The Other Beasts of the Southern Wild

Do you ever watch documentaries on animals in Africa?

I used to, before all the animals became endangered and every documentary had to end with the 10 minute Morgan Freeman narration, "These glorious animals you have been privileged to see for the last 50 minutes exist only in a single city block preserve in Africa and are the last 6 specimens on Earth.  They are killed at the rate of a billion per day and hunted only for their left testicle.  Moreover, their territory is shrinking at the rates of four football fields per minute, and they're all dying and IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT."

So, before that, I used to watch documentaries on animals in Africa.  There was always a segment on these gorgeous prides of lionesses.  The male lions fight over who gets to claim the pride, the victor eats all the loser's cubs, impregnates all the lionesses and then leaves until the next mating season.

(Forgive me, biologists for any generalizations and over simplifications.)

So, this pack of lionesses is left with all these crazy cubs.  First, they're all cute and nursing and falling over each other.  Then, the cubs have to be trained to hunt, fight off rivals, and survive without the pride of females to care for them.

The cubs spend the next seven minutes of the movie growling at one another, pouncing on one another, gnawing on one anothers' ears, pretending the weakest one is a gazelle.  It's chaos, and the mother lionesses just sit there, flies in their eyes, big tails lazily swatting at the bugs, while cubs fight and spar and tussle all around them. 
The lioness, equipped to provide for her offspring and for those of her peers, takes her responsibility stoically.  She's waiting until night, when after enduring a whole day of being her cubs' playground, she has to go out into the wilderness, find dinner, fend off scavengers and bring it back to those babies who then strut around like they brought down that gnu on their own.

Cubs these days.

Living in a house full of boys is a lot like an African Animal Documentary, except for a few things:

1.  Morgan Freeman is not narrating my life.  My life doesn't lend itself to linear narration, but would be more like perpetual surprise for the voice over..."and now, the Mother Human moves to...wait, what the hell is she doing?"

2.  My cubs draw blood.  Cubs learning to hunt and play spar until one dominates the other, but do not draw blood.  That would draw predators.  So, another point in favor of the wild animals being smarter than boy-cubs.

3.  I don't live in a pack of lionesses.  Though sometimes I wish I did. 

If we lioness moms lived in a pack, many things would be very different.  If we could all sit there together, swatting our tails, making sure no one came and ate our babies, and all we had to ensure was that our cubs could fend off a weaker male and catch the occasional wildebeest, our lives would be a snap.

But no.  Instead, moms of boys live in the reverse situation.  We exist in a pack ruled by testosterone.  Motherly instincts to "stop climbing on the furniture" and "stop hitting your brother" and "whoever left footprints on the wall, please stop doing so," are regular, repeated directions.  Nobody has to tell the girl-cubs that falling into a glass coffee table would be painful.

Moms of boys live in a world where a bra in the laundry pile is not just another piece of wash, but readily becomes a hat, ear warmers, or Mickey Mouse ears.

Moms of boys live in a house where each person actually has a favorite body part.  And those boys feel compelled to mention, extol the virtues of, give names to, praise, and exhibit that favorite body part on a regular schedule.  (Hint: it's not an elbow)

Moms of boys live where any words can be fightin' words.

The pride is flipped on its head.  Estrogen is rare and precious.The female is not the norm, she is the oddity, the novelty, the one who mysteriously gets giant pimples on her chin every 28 days.  The cubs, needing the dummy wildebeest, jump on, roughhouse and spar with her as though she is as spry and resilient and tough as they are (which she most definitely is not, in large part because she GAVE BIRTH to two cubs!)

Moms of boys live in a demographically gerrymandered world.  There is no sympathy in the house of boys.  There is no commiseration.  There's barely cooperation.  Boys live in a world without cootie-awareness or personal hygiene guidelines at all.  Like that lioness licking those babies' fur, a boy-mom has to double check fingernails and ears in ways girl-moms never do.  We tend to our camouflaged colors as our cubs grow patchy manes or fantastic plumage and flaunt it in pre-adolescent absurdity.  Little miniatures of noble sires, awkward, comically imitating what they hope to become.  Flexing their wee might as though they were the king of the jungle.

Moms of boys live in a world of heightened bluster and competition.  Of sparring only to see who is dominant in one particular moment, at one particular skill.  Moms of boys live in a zoo-like reproduction of the African wild animals.  The population balance is off, the pairings of moms and cubs much less like a commune, and much more like a habitat surrounded by a moat.  Moms of boys are trying to raise these unruly mini-men into the model of their virile lineage but they're doing it without the community of the lionesses.  There is no check of the rival alpha male.  These cubs aren't aware of forces selecting against them, of males stronger and more dominant. Or females who close rank to protect. These boy-cubs are being raised in the habitat where both of them could be king of the jungle, where neither of them will be the all-watching, all-nourishing lioness.  And there is only that duality.

Moms of boys live in an every-man-for-himself world.  And it's all fun and gazelle games til somebody skins a knee.