#like. dads comfortable enough in their ‘masculinity’ to be Super Involved in something their daughters enjoy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thehautegoddess · 5 years

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goddess mother: a dad's advice for moms raising sons

check out this vintage post from my old blog, haute mama in the city. although my boy is 12-years-old and becoming so independent, this post still rings true – i hope you enjoy!

i am completely in love with www.thegoodmenproject.com, a blog i found out about on twitter (@goodmenproject). here’s some background:

“the good men project is a glimpse of what enlightened masculinity might look like in the 21st century,” the press raved when we launched. finally, “a cerebral, new media alternative” to glossy men’s magazines. in fact, the good men project is not so much a magazine as a social movement. we are fostering a national discussion centered around modern manhood and the question, ‘what does it mean to be a good man’?“

the world desperately needs this, and i am more than happy to share. there are a ton of amazing tidbits on the site that i will be referencing frequently, but a post entitled, "raising boys (a dad’s advice for moms)” recently caught my eye.

i often speak of my son, who is my favorite thing in all the land, and i definitely grapple with the concept that while he is a child, which comes with its own set of issues, he is also a male. and just like i consistently have to contend with the *ahem* challenges (i am keeping my vibration high today…) associated with my male relationships, my sweet boy is no exception. i need to think like a man, so to speak, when dealing with him.

here are some of my favorite highlights from the post:

“think caveman. adult women have thousands of emotional states, as do girls like my daughter. boys, on the other hand, tend to feel one of three: mad, sad, happy. don’t project your complex emotional life on your son. his issue of the moment might not be that complicated. He wants to eat, poop, or run. on a really bad day he wants his toy back after some other kid took it from him. he doesn’t want to stare out the window and have lengthy discussions about the meaning of life, as my eight-year-old daughter often did." — this is really great advice. i am extremely emotional. extremely. when i am in crisis-mode, i can spend hours on the phone with my board of directors/life coaches (i.e., my friends) working through my issues. and i noticed that he already finds this incredibly strange - he rolls his eyes and seems totally annoyed with my girl talk. lol. this is why. i need not complicate the boy’s life with my girl drama! i am going to monitor my phone time, and try to conduct conversations when he is not around.

"watch his body not his mouth. again, like adult men, the clues to how your son is doing will show up first in his body language. jumping up and down with six-inch vertical leaps is the natural state of being and is good. slumped shoulders are bad. yelling is good. quiet needs attention.” — i know for sure this is true, because i remember the first time i saw my son’s posture change because someone hurt his feelings - and i will never forget that moment. when i pick him up from school, and he is jumping around like a crazy monkey, i know he had a great day.

“when in doubt, hug. boys will often have a much harder time than girls verbalizing their problems. my 5-year-old son will sometimes burst out into tears after seemingly trivial events. i know there is something deeper going on, but i am not going to get it out of him, at least not at that moment (whereas my daughter would not only tell me what went wrong but in no uncertain terms why it was my fault, which was generally true enough). so the solution is physical not verbal. i spend a lot of time just hugging my boys. i usually have no idea why. but as a default cure-all, it seems to work wonders. a minute later they are all patched up and ready to rumble again. this even works pretty well with my 14-year-old, who is a 6-foot-tall linebacker at boston college high school.”— i love to hug my boy. he is so sweet, and very loving, and i want him to be that way as a man. i have started making it a point to always hug him after i discipline him, and explain to him that God sent me to be his mommy and teach him how to be a good man, and discipline is part of that. and sometimes he just comes and crawls in my lap and wraps himself around me, and it’s the best thing ever because we have an unspoken moment of pure comfort. hugs effing rock.

“pointless physical activity is perfect. my brother and i once convinced his two sons and my older boy, when they were all around the age of 10, that they really needed to build a structure out of rocks. the rocks were on one side of a beach, but the perfect spot where the structure had to be built, according to our sage advice, was on the other side of the beach. each stone weighed between ten and thirty pounds. the boys started moving the boulders one by one, working together to lift the heaviest ones. my brother and i set up our beach chairs midway from the rock pile to building site. we read the paper most of the morning while the boys tired themselves out moving rocks and then assembling a tremendous cathedral. by lunch they were tired and happy, and my brother and i had enjoyed a peaceful morning." — i need to get more involved with this. i remember will smith said his father tore down a brick wall in front of their house and made he and his brother rebuild it - and although it took them months, they enjoyed the process! i thought that was the oddest thing - i guess that’s just what men do, chile…go figure :)

"crowds, not so much. i have noticed that my daughter lights up when she enters a crowd, whether family or strangers. mass humanity is something that gives her energy. with my boys, and, frankly, for me too, it’s the opposite. they get shy and tend to hide behind my legs. i try to protect them from these situations and not push them beyond their limitations." — my son is super outgoing, but i definitely notice that he sometimes shrinks in front of large crowds. in my effort to help him get over his trepidation, i often push him to be more confident. but now that i read that this is the nature of boys, i will back off, and let him naturally move.

"bedtime is sacred. because boys are so active, it’s hard to get them to sit still. the best time of day is the ten minutes before they go to sleep. crawl into bed with them, read books, and hold them while they fall off to sleep. if you don’t believe in God, you will once you have lain next to your overactive son while his body goes limp next to you, and he ever so faintly begins to snore." — this one is my favorite. one of the best moments of my day is lying in bed reading with my angel :) i love it, and rather than rush him to sleep, like i used to, i use it as a time to be still and reflect on our day and my tremendous love for him. i have found this time to be incredibly calming.

thank you to the better man project, as i learned a lot from this amazing story. i will apply what i have learned and continue to be on the lookout for signs from the universe on how to be the best mother i can be! :)

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ashleydoes-blog · 7 years

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violence culture

I’m not writing this to turn a tragedy into something about me and my life, or because I think what I have to say is super significant. I’m writing it because when my emotions about a subject run deep and wide, writing them out helps me cope, especially in situations where I feel totally helpless and sad.

I don’t feel like gun violence is my issue to champion. I’m a farmer’s daughter from South Texas. Guns have been a part of my life since birth, and I have witnessed everything that falls on the spectrum between usefulness and danger. I believe 100% that we should reform our gun laws. I believe we have a tremendous amount of work to do . . . but I don’t feel like I know all of the right answers.

Here’s what I do know . . . I know being a single mother raising a son around violence culture in South Texas. I know what I’ve been taught about men and what makes them masculine. I know how people talk to me now about what kind of man I should be raising. I know when people think I’m not doing it right. I know how uncomfortable it is to challenge the status quo.

I’ve been thinking about Atticus all morning, and instances that I thought were isolated in his life are starting to connect together to paint a picture for me.

I’ve worried about raising a man since the day my son was born, but since we moved to Pleasanton and I’ve been raising him mostly alone my worries have compounded. We live in the center of Texan masculinity, and I’m navigating it while trying my damnedest to make the right decisions.

When we moved here Atticus dreamed of playing football. It was all he wanted in the world. He thought he was going to be an NFL star. He begged me every day to play. Every. Single. Day. Even though I had my reservations about the culture and the injury potential, I was finally convinced to let him join a team. It was one of the worst Summers of our life. The culture didn’t work for either one of us. He did get hurt. He didn’t want to tackle anyone. He didn’t want to be tackled. I watched his heart break a little bit every practice and every game because football wasn’t what he thought it was. The men I hoped would be strong masculine figures in his life weren’t who I thought they were. He cried constantly. I cried constantly. What I cried about the most was feeling like he shouldn’t quit before the season was over. I’ve been taught that you don’t quit a team, and I wanted my son to learn that too. I wanted him to learn that commitments shouldn’t be broken in the middle of a season. I wanted him to toughen up. To man up. I wanted him to be brave in the face of what he was scared of. In the end, it wasn’t for him, it just wasn’t, and we decided together in the middle of a season to stop playing football.

Then he started Tae Kwon do and he LOVED it. He loved the training, learning, and conditioning. Tae Kwon Do seemed like his thing. A requirement of graduating to the next belt was to spar, and every belt requires more sparring. As he moved up in belts he gradually started complaining about Tae Kwon Do. He was vague. He didn’t even seem to know why he wasn’t liking it anymore. We naturally started to skip sparring days. He sparred enough to advance, but that was it, the bare minimum. I assumed it was because he would rather be at home in the AC watching TV. I assumed he wanted to quit because I taught him quitting was ok. When we got to the point that he started complaining the moment he got off the bus about dreading Tae Kwon Do I told him if we quit he had to replace the hour he was spending there with something productive. He went 3-5 days a week, so my compromise was that in order to stop going he had to spend an hour every day either outside playing, doing something creative, or helping me with chores. He happily agreed.

On Saturday at lunch my Dad invited him to go hunting. Atticus turned it down quickly with no explanation. It hurt me to watch him turn down spending quality time with his Pops so fast. An influential man in his life invited him to go do “man things” and he had no interest whatsoever. As a mom constantly worried that I’m not teaching him to ”be a man”, this gave me pause. I assumed, again, that he was just more interested in going home to video games and chilling. I thought he had his priorities wrong, so when we got in the car after lunch I explained to him that he was turning down quality time. That his Pops wanted to spend time with him and he dismissed it and why would he do that? A few weeks ago when I picked Atticus up from a friends house, the grown folks were out in a pasture shooting birds. I knew that at some point Atticus had probably been involved, and I trust the family 100%, so I didn’t think much of it. But in the car Atticus explained to me that when he was involved with hunting, he didn’t like it. He thought it was scary and loud. He didn’t want to kill anything. What started with me lecturing him about spending quality time with his Pops turned into me listening and really hearing that my son found hunting to be violent and scary, and he didn’t want to do it.

This morning I was getting ready for work, reading about another incident of gun violence in this country committed by a white man, and the dots started to connect about how I want to parent my son.

I want to change gun laws. I want to hug families of victims. I want to donate tons of money to all of the causes I find important. I want to solve mental health problems. I want to go back in time and fix unfixable things. I want to do it all, and I can’t do any of it.

It’s so heartbreaking to feel helpless, but there is one contribution I can make.

I can listen to my son. I can really hear him when he says violence isn’t for him. I can look at these patterns and see that he’s not comfortable with people hurting him. That he’s not comfortable harming living things. When he thinks something is loud and scary, I can make the choice to be compassionate. Instead of making fun of him, telling him to get tough, or minimizing what he’s saying, I can tell him I understand. I can block out the influences around me and choose to ignore the advice of people that want to help me “turn him into a man.” He’s going to become a man either way, and I have the responsibility of listening to him when he tells me what kind of man he wants to be.

I don’t know the story of this shooter yet. I know these issues are complex. But I also know there are patterns in how we raise our boys that cannot be ignored. That placing value in how big, strong, tough, and aggressive they are while teaching them that their other emotions are wimpy isn’t turning out well anywhere I look. Of course not every boy is like my boy, but I believe in listening to what they are saying and trying to help them figure out their emotions when they are confused about them. I believe in finding your child’s strengths and helping cultivate them. I believe there is goodness in being big, strong, tough, and aggressive, but I don’t think there is goodness in forcing everyone to measure themselves against those qualities to determine how much of a man they are. I believe my son deserves to be heard when he’s finding his words to explain how he feels about activities that make him feel uncomfortable. I also believe he might change his mind later, and I hope I approach those times with respect.

I believe I can do better, I believe we can all do better, and I believe that we have to.

No one expects their son to grow up and do something horrific, and I have no way of knowing who my son will grow up to be. But while he’s little and while he’s still looking to me for guidance I can do my best, and I can focus my energy into making that my contribution, however small it may be.

#violence #texas #lasvegas #singlemom #mom #boys

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