Tag: Child development

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Explorations, by Ricky

“Exploration” and 8-year old boys naturally go together as it is part of a boy’s job description along with: mischievousness, recklessness, inquisitiveness, disobedience, playfulness, rowdiness, loud, annoying (“Are we there yet?”, and the ever popular “Why?” repeated ad nauseaum), seekers of anything remotely fun (especially if it involves dirt or mud). But the description also contains: loveable, unlimited energy, full of wonder at new things, dreamers, and the all powerful over riding (and indefinable) “cuteness factor.” It doesn’t matter from what background or environment or race or culture a boy comes from (as long as no one has beaten such characteristics out of him) all boys share this common job description.

My story actually has its roots in 1953 with my first day of kindergarten. My grandmother dressed me in old style “baby” clothes (that in her day were perfectly acceptable girlish styles for little boys) as often as she could. My mother wisely stopped that practice when I began school. Unfortunately, her choice of shoe styles did not match the opinions of other boys of the same age or older. I had to wear sandals with wingtip style little holes punched into the leather. That day I learned the word “sissy” and I did not like it. So, I pitched a fit (mostly crying) and my dad over ruled mother and I got normal shoes that very evening. Nonetheless, “sissy” did not disappear from other boys’ vocabulary when referring to me for the next three years (K-2).

Now enter 1956, I (a newly arrived 8-year old), was sent to live on my grandparents’ farm in central Minnesota while my parents (unbeknownst to me) were arranging their divorce. Suddenly, I had a whole farm to explore that summer (and ultimately), autumn, winter, and spring in rotation. Eighty acres of new frontier for the world’s greatest trapper ever known, to bring in beautiful animal pelts for the ladies back east to wear. (Okay, so they really weren’t buffalo or bear pelts, but if an 8-year old boy squints just right under the proper lighting conditions, gopher skins can look just like buffalo or bear hides.)

1956 was the year of my awakening to the expanded world of exploring everything on the farm: the barn, milk house, hayloft, silo, chicken coop (stay away from there—guarded by a vicious rooster; Hey! I was only 8 and the rooster was “big”), granary, workshop (nice adult stuff in there), equipment shed where various farm implements were stored until needed, and the outhouse (the stink you “enjoyed” twice a day). State and county fair time brought other places to explore: animal barns (varieties of chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, horses, etc.), judging of canning, 4-H, displays of quilts, new farm machinery (tractors, bailers, rakes, manure spreaders (yucky!), thrashers, and combines), and of course the midway (yea!!) in the evenings.

As summer waned and school began I met and made a few friends: two farm kids (one even in my third-grade class); and several “townies” (my best townie friend was the son of the high school football coach). I also discovered that one of my dad’s brothers and two cousins also were townies. I had ridden school busses for three years in Los Angeles so that was not new. One of my farm friends and I were part of the “space race” as we would design rocket ships every evening and then compare them on the bus ride to school the next morning. (Hmmmmm. Could that have been early “training” to enjoy phallus shaped things?) Another farm boy and I did a bit of exploration of another type while riding the bus to school with our coats covering our crotches (use your imagination—and “No” we never got caught).

Another school-yard “exploratory” activity involved games. One favorite among all students (townies and farm boys) was marbles. Our version involved scooping out a shallow depression next to the wall of the school, placing the marbles we wanted to risk (bet) into the depression, and then stepping back a distance (which increased with each turn) and attempting to roll a “shooter” into the depression so it stayed. If more than one boy’s shooter stayed in, the two “winners” would roll again from a greater distance and repeat the process until there was only one shooter in the depression. The winner would then collect all the marbles in the hole and the betting process would begin again. Sadly, I don’t remember the name of this game.

The second game we called Stretch. I can’t speak for the townies, but all self-respecting farm boys had a small pocket knife in one of his pockets all the time (including at school). [Can’t do that today due to fear of violence in schools.] In this game two boys would face each other and one would start by throwing his knife at the ground at a distance calculated to be beyond the reach of the other boy’s leg. If the knife didn’t stick, it was retrieved, and the other boy took his turn. If the knife stuck, the other boy would have to “stretch” one leg/foot to touch the knife all the while keeping the other leg/foot firmly in place where he had been standing. If he was successful in touching the knife without moving the other foot, he retrieved the knife, returned it to its owner, and then took his turn of throwing the knife. If he could not touch the knife, he lost the game and another boy would take his place challenging the winner.

The third and fourth games were “King of the Hill” and snowball fights (obviously reserved for winter recess). I trust I don’t need to describe these. With all of these games, I (we) were “exploring” our limits or increasing our skills.

The elementary part of this school was of the old style, a “square” three story edifice with one classroom located at each of the corners of the first two floors and storage rooms on the third floor. The restrooms were in the basement and (miracles of miracles) the rope to ring the bell up in the cupola on the roof ran all the way into the boys’ restroom. “Yes,” even during a pee break (raise one finger and wait for permission) I would occasionally “just have to” “explore” pulling on that rope and then run back to class (remember the job description—mischievous).

Anyway, 1956 is when the “sissy” got lost and I became all boy.


© 26 March 2011

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

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To Be Held, by Betsy

When I was an infant, the scientists–physicians and psychologists–who knew everything there was to know about mothering, all proclaimed that holding your baby too much was not a good thing. The consequences of this seemingly natural human behavior was, in fact, risky. Babies could grow up expecting to be held all the time. They would become dependent on being held, they would become “spoiled.” Also at the time cow’s milk or cow-milk-based formula created by humans and promoted by the forces of capitalism, was better for a human baby than human milk which was, after all, only poor mother nature’s formula for what is best for a newborn.

Years later when I became a mother the same thinking was prevalent–except for the milk ideas. There had sprung up in recent years a group of rebel mothers called Le Leche League. The group promoted breast feeding among new moms. They had a book which described the benefits of not only the milk, but also the process of delivering the milk, not the least of which was to hold your baby close while feeding him. They held the notion that there is a reason the female human body is configured as it is. That properly and naturally feeding your baby required holding him close.

I actually heard many mothers at the time say “The problem is that if you breast feed your baby, you will become completely tied down to him/her.” When I told my doctor husband this, he had the perfect answer. “Well, a mother SHOULD be tied down to her baby. That is how a baby survives and thrives.”

My oldest child did not have the benefits of breast milk for very long. The pediatrician instructed me, a very insecure novice mom, to begin supplementing the breast milk with formula after two months or so. Why? Well, baby needs more milk and it was believed baby could not get enough milk from its mother alone. I soon learned that once you start the process of bottle feeding, baby learns really fast. It’s much easier for her to suck milk from a bottle than from a breast. It flows much, much faster out of a bottle and, well, they don’t have to work so hard to get it. Then, of course, they don’t want the breast milk, demand for the rich liquid plummets, and the milk-making machine quickly becomes non-productive.

I later learned that breast milk is the best, there is plenty of it as supply usually meets with demand, and it works perfectly for about one year, longer if one wishes, and if the feeding is supplemented with a source of iron.

Actually, in a society driven by corporate profits the truth is the main problem with breast feeding is that the milk is free, so long as the mother is properly nourished and hydrated. No one is buying anything. No one benefits monetarily from that method of feeding, no one except baby and mother. No corporate profit is to be made. Baby and mother alone benefit.

It seems that to be held IS important–not just for babies but for children and adults as well. Being held promotes healing, comfort, security, well being of all kinds. It is hard to imagine how it ever came to be regarded as detrimental. Yet the notion continues in some minds.

One of the first complete sentences my oldest child ever uttered was, “I want to behold.”

Of course when we first heard this we asked, “Behold–behold what? A star in the East?

“What do you mean, ‘I want to behold?’ Oohh! You need comforting and reassurance. You want to be held,” we said realizing that our brilliant three year old was not familiar with the passive form of the verb to hold.

Holding in a loving way and being held is loving behavior. What adult does not want to hold a kitten or puppy immediately when he or she see it. I think holding each other as an expression of love is something we learn or at least become comfortable with early in life. I think we could use more of it in this troubled world of ours. I’m all for it.

© 8 October 2012

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading, writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.

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Acceptance, by Ricky

While I was under 6-years old, I enjoyed playing with both boys and girls whenever they were around. I was not particular as to the items we played with either. If I was at my house, we played with my toys and if at another’s home, we played with their toys, which would include dolls if the playmate was a girl.

Somewhere between 3 and 4-years old, one of the girl playmates and I played doctor and we both learned the difference between girls and boys. Of course we got caught, but the visual images could not be erased.

As I aged to 6-years old and above, I gravitated to playing with boys only as the girls suddenly had cooties. I gave up playing with dolls and chose to play more active games like cowboys and Indians or war in an obvious imitation of the movies on television. For some reason, I never wanted to play Peter Pan after I saw the Disney animated feature. Perhaps I did want too, but my other playmates thought playing it was too sissy like.

At age 9 ¾ (not to be confused with platform 9 ¾ in the Kings Cross station), another boy and I fondled each other two nights in a row. Up until then, I never desired to see another person naked, but from those two days forward, I wanted to see other boys’ genitals. I had no desire to see girls’ private areas because I had learned playing doctor that girls have nothing to play with down there whereas, all boys have a built-in toy.

I experienced both oral and anal sex at age 10, learned about masturbation and had my first orgasm at age 11. At 11 I also noticed that I was attracted to some boys but not others. Since, I was still in the girls-have-cooties frame of mind, I thought nothing of it. However, as I continued to age, I became increasingly aware that my schoolmates no longer believed in females having cooties. That is when I began to feel different because I was not attracted to girls, only boys. I didn’t dislike girls and had several classmates that I got along with really well. If the opportunity had presented itself, I would have willingly gone to bed with them. But no such opportunity occurred and I became more and more confused and worried. I kept telling myself that I would probably “grow out of” my interest in males and I accepted that and internalized it for years.

I remained hopeful until 2010, when I finally accepted that I was never going to change and I was, in fact, gay. But now I am confused again.

Based upon my life experience growing up, I believe that children about 5 or 6 began to prefer being around members of their own gender. It is just my opinion as I have never read anything about child development in that context. It is just a self-declared fact I “made up” based upon my observations. So, why am I confused now?

I have recently watched several “coming out” stories that pre-teen and young teens have posted on YouTube. Most of them parallel my experience at that age except for one major difference. In most cases the boys state that they knew they were different at young ages. I didn’t know at that age, so how can they know? Is my so called natural-preference-for-one’s-own-gender-when-young theory real or is it just a desire to play active “boy games” and not passive doll games? Is it really a sexual attraction these video coming out story boys feel or just a non-sexual desire to be with and do boy things that they are misinterpreting as evidence or proof they are gay? Are they, in fact, in the early stages of puberty (as I was) at ever increasingly younger ages and these desires really are “sexual” in nature or just curiosity?

I just don’t know the answer to my questions. Until some straight boys of the same ages tell their stories on how they came out as heterosexual, there is nothing to compare the experiences of the two groups. So, I’ll just accept that I am going to be confused about these questions and probably something else as well for the foreseeable future.

© 21 December 2015

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

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Mom and Her Mom and I, by Phillip Hoyle

Just what are we to think about boys who seem as much girl as boy? I once heard a psychiatrist analyze how Freud’s laying the blame on the parents for the inability of some males to resolve the Oedipus-related developmental challenge in early childhood moved responsibility away from the homosexual child. Freud’s analysis thus called for improvements in therapy for homosexual men. That sounded nice, but then the psychiatrist I was listening to laid more blame upon the doting mother and less on the emotionally absent father. Moms! Poor moms!

I tend not to be Freudian or neo-Freudian, but I am always interested in how domestic upbringing influences any child and particularly with regard to his or her sexual needs and attitudes. So I am curious about how my parents coped with and responded to challenges of rearing me, a skinny boy whose interest in girl things was rather plain to see, whose penchant for the artistic persistent, and whose lack of physical coordination or upper body strength kept him out of sports. So I want to tell three short stories that somewhat address the theme of “Mom” but also keep me wondering.

I

One Christmas my mom’s mom gave me a baby doll as a gift. I named him Andy probably following the lead from the only boy doll I had ever hear of, Raggedy Andy brother, I assumed, of Raggedy Ann. My boy baby doll came with clothing my grandmother had made. I recall a plaid shirt and denim-like slacks. He was one of those babies made of rubber and if you worked hard enough you could pull off its arms and legs and even its head. Then if you worked even harder, you could reassemble the little thing. It was approximately nine inches tall.

Andy looked just like my sisters’ baby dolls except that he had brown skin and black hair whereas theirs had pinkish skin and blond or light brown hair—not wigs, simply hair stamped into the rubber and lightly painted. I don’t recall if the eyes were inserted or painted (probably the latter since I remember them as being black) but I do recall they didn’t open and close like my sisters’ fancier Terri and Terri Lee dolls.

I sometimes wonder what Grandma and Mom were thinking. I never thought to ask either of them. They were very bright women, both educators. Surely they had talked about the present before it showed up under the Christmas tree. I’m sure they had noticed I played with my sisters’ dolls. Perhaps they thought I ought to have a boy doll so I would somehow know I was a boy? I’m sure there was some application of logic in their decision to give me that boy doll years before Barbie and Ken appeared under anyone’s Christmas tree.

I played with Andy but have no recollection when I got him, how long I had him, or when I left off playing with him. I don’t know whatever happened to the doll. Perhaps he was adopted by a nice Black family. I don’t even know if Andy was actually a boy doll or if he was simply dressed as one. I was intrigued that Grandma had made his clothes designing, cutting, and sewing them herself just like she did for my older sisters’ dolls. I don’t know if Andy’s shirt buttoned on the girl side or the boy side, but I am pretty sure there were no boy baby doll clothes to purchase from any store in our town.

II

When Mom was a child, she was taught to sew by her mom. I loved to see mom at work using her portable Singer sewing machine at the kitchen table. I loved even more Grandma’s Singer in its oak console, iron frame, and a treadle that we kids sometimes got to pump. When I was fifteen and we moved into a larger house, Mom got her own Singer in a console that sat in the utility room. It was powered by electricity with a foot control that reminded me of a small automobile accelerator. Grandma came to see us, and I asked her to help me make leggings for one of my Indian outfits. She did it and in the process taught me to cut, sew, hem, and more. I liked sewing and bought cloth and a pattern for a war shirt and a vest. Later I sewed a Cheyenne style dress for my next younger sister and decorated it with imitation elk teeth. When I had questions about sewing, I asked Mom to help me. Somehow playing Indian allowed me to do even more girl things. I never once heard a word of disparagement or caution from my mom or my grandma. I’m pretty sure I didn’t talk at school about sewing!

III

When I was an adult, Grandma told me a story about my childhood. She had been worried about me growing up around all those sisters, but she said she quit worrying one day while she was taking care of us. I had come into the kitchen where she was working. She claimed that by the time I had walked through the house I had all four of my sisters crying. I am not sure I like the story’s idea of what makes for a real man, but it does indicate that in her eyes I had enough ego strength or whatever was necessary to carry on with my life—queer or otherwise. She quit worrying.

I’m happy for her, pleased with my own life, happy I know how to sew; but still I wonder.

Denver, 2013

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot