Gender roles

It’s been agreed, between my wife and I, from pretty much the initial point of emergence of anything resembling personality traits in our son that the little guy is without question a dude’s dude. Back when his baby blue eyes would meet ours when either of us showed up for the daycare pick-up and very little would register beyond “Oh. It’s you, Tall Roommate.” – those same eyes were quite capable of tracking female strangers walking through the grocery store, as long as said females were in the target demographic (19 to 29 years old and not obviously physically malformed). In addition to a weakness for the fairer sex, other stereotypically male predilections of the little guy include: a gleeful tendency toward physically rough horseplay, profound amusement at the sound of his own flatulence, and of course, approximately 47 of his first 100 words of recognizable spoken English falling into the category “Things With Engines” (car, truck, garbage truck, school bus, firetruck, motorcycle, tractor, zippermobile).


Look, I’m just saying that he has two parents who can overthink their way into worrying about pretty much anything the future might hold for him, from terrorist dirty bomb attacks because we live near DC to developmental lags because we can’t get him to eat a lot beyond yogurt and chicken nuggets, but we seem to have dodged the endocrine disrupter bullet. Testosterone deficiency does not worry us AT ALL.

And not that the argument needed bolstering, but yesterday I got home from work with little guy in tow, and I pulled into the garage as is the new custom. I park on the left side of the garage, which means my driver’s side door opens into a wall, against which rest the little guy’s stroller and his push trike. As you can imagine, our precious Formula One infatuee adores both of those, especially the trike. It can in fact be hard to get him in the house if he’s decided that what he really needs is a few spins around the block on said trike, assuming I can even say no to a plaintive “Daddy push?” and head for the front door myself.

I’d been in the habit of getting the little guy out of the backseat via the rear driver’s side door, because it was closest, and that worked fine when I was parking in the driveway and the garage could remain closed and the trike well-hidden. Now that I’m parking so that the rear driver’s side door is essentially on top of the trike, I decided a different strategy was in order. I got out, walked around the car, and opened the rear passenger’s side door to extract my boy. Smooth move, right? The trike would be blocked by the car, out of sight out of mind, and since we were slightly late getting home due to even more inexplicably egregious 66 traffic than usual, we could get inside and get down to the business of dinner and other pre-bedtime rituals.

So I set the little guy on his feet on the garage floor and closed the rear door and opened the front passenger door to retrieve my work bag. Meanwhile the little guy very nonchalantly walked around the back of the car, straight to his trike, and was astraddle it by the time I caught up with him, as he looked back over his shoulder hopefully. “Daddy push?”

Daddy pushover, really. Although I like to rationalize what happened next as something of a compromise. I pulled the trike out from between the car and the wall and wheeled it to the door leading into the house, through the den, and out the back sliding glass door onto the deck, which was where we were headed anyway to let the dogs have their customary supervised evening romp after a day home alone. The little guy got a few laps up and down the deck, and then I was able to move the whole party inside for dinners with minimal resistance.

Anyway, knowing where something is even when you can’t see it, that’s pretty advanced spatial reasoning, right? The thing guys are supposedly slightly better at, or so we are flattered to hear when it falls upon us to pack twenty-two cubic feet worth of luggage in a thirteen cubic foot car trunk? Or maybe it’s not so much that my little guy is stockpiling the glial juice necessary to keep a mental map of the relative positions of desired objects and room orientation and intervening obstacles updated and accurate; maybe he’s just a frood who knows where his trike is.