, come to think of it), off their bikes; smashing their fingers with hammers , rocks and bricks; tripping over their own feet; getting pierced by fish-hooks; slicing open thumbs with new Swiss Army knives—the list goes on and on, injuries too numerous to recount.

They all made it to adulthood fairly intact (well, physically, anyway). And no doubt they learned about the physics of the world—gravity is a law, sharp things cut, bones break, skin is soft, heads are not as hard as bricks, etc.

This is not to say that the world can’t be an extremely dangerous place for children, or that we should be cavalier about their safety. We learned to child-proof (as much as possible) a home construction site. We also learned that giving the boys their own little tools and showing them how they work went a long way toward keeping them away from the adult tools. I still have a mental picture of a diapered Segundo sitting on the plywood subfloor of some addition (there were so many), doggedly pounding in nails with a ball-peen hammer, so many that the floor shimmered like chain-mail once he was done.

And I also think that each child has a platoon of guardian angels assigned to him or her—some kids’ platoons may be larger than others—but they all have one. I imagine these angels, punching in and out of their celestial time-clock (like those sheepdogs Sam and George in the Looney Tunes cartoons), making sure that their charges survive until lunchtime, when they’re off the clock. It’s the only thing that can explain the more hair-raising close calls.

The world is a dangerous place. And, as insurance underwriters tell us, most accidents happen in the home. So home AND the world are dangerous places. The trick is to empower our kids to navigate the two. And since they learn this in that menacing, hazardous and jeopardous place called home (“There’s no place like home!” insists Dorothy, desperate to get out of Oz—wait, didn’t a tornado just HIT home?). So again, parents must perform a balancing act—on the one hand, being vigilant about danger, anticipating it and rescuing children from its clutches while on the other allowing their kids the scrapes, lacerations, bruises and sprains that come with activity. Parents, working with the guardian angel platoons, do this balancing act daily—only getting respite when their kids are safely in bed (unless they fall onto a pile of Lego, that is).

So yes , raising boys is a dangerous business. Indeed, raising children in general is not for the faint of heart. It’s the most important job out there, and often there is little support for it: emotional, economic, social. If it really is as important as everyone seems to think, then it stands to reason that there should be some serious pay-rate increases, for the parents AND for all those guardian angels (although I’m not sure what they would get paid in). Maybe parents need to start a union. The International Brother and Sisterhood of Parental Units Everywhere—IBSPUE! Parents of the world, unite! You have only your guilt to lose! Strike for higher wages! DANGER pay! Oh, yes indeed.

Wouldn’t it be nice…

Brain Sex

With my last post and Cuarto's arrival, our little family was complete (other than various pets added and subtracted over the years, many of which were interred in the pet sematary behind the house). Nowadays, four kids is considered a large family--well, I guess it was back then, as well. Big enough, at any rate, although there were several of us Herbertians who had four kid families. But we were the only ones with four boys.

One thing the four boy family gave us was a certain comfort level with noise and confusion. And I do believe that boy noise is different than girl noise--a few years of chaperoning girls on school trips has convinced me of that. Girls shriek and boys holler--the difference is huge. Shrieking enters your head like a sharpened vampire stake, while hollering just makes your holler back. And girls will shriek for anything--they're happy, they're mad, they've dropped their Barbie, they've seen a bug, they want the world to know they're there.

Boys, on the other hand, holler for emergencies (or what they consider to be emergencies)--they've fallen out of a twenty-foot tree, they're stuck on the railroad tracks, they've just dodged an exploding burning barrel and now they're trying to dodge YOU, etc. etc.

Jack and I firmly believed that we could raise kids who were gender neutral. By that, I do not mean we were bent on producing hermaphrodites. I mean we felt gender was pretty much a product of environment--there was no such thing as "brain sex", as the socio-biologists insisted upon. No, that smacked far too much of determinism for us, and we would have none of it. We were going to raise sensitive new age guys who would understand where women were coming from, who would "get" what Mr. Freud so famously asked: "What do women want?", who would assume their role in an equitable world where gender roles were the same.

We have since seen the error of our ways.

It started with a toy car. We watched, in fascination, as each of our boys would first discover the car, pick it up, spin its wheels on the floor, and say "Vroom!" Our nieces and the little girls of our friends did not do this. We would also watch in horror as each boy first encountered the dolls we insisted on buying them (well, okay, it was I who insisted--Jack was ready to draw the line on this one). They would dismember the dolls, pull their heads off, and then put them back together in various distorted ways. Again, our nieces didn't do this, although I can't attest to that as we didn't live with them. For all I know, some of them might have engaged in serial mutilation.

From the cars and dolls, it went on to guns. Of course, Jack and I forbade all forms of guns as toys, lest we feed into the military-industrial complex's all pervasive culture of death. Again, the boys defied our preconceptions. They simply made guns out of whatever was handy--sticks, carrots, wooden spoons, mailing tubes, Lego. We finally gave up and allowed water pistols--this escalated when Uncle Walt brought super soakers to a family barbeque one year. It was as if he'd armed the mujahadeen with AK-47's--our world was never the same again.

Increasingly, despite our efforts at raising boys with some consciousness of gender equality, it became obvious that little boys were different than little girls despite all our enculturating efforts. Little boys just thought differently than little girls. I'd always known that big boys thought differently, but I'd chalked it up to the oppression of patriarchy. Now, I had to re-think things. Maybe there was something to this notion of "brain sex"--maybe there was a biological difference in how boys and girls thought and learned. Maybe, just maybe, difference didn't automatically mean "bad" but just "different". Maybe I had to adjust my thinking about the whole notion of "difference" (I was likely studying Derrida and the Deconstructionists at the time--for a real mind-bender, google Derrida's term "Differance")--it's all in the final "a".

I also had to reconsider my reaction to some of Jack's behaviours. For years, I'd been asking him what he was thinking at any given time. More times than not, he'd say "Nothing." I refused to believe it--my mind NEVER was thinking nothing. Something was always percolating--there was no such thing as NOTHING. I would prod and poke: "C'mon, you have to be thinking about SOMETHING." I would fret--obviously he didn't want to tell me what he was thinking about, which meant he was thinking about me and it was something BAD and what a jerk he was being and how dare he not tell me what I wanted to know and I think our marriage is over.

Now, after years of insight into boys' developing thought systems, I realized that what Jack had been telling me all these years was true. Sometimes (well, okay, a LOT of the time) the male thought balloon is empty. True, ladies, as strange as it may seem--there's really nothing there (nothing conscious, that is). The brain is in idle, chugging along at its default position, waiting to be put into gear at a moment's notice (say, when a particularly delectable motorcycle or girl goes by, or any such other shiny object).

Raising boys has helped me understand the male mind, or as much as anyone who isn't male can do so. I watched our boys handle conflict within the family--they would bug each other until one broke and would start beating on the other. After the dust-up, everyone was friends again, until the next time. Grudges were not harboured. That would require remembering what led to the conflict in the first place, which would remove the enjoyment of executing the conflict over and over again. Primero ALWAYS succumbed to Tercero's needling, Segundo ALWAYS tried to (unsuccessfully) hide his Halloween candy, Cuarto ALWAYS fell for the various ways his brothers abased him, and all of them ALWAYS left the toilet seat up and incurred maternal wrath.

It has been my (limited as it is, admittedly) experience with girls that they are far more canny about these things. Girls, like elephants, never forget. (I remember this--I was once a girl). They can harbour slights and take them out to caress like Gollum with his precioussss. They use words, not actions, to wound. If all this points to girls being smarter than boys (this used to be my position--I mean, it seemed so obvious), I'm not sure anymore that this is the case. Again, we are falling into the pit of difference being necessarily bad--that one thing is better than its other. Derrida and the deconstruction gang had much to say about this.

Over the last several years, there have been many fascinating studies done on the brain, and on how female and male brains are different, starting in infancy. It appears, from the studies, that girls are better than boys at identifying the emotional content of speech. This is not particularly earth-shattering to any woman who's ever asked her husband if those jeans make her look fat and the poor sap who actually ANSWERS. He obviously has not identified the emotional content of that loaded question--but now, he can relax, knowing that he's been hard-wired from babyhood to miss the boat.

Another study shows that girls 2-4 days old spend twice as much time maintaining eye contact with a silent adult and when the adult is talking. The boys' attention span was the same (shorter) whether the adult was talking or silent. Again, any woman in a relationship can verify this male bias towards what guys see, rather than what they hear. This may account for the male ability to watch fifteen television shows simultaneously while tuning out their partner's demand to hand over the remote before she has a seizure.

Studies also show that baby girls like to gurgle at humans, while boys are equally happy jabbering away at toys or abstract geometric designs than at people. This could explain why men holler at televised sporting events or argue with Don Cherry between periods. (When you think of it, those jackets of his stand in admirably for the abstract geometric designs that babies jabber at).

Apparently, at four months, baby girls can distinguish photographs of people they know from photographs of strangers, while baby boys cannot. This may be why husbands do not notice if their wives have new haircuts, new outfits, or new bones through their noses.

So now, these (to women) annoying traits can now be explained by brain sex. And the bitch of it is, women always suspected this is so. Even the most hard-core, radical, card-carrying feminist has conjected, deep down in her heart of hearts, that there is something going on in the male brain that is not going on in the female brain, regardless of the toxic environment patriarchy has erected over the generations.

However, lest people think that this lets men off the hook for being doofuses ("Hey, what can we do? We're born that way!"), we again must re-visit our notion of difference and the role of environment on the brain. For many recent studies have ALSO shown how environment can affect the brain's wiring, especially in infancy and childhood. AND, increasingly, studies are showing that older brains can be re-wired (unlike that toaster you've been waiting to have fixed by you-know-who).

So, it comes back to how we want to raise our boys (and girls), and how we feel about difference. For difference does not have to privilege one term over the other in Derrida's binary oppositional "violent hierarchy" where "one of the two terms governs the other"--in other words, no one gets to be the boss of the other.

What we've learned, since our boys have grown up and most of them found terrific women, is that despite the difference of brain sex, our efforts at providing an environment where boys were encouraged to play with dolls, have tea parties (we bought Primero a tea set--he loved it, but it got smashed to bits over the years--this wasn't a comment on the tea set--the boys were remarkably even-handed about what they destroyed) and only play with water-pistols did bear some fruit, or so their partners assure us.

Perhaps brain sex can change over time. As the outer world becomes more celebratory of gender difference (and, indeed, of all the many differences that make the world an interesting place), as little girls play with lego and little boys with dolls (NOT action figures), as parents demand and assume that the outer horizons for sll children are equally limitless and their inner horizons are cherished, then the inner world of the brain may change, and when that happens, the outer world will change even more, which will, in turn, act on the brain again, on and on, in a dizzying whirl of nature/nurture.

I was at a conference years ago when a researcher who'd studied supportive communities and their effects on children stated that the old opposition of nature/nurture no longer applied. The relationship between the two was more like an intricate dance, she said, where one partner might lead for a time, and then the other would take over in a constantly complex do-si-do.

Our own little family laboratory seems to show this--nature and nurture work together. Each generation learns a bit more than the one before, and in so doing, BECOMES different. And the older generation must honour that learning, for after all, it had a part in the process. And while we didn't raise boys who thought just like girls, we managed to raise boys who are respectful of difference and give it room to play. And who are smart enough to ask the women in their lives the answer to Dr. Freud's question of what women want (something that Sigmund apparently never thought of). Of course, like all women everywhere, their brain sex determines the answer--"Women want men to do what we say..."

No, if nothing else, raising four boys has taught me the meaning of difference, and that is a good thing. As the French would say, "Vive la difference!" As Mr. Derrida (wherever he may be--in whatever endless world of play inside the celestial text) would say, "Vive la differance!"