Boy Crazy
By: Erica Jong Source: AARP The Magazine Date Posted:
I grew up in a family of girls--girls with handmade dresses sewed by my talented mother, girls with ponytails and "bunches" and braids, girls who loved lipstick and nail polish and twirling for guests in the living room. Girls who took ballet classes and went to see Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet, girls who ice-skated in Central Park and at Rockefeller Center. Girls, girls, girls.
We never watched ants crawl around the edge of a swimming pool, or memorized all the names of the dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History, or contemplated sharks in aquariums, or wondered if they ate little boys.
Welcome to the world of my three-year-old grandson, Max, all boy, and proud of it. But he is also sweet and vulnerable, questioning and clever. It's just that sharks and swords and castles interest him. Braids and bunches and clothes and lipsticks do not. I buy him a new shirt--he doesn't care. I buy him toy penguins and walruses and dinosaurs--he does. He has no vanity, just infinite curiosity. He is the boy I would have been were I not born a girl. This knocks my socks off.
I came of age in the generation that insisted all gender differences were the result of societal conditioning. If only we stopped giving guns to boys and dolls to girls, they would have identical interests. "Free to be" was the mantra. I never quite believed it, but then I was an unorthodox feminist. I never wanted to be an orthodox anything. I had my own mind and would make it up from my own observations. Dogma of any kind made me itch. And now that I can get down on the floor with a little boy I love, I am observing closely.
We never give Max guns or swords and we never let him watch television violence, but he has his particular interests. Dinosaurs delight him. He builds castles and knocks them down. He likes to see his pirate ship aim cannons and go kaboom. He counts the legs on insects. He does not pull them off.
Of course there are a million ways in which he's just like the little girls he plays with, but I am looking at the ways in which he is different--just because it's such a novelty to me. I never had this much fun with a little boy before. I was too busy with big boys--or writing. Now, I am observing the origins of the male of the species. I could stay here on the floor forever.
Often, when I have free time after the writing day, I have to decide whether to visit my 96-year-old mother or my 3-year-old grandson. Guilty as I am, my grandson wins. He is the future, and my mother is the past. Much as I love my mother, I have to move toward the future. The future is irresistible.
Even saying this suffuses me with guilt. My mother used to be such a pistol, and now she seems to drift in and out of sleep. When I remember the fiercely energetic woman she was--the witty talker, the chess player, painter, dress designer, and Scrabble champ--I want to cry. She knows me still and knows my sisters, but she is not much company. I kiss and cuddle her without conversation. Her sentences always seem to slide away like errant skis down an icy hill. I am desolate that her talent and wit have come to this. Yet she is happy in her way--and astonished to be still alive.
* * *
"Look--I am pretending to be early man," my grandson says, bending over to walk on all fours like an ape.
"I'm early woman," I say, doing the same.
"Then you're extinct!" he crows.
"I am not!"
This question of extinction is a tricky one. More for me than for him. He knows that dinosaurs became extinct and other animals, too, but he does not plan to ever become extinct. Neither do I, but the difference is, I know I am not immortal. For the very young, death is invisible--or at least it does not apply to them. I know it applies to me.
This is a recent revelation. I did not feel it entirely when my beloved grandparents died and I was in my 20s and 30s. I began to feel it with a vengeance when my father died--just a few weeks after Max came into the world.
My father's death changed me profoundly. He was a health food and exercise aficionado long before such practices were widely embraced. But he could not resist the diseases that so often come with aging: skin cancer, prostate cancer, and eventually colon cancer. The amazing thing was: he beat all three cancers. It was finally an incurable pneumonia that did him in.
Initially, doctors can patch one system or another. The cancerous colon can be removed, or the cancerous skin lesion or the cancerous prostate--but what happens when the efforts to expunge the cancers result in further damage to the systems?
My father wanted to live forever. Would he have really enjoyed living with all the decrepitude old age brought him? He was an athlete who eventually could not walk, could not jump, let alone run. He was a musician who could no longer play his Steinway or his snare drums. Did he really want to live like that? My sisters and I worked with a whole palliative-care team--a social worker, gerontologist, and nurse. They could not make the decision to let him go: they could only enumerate our options and tell us about the statistics for 92-year-old males. Statistics are little comfort when your beloved father is dying before your eyes.
* * *
And now Max was here. He slept and nursed all day and night, but he was certainly here, and here to stay. He had come into the world when Dad was dying. Max and my dad passed each other on the escalator--one going down, one going up--and entered and exited the world within a month of each other. They never played the drums together, or basketball, or explored the American Museum of Natural History, or went to a Broadway show. But I will do all that for him with Max. I'll pass the basketballs and songs along. I know that's partly my job.
What I know of men I know from my grandfather and father and husbands and grandson. I know that men are more vulnerable than they want to admit. I know that many of their adaptations are about disguising their vulnerability. But I have never watched this maleness develop and grow. I have never seen the hegira of a 21st-century boy. This is more exciting to me than Harry Potter's hegira. This is all the magic I need.
Last summer the whole extended family was in Nantucket with Max. Though I had been to the island many times before, I had never seen it through the eyes of a little boy. All Max wanted to do was to go back again and again to the tidal pool where he could lift up crabs and look at their legs wriggling, where he could pick up oysters and squirt them in my face, where he could marvel at all the sea creatures.
Watching him do this, watching his delight in the creatures of the tidal pool, I realized that I had missed all this in my childhood. I had spent summers on Fire Island and had run on the beach stumbling on dead starfish and horseshoe crabs, but I had never seen the sea alive with creatures, nor did anyone think to take me to a tidal pool.
Having a grandson, I get to be a kid again, learning the things I never learned in my childhood. I get to be a boy and a girl. I get to remember what it was like to feel immortal.
Erica Jong's book Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters (Tarcher) was reissued in August.
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