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Notes on how to raise a boy

A few days ago I found this article (in Italian) by Tiasmo on how to raise a boy. Today I want to share with you my favourite parts (translated, of course).

I’d like to give him the tools to graduate from teenagerhood well. Not with the highest scores, but on time. There are lots of teenagers out there who are five, ten, twenty years late. […] I’d like my son to become a strong man capable of emotions, not an eternal teenager dominated by strong emotions.   I’d like to teach him the difference between sensitivity and weakness. When a man is sensitive, we say he’s got a feminine side to him. I’m not sure it’s exactly like that. I think, though, that women account for pain more than men do, and they’re more prepared. Men are usually caught off guard by pain, like in movies when the main character is shot in the chest and doesn’t really understand what’s going on, he touches the wound with his hand, looks at the blood that stains his fingers, astonished, and seems to realise then that he’s got just one heart—when it breaks. I think—and I keep saying “I think,” because I’m no anthropologist, sociologist, nor male-ologist—I think that men have this brave and adorable cockiness to them, that in women is infused with awareness and turns into courage. That’s probably it, men are less used to understand the anatomy of feelings, theirs and others’. They’re cockier, but less brave. Mothers should probably work on that: less alpha males and more emotionally aware men.I want to be many things for my son, but a visceral, feral mother. Women who “The man of my life? I gave birth to him!” forget that all greek tragedies start like that. And yes, even I got butterflies that time when my son surprised me at the train station, on my return from a trip. But I’m pretty sure that claims of absolute devotion and declarations of furious love are not good for our sons. There’s a maturity to motherhood, too. It’s difficult, but if you want to smell his neck—in that exact point where it still smells like baby—do it at night, furtively, when he’s asleep, because a mother’s love has to stay a bit secret, undercover.

It made me emotional, in a strange way—maybe in a way that probably only a mother of a boy can understand.

I don’t know how different it is to raise a boy than a girl (I don’t know much about raising a boy either); many mothers say it’s easier, less hormones to deal with—and looking back at my teenagerhood, I can see how that’s true. I remember the constant quest for independence through long battles, the early need to separate myself from my mother’s strong identity to find my own. And then I see young boys still cuddling with their mothers, teenager ones proudly showing off their mothers at the football game and young men in their 20s taking their mothers out for dinner. I like that. I want that. And I can see how that can become addictive, and lead to a “visceral, furious love”.

I don’t want that. I want to raise an independent boy, one that will graduate on time (even early?) from teenagerhood. And maybe, just maybe, the secret is exactly what Tiamso wrote about: maturity in motherhood, and keeping our love a little bit undercover.

After all, my son might be my sweet little prince, but I met the man of my life way before Oliver was born and it’s with him—not with my son—that I’ll grow grey and old.

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