Boys Don't Arrive Entitled. They're Taught.

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Today’s essay was inspired by this discussion question from Celeste Davis’s Women’s Circle discussion group: What would it look like to raise boys without a sense of entitlement to women’s time, bodies, labor or emotional energy?

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It was literally killing me.

The accumulating decades of being the floor everyone stood on. I was the one who found the answers. I absorbed the emergencies. I soothed the pain. The good wife. The good mother. The facilitator who had to numb, stuff, dissociate just to get through the day.

I thought I was showing them love.

I was teaching them something I didn’t mean to teach.

I had six children assigned male at birth. Now five sons, one daughter.

Some of them will love women. Whoever they love is not mine to decide. But all will have women in their lives and all of them are growing up learning about how a woman moves about the world primarily from me.

That education is happening whatever I intend.

I am living. I am loving. I am absorbing. I am deferring. They are watching.

Whoever they spend their life with is for them to discover. How they treat the people they love is mine to interrupt.

Photo by Yevgeniy Mironov on Unsplash

I was two decades into parenting when I learned the shocking idea that my kids are not entitled to unrestricted access to me.

And I really mean shocking, which tells you everything about what I was taught about what it meant to be a good mother. I invited these children here. To my home. They didn’t ask to come. They arrived already owed my attention. My body. My emotional energy. All communally owned. A good mother makes herself available until there is nothing left. Then she finds more.

One of my boys used to grab my face with both hands. Physically turning my head toward him to get my attention. He was small. Autistic. He wasn’t cruel.

Someone mentioned this specific behavior in a discussion group on this topic last week as an extreme example. I flushed warm with shame. I had allowed this. When my son did this my first instinct was guilt. I wasn’t being present and attentive. My son was right. He needed me.

It took me way too long to see this for what it was.

My son wasn’t suffering from too little access to me.

He was learning that access is something you take.

I had to completely redefine what a good mother was.

The version I learned was that of a human giver. To solve everyone’s problems, feel their pain, find the answers, manage the schedules, keep the wisdom, manage the emotions. Be the floor.

I believed it. I did it. I numbed myself so I could survive it.

But I was not their mother in those moments. I was a facilitator. A vending machine. A tool. A surface.

My greatest responsibility as their mom is to model a life well lived. To model emotional responsibility.

Saying no. Resting when I am tired. Enforcing boundaries.

As hard as it is for my heart to believe, when I hold the line and say, not now, and mean it, I am not actually failing them. I am showing them something they cannot learn any other way.

That the people they love have limits inside, just like them.

The difference between a request and a demand is consent.

A request can be declined. A demand has one correct answer. (It is not no.)

My son turning my face toward him was not a request. He wasn’t asking if my attention was available the way we had discussed it, a patient hand on mine, until a break in my conversation. He was taking what he believed to already be his.

Now every time I hold the line, I’m introducing a new idea. That my attention belongs to me. You can ask for it. Asking is different from taking. That no is a complete sentence when spoken by any person at any time. It is not an obstacle to be overcome.

My people are learning.

The interrupted mother becomes the interrupted partner.

A boy who learns to grab his mother’s face, growing up, will assume physical presence is a given. He expects it. Gets confused when it’s not available. Doesn’t understand when someone needs space.

A girl who is told that boys pick on her because they like her will learn to accept mistreatment as a fact of life in romantic partnerships. She will make excuses for abusers.

A boy whose meltdowns are absorbed by his mother grows up and says to partners, you make me feel this way. You always make me act like this. You make me shut down.

A girl who is told that it takes so much courage for those boys to ask her to dance and she must always say yes will end up repeatedly assaulted, because she has gagged the voice inside her that says what she wants in favor of others’ comfort.

(One of these stories is mine.)

These are the pieces of emotional logic we are given and we build our relationships on them. Just as our kids will do.

This is not just a hetero problem either. A boy can grow up to love men and still carry every one of these patterns into relationships with him and all the women in his life. Toward his friends. Coworkers. Mother. Entitlement to women’s emotional labor and bodies shows up everywhere.

Photo by Douglas Fehr on Unsplash

Whoever walks beside my children through the years of their lives will inherit something from me. I am trying to change it from a burden to a gift.

My actual job as their mother is to walk beside them. Offer tools. Support. Believe in them as whole, capable humans who have the inner wisdom to succeed on their own.

They can solve it. ONLY they can solve it.

No one can actually make them do anything. To pretend is an illusion.

And no one should have to carry what I was. Not the women in their lives. Not their partners. No one should have to numb themselves past their capacity to keep going. Lose themselves in service to my children. Not only is it unnecessary. It’s harmful.

Every time I say, not now. Every time I don’t absorb the emergency. Every time I remain a person instead of becoming a floor. My kids will not remember it.

But someday, someone will.

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I’m going deeper on all of this — the buffering, the absorbing, the knowing-better-but-still-frozen — in a one-hour workshop on July 7th @ 7 MT (Arizona).

The workshop is called You Know What to Do. So Why Can’t You Do It? and it’s about what’s actually happening when action stalls. Not laziness. Not motivation. The real questions your brain is trying to answer before it will let you move. And why those questions got so much heavier after obedience.

If you recognized yourself in this piece, that’s probably the room for you. Free for CNRS members here. And my paid subscribers here. Or book a 15-minute clarity call to work through one stuck point here.