Boy Toys

When I was pregnant, I was convinced -- 1000 percent positive, actually -- that we were having a girl. My husband Stewart would refer to my growing belly as “he” … and I’d routinely correct him. “No -- She.” These back-and-forths usually played out when we were in a department store’s baby section, and I was mooning over some ridiculously frilly powder pink dress that no baby could conceivably be comfortable in -- or able to keep clean -- for long. But those baby wear designers know exactly how to hook into a hormonal pregnant woman’s fantasies -- before they’re shattered by the reality that your bundle of joy will really live in the onesies you buy by the dozen because a) they’re comfortable and b) can be tossed without regret once they’re stained beyond repair.

Not that there was any rationale to my insistence that there was a girl baby cradled in there. My thinking ran along the lines that my sister already had two boys, and I figured, with the kind of twisted logic that makes Lotto addicts play the same combinations day after day, convinced their numberswill come up … someday, that it was simply time for our collective family to have a girl. And thus I was carrying her. So certain was I, we’d already picked out her name -- Quinn. I wasn’t even thinking about boy names, because … well, why bother? Obviously, we were having a girl.

And then around about 14 weeks, I had my amniocentesis.

“Do you want to know the sex?” the ultrasound tech asked as she slid the wand over my belly, before the maternal-fetal medicine specialist came in to play pincushion with my expanding waistline.

Now some people swear they don’t want to know their baby’s gender until the doctor joyfully announces “It’s a boy/girl!” in the delivery room. “There are so few surprises left in life,” they sigh wistfully, as if Christmas will never come again, and even if it does, they’re sure to get nothing more exciting than socks. “We want to be surprised when he/she arrives.”

Whatever.

I promise, if you’re newbie parents, there are still plenty of surprises in store for you. Just wait till your toddler is covered in sky-blue paint because you left a paint tray on the floor when you went to answer the phone and he decided to “help” paint while you were gone -- as my oldest nephew Eli did. (“He looked like a Smurf!” my sister still shrieks, now with laughter, but at the time, given that she’d just had her carpets cleaned … well … that’s another story.) Or when your daughter learns how to get her diaper off, discovers that poop is her true medium and finger paints her crib with it -- as my friend Gail’s daughter did. I’d bet hard money they were … surprised to say the least. So trust me on this: whether you find out at 14 weeks or 40 weeks when you give that final push your baby’s gender will still be a surprise. But knowing ahead of time, at least gives you a jump on nursery décor.

“Sure, what is it?” I agreed, confident my girl hunch would at last be confirmed.

“It’s a boy!” the tech said jubilantly, as if she’d somehow had a hand in his creation.

Wait … a boy? I looked at her dumbly. A boy? (What did I tell you about surprises, right?)

“Check again,” I directed, thinking she must have somehow been mistaken.

“Oh, it’s a boy all right,” she said, turning the monitor toward me and pointing to the fuzzy gray image onscreen. “See? That’s his penis, right there.”

It all just looked like a fuzzy gray blur to me. But Stewart, who knows his way around an ultrasound and had spotted the evidence well before the tech’s announcement, confirmed it. We were having a boy.

Later on, my mom called, all concerned. “Are you okay? Are you disappointed? You can tell me,” she said conspiratorially.

Well, on the one hand, I was delighted that the ultrasound showed everything was as it should be, and that I wouldn’t be giving birth to some eight-legged octopus alien out of Men In Black. Girl or boy, a healthy baby was ultimately all that mattered. But, yeah, my heart of hearts sank just a bit. And not just because I’d miss out on the parade of little girl baby fashions. But because the terrifying truth was, I had absolutely no idea how to play with a boy.

Growing up, I was the girliest of girly girls, from the ribbons in my hair to my lace-trimmed ankle socks and black patent leather Mary Janes. I disliked sports, loathed getting dirty, hated to rough-house. I played dolls, I played dress up, wearing so much of my mom’s tacky costume jewelry, I looked like a retirement home granny dolled up to receive visitors. For weeks after seeing my first Nutcracker ballet at age 5, I danced around the house in a pink tutu and cardboard tiara, pretending I was the Sugar Plum Fairy. In other words, I knew what to do with a girl. I could play tea party and house and Barbies all day long. (Sure, I knew how Barbie’s unrealistic dimensions could torpedo a girl’s self-esteem, but I was already prepping a feminist self-actualization speech to deal with that dilemma.)

But a boy? Utterly clueless. I felt like I’d been dropped into unfamiliar territory without interpreter or GPS. How’d the nursery rhyme go? Snips and snails and puppy dog tails? Having a boy meant there’d be no Barbies or princesses. Instead, I’d have trucks and bulldozers, trains, cars, and let’s not forget: -- assorted weaponry. (As I’d long ago learned from observing my nephews, any toy, no matter how innocuous, can instantly be transformed into a sword or a gun.)

My fears were only compounded when I dropped by my sister’s one night and found her hunkered down on her patio with a new Hot Wheels track, racing cars with her boys. I didn’t know how to play cars. Nor did I know how to play Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Rescue Heroes, Avatars or Transformers -- or any of the other things that seemed to captivate my nephews. The closest I’d come to playing with “action figures” was having Barbie make out with G.I. Joe because even as a kid I knew Ken batted for the other team. Even after my sister promised her boys would “bring me up to speed,” my anxiety that I wasn’t up to this task wasn’t entirely allayed.

After the baby formerly known as Quinn now formally called Fletcher was born, I held out as long as I could, studiously avoiding the obviously gender specific toys to see if we could find some middle ground I could relate to. Now there’s an uphill battle against evolutionary hard-wiring that’ll give you glutes of steel. Sure, Fletcher loves playing in the toy kitchen. But then, again, in our household, kitchen duty is hardly “girl” stuff: It’s my husband who mans the stovetop since I’ve been known to burn water, ruin box brownies, and once did actually set a kitchen on fire.

When I visited college friends and watched their daughter deck herself out in plastic beaded necklaces, rings, bracelets and tiaras, I knew I was swimming hard against the gender currents. Fletcher would endure a wicked case of diaper rash before he’d ever reach for that stuff. And as soon as he could make his preferences known and was mobile enough to get to what he wanted, Fletcher headed straight for the toy cars, spy gadgetry and play guns he found in his older cousins’ toy bins. Last Christmas, he instantly commandeered the new spiral racetrack that had been a gift to my nephew Dylan. While the rest of us ate, first, Christmas breakfast and then later moved on to Christmas dinner, Fletcher refused all attempts to engage him in anything else. He stuck with that toy the way a determined slots player sticks with a progressive jackpot.
I knew when I was beaten. I gave up and gave in.

Now our living room looks like a construction site imagined by Toys R Us, and I can actually articulate the difference between a back hoe and a front-end loader. But nothing gets my boy more jazzed than seeing a real-life, honest-to-goodness truck on the road while we’re driving. “Big truck! Big truck!” he shrieks excitedly from the back seat. And these days, a major source of entertainment involves standing in the driveway, watching the sanitation guys roll through the neighborhood picking up recyclables. “Hi, Truck!” Fletcher waves enthusiastically when the garbage truck stops at the end of our drive. He is in awe. To him, the guys who drive and ride these trucks are way cooler than Justin Timberlake will ever be. It’s my tough luck if we’re running late for school on pickup days because I’ve learned it’s futile to even try to wrestle him into the car while the truck’s still on our block. “Bye, bye, Truck!” he shouts as it disappears from view. Though I don’t get the allure, it must warm these guys’ hearts to know they have such a devoted fan base.

One night, when it was just the two of us at home, we played on the floor in his room. Fletcher spilled out his bin of cars and trucks and lined them up, a long snake of bumper to bumper toy traffic. “Vroom, vroom,” I said, making some circles with a yellow cement mixer, in what I hoped sounded like a convincing I know how to play this game tone. “Vroom, vroom,” Fletcher parroted back, happily. Gradually, it began to dawn on me that this wasn’t such an enormous stretch from playing tea party. Pushing toy cars around on the floor, pushing toy cups and teapots around on a table. It was the same game of pretend, really, just with different props. The point was, the two of us were having fun playing. Together.