I’ve Met the "Boys, Will Be…" Myth Busters

And you are going to meet them too.

I don’t usually keep my blog promises, but I’m pretty sure that, unless I am run over by a bus, I’ll be keeping this one.

I had some great photos to go with this but I lost them in a cup of coffee last fall, so I will get some more for future posts in this series. But for now you are just going to have to close your eyes and imagine… oh wait, this isn’t in Braille, open up and keep reading and just let your mind wander off and imagine these lovely folks that I hope will:

Knock your socks off.

Encourage you to a knowing that you can have amazing sons like they do. And that you do not have to live through terrible twos, horrid adolescence and wait for them to be thirty to see decent character lived out in their lives.

Oh and a side note, and perhaps a separate series, that you can be in business or work for family, and with and for people that are nearly like family, and do it for longer than a month or two. They have been doing it for years.

Suffice it to say, I’m in love, we both are, Dirt and I, yes with each other but also with some new found friends. And yes, actually I’ve been holding out and keeping them mostly to my self, well we have shared them with the Bowermans a bit, but I haven’t told ya’ll about them much.

And forgive me if my gushing may sting, trust me I love all of you too, really I do, so maybe love isn’t the right word for the special feeling I feel towards these people. Maybe astounded, or relieved is what I feel.

I knew that with my daughters, rearing them was not a crap shoot. It was not a case of “do my best” and hope for something less than a disaster. I knew that I did not have to despise my child at two, or sixteen. That none of them needed, like the world thinks they need, to go through a horrid rebellious stage. I knew that I did not need to beat them down and strip away their humanity to get there either. Actually I knew I couldn’t take that approach if I wanted them to continue, on into adulthood, how they were as young people in my home.

(I’m writing “I” and “me” a lot, but please, see that “I” and “me’s” are really “we’s”, Dirt and I, it is just that the convolution of making sure that every time I mention us, I mention us, it gets to be rather halting for me.)

The problem with having only one gender for your offspring is that people can continue to deny that the same result can be reached with the gender (opposite from yours of course) they have. And yes, of course those who birthed and are raising both will still have an out because they are having to deal with a “mixed” household, and we have only girls and they (this family you will be introduced to over the next few months) have only boys. But if you just want to look for excuses as to why you are going to insist on having what most everyone else has, a crap shoot and eventually nice twenty-five or thirty-year olds, then by all means excuse away. I’ll have a funny post up about something innocuous in a few days for you.


And I certainly do not wish to give the impression that my girls are anywhere near perfect or that I did it on my own, or with some amazing program that I’m going to tell you to buy at the end of this post.

Sorry girls, but yes, my girls could be better. I could have had my head out of my… well I could have not been in residual lingering rebellion during the first five years of my marriage, that could have helped. I could have not been over come by neurotic anxiety in the ten years following that and then I could have not gone through crushing, immobilizing depression that had me in bed for over twelve to fifteen hours in a day, or twenty-four if I had no outside appointments, for the next five. So yeah, I could have done a little better job and then maybe I could say my girls are pretty close to perfect.

As it is, I didn’t experience: rolling eyes, stomping feet, snotty attitudes, incredibly dishonoring words from their mouths, run aways, blatant disobedience, laziness, rudeness to my friends, slamming doors… .

What I have experienced consistently from all of my girls, now ages twenty-seven, twenty-three, eighteen and sixteen, is: tender hearts, open minds, sweet dispositions, loyalty. Obedience in stuff like: pleasantly working hard, like grown men in many instances, daily; not getting to go everywhere or just anywhere with just anyone; not a lot of material goods and faddish clothes; not dating; not pretending not to date; not moving out on their own, being “independent” and having daddy pay for the “independence”; being corrected when they were off base, and willingly changing.

But this series isn’t about me, it is about them. And I can’t wait to tell you all about them from my perspective and include little snippets of interviews that I am going to force them and me, us, to do, just for you.

But now the sun is up, well I am assuming it is, because I can see the leaves and grass out my window, which means that I need to get my rain gear on and get out-of-doors and pretend to be the farmer I think I want to grow up to be.