My son has discovered girls. Well, maybe I should say they have discovered him. It is an undisputed, proven, scientific fact that girls mature faster than boys. Female accelerated maturity renders similar-aged boys powerless and confused.
One of these young, yet older girls got the attention of my son recently. He doesn’t stand a chance. My son is entering the seventh grade, and he still enjoys his days playing Legos on the floor of his room while his “don’t call her my girlfriend, Dad!” texts him relentlessly. She wants to know what he is doing. He wants to know why she wants to know so much.
I tried to explain to him that it is female nature to be up in everybody’s business, and that her behavior was normal. Girls want to know where you are and what you’re doing at every single nanosecond. The concept was lost on him. He couldn’t understand why women would care if he was playing Legos or not. While I continued to try to explain the craziness and wonderfulness that are these strange and demanding things called women, my wife interrupted us and asked what I was doing.
“I’m explaining why his girlfriend—”
“She’s not my girlfriend!” my son interrupted.
“Yes, not his girlfriend wants to know what he is doing.”
“Because she’s interested in you. That’s why she’s curious,” my wife claimed.
I didn’t buy it for a second. Women want to know everything because knowledge is power—power over men.
My son is still coming to terms with his newfound role as an object of affection. His “not girlfriend” is trying to score a date to the movies with him, but the only scoring he cares about is finishing level 10 on the Wii game Star Wars: Force Unleashed.
The girl who is causing all of the fuss is the daughter of some friends. That means the two kids get to be around each other at any social gathering. My son, the shy one, ignores her for the first hour of any event. She spends this time interrogating his little sister. My daughter is more than happy to dish on her older brother and then tease him all day long about his “giiiiiiirlfriend.” This always leads to us hearing him declare the usual, “She is not my girlfriend!”
After a while, my son abandons the shy routine and remembers that he likes this girl, and then they hang out like old friends. It’s very innocent, and they go through this routine every time we get together. Usually, all is well—until his little sister gets involved too much and teases both of them. Last weekend I overheard my daughter say, “She wants you to kiss her!” This made my son reel back and exclaim, “Ewww! No!”
The following day he was dumped by text message. He was pretty bummed out about it. I was surprised to see him upset by the “e-dumping,” since he had professed endlessly that she wasn’t his “girlfriend” and refused to kiss her for fear of cooties. Regardless, obviously she was someone of some type of importance to him; he just didn’t have a name for it. I don’t care what he labels her, as long as he doesn’t end up referring to her as his “Baby Momma.” We’re a few years away from that kind of panic—I hope.
I heard about my son’s text tragedy (from his little sister, of course), sat down in his room, and began to build a Legos racecar with him. Like any good father-son conversation, we ended up talking about cars and women. These are subjects I claim to be an expert on, even though my wife, whom I love, would disagree that I know anything about women, and the car in my garage that hasn’t run in six months would also indicate that I don’t know jack about automobiles.
Regardless, I’m all my kid’s got when it comes to questions about the opposite sex. I’m his personal human Google for Gals, and so I try to answer all of his questions about women.
“I don’t know why she wanted to break up with me. I was nice to her.”
“Let me sum it up for you: You’re never going to understand girls. They are unsolvable puzzles. Man knows how to make a car go 200 miles per hour on 91 octane, but man doesn’t know how to keep a woman happy for 200 minutes. Get it?”
“No.”
“Well, knowing that you don’t know is knowing a lot. Girls have some loose wiring that causes them to do strange things. Let’s say you’re Guy A: a nice, good-looking, well-behaved kid. You like a girl, and she seems to like you, too. Then comes along Guy B: a kid who wears a lot of black clothes, has longer hair, rides a motorcycle, and probably has a juvenile record. Against all common sense, the girl will pick Guy B every time and leave you heartbroken.”
“So what do I do?”
“Stay nice like the person you are—Guy A—but dress more like Guy B.”
Rob’s just glad his son still talks to him at all. He figures any moment, in the eyes of his own son, he will become the lamest, most uncool person in the world..
This article appears in Aug 20-27, 2009.
