“You know you’re in a house full of men when …” the teenaged boy paused, recollecting, and then grinned.
“… When the living room is covered with fast-food wrappers, and they’re not all from the same night!”
“Ugh, seriously?”
“Seriously. You know you’re in a house full of men when a guy eats cereal out of a teapot.”
“Because no one wanted to wash the dishes?”
“Yeah. It was a tall, narrow teapot, too, so he had to reach way down inside to get the cereal. The milk was easier to get. He just drank it from the spout.”
The boy beamed. Such happy memories! He was freshly returned from a lengthy all-boys school trip, and it had given him a glimpse of the glorious masculine messiness that awaited when he was no longer living at home in a house full of girls with a mother and father who made him clean things up.
New vistas had opened. The future lay before him, and it was paved with pizza boxes.
Interestingly, for comparison’s sake, his teenage sister had been off at the same time on a lengthy all-girls school trip. She too had come home full of warm memories, but the way she acquired them could not have been more different.
Away from home and the normal strictures of life, she and the other girls had not gone feral, oddly enough. They had not left garbage heaped in common areas, and they had not eaten from teapots or vases or with their bare hands.
At night, the boys had watched movies in which large pieces of machinery blew up. The girls had stayed up late talking about their feelings. The boys had thrown each other into a swimming pool; the girls had sung together and given each other hugs.
The only commonality in both groups, apparently, was a zest for junk food. Boys and girls really are not the same, and you can’t make them the same, and left to themselves they manifestly do not behave the same way — and why should they? Vive la difference, as someone said.
Still, speaking as a mother, it would be nice if sons in particular weren’t so inclined toward grubbiness. A friend of mine remembers a particularly coruscating exchange with her boy, then 16, whose bathroom was a horror.
“How can you live like this?” she remembers yelling. “There’s hair everywhere, and dried shampoo on the wall — how do you get shampoo on the wall? — and the sink is encrusted with–”
“Mom!” the boy had yelled back in frustration, “I’m a teenage boy! It just looks like a bathroom to me! I don’t see squalor!”
He didn’t see it, she did. There it is, in a nutshell.
The recently returned boy, meanwhile, had summoned another beautiful image from the recent past.
“You know you’re in a house full of men,” he said, “when someone takes a shower and the shower door sticks and you hear what sounds like a gunshot and when the guy comes out the floor is covered with broken glass.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “It was funny.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
