Manly Men

Miguel asked to shave the other night.

"But Miguel, you don't have any hair on your face," I said.

"So," he said. "I just want to shave."

So I went to the front desk of the hotel we are staying at in Boynton Beach, Florida, and asked them for two complimentary razors (I'd forgotten mine) and shaving cream. Miguel lathered up, though he was disappointed by the generic brand's lack of froth, and started to drag the razor across his cheeks and above his upper lip. When he finished, he rubbed his face and said, "That feels smooth."

He announced in the car last night that he wants a Gillette Fusion.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it has less tug and pull," he answered.

"Where'd you hear that?" I asked.

"On a TV commercial."

My stepmother chimed in that if he starts shaving now his facial hair will grow in that much faster and darker.

"Is that really true," I wondered, "or just some myth?"

I think I shaved for the first time when I was 14. I'd noticed darker strands of hair amid the virtually invisible peach fuzz, so I grabbed my father's razor, the one with the blade screwed into the middle, and gently removed evidence of my burgeoning adolescence and early manhood.

I was so afraid of my parents' reaction that I never told them. I guess the statute of limitations has long expired should they read this blog entry.

But I did wonder what was behind Miguel's desire to shave and, as he informed me tonight after he mowed away nothing but facial air, continue shaving. Does he identify shaving with becoming a man? Is he growing more aware of his body's changes? What does he actually think becoming a man means?

These questions do not reside solely in the blogosphere or in my mind. Miguel and I are dealing with them as he is perched to jump into young adulthood and is preparing for his bar mitzvah ceremony in August. In the Jewish tradition, one becomes a man when he turns 13. Of course, that Talmudic (Jewish legal) rule grew out of a time when the life span was much shorter.

But in our society, what does becoming a man mean? Miguel isn't old enough to drive a car, drink, or vote, but he has babysat and cooked hot food for his sister. And while he is biologically capable of fathering a child, he has only recently shown any interest in girls at all. So I think grandparenthood is a long way off for me. Whew!

I recently asked several friends--male and female--to share some of their wisdom about what it means to grow up, become a young adult, and accept responsibility. I eagerly await their responses.

I have tried to instill in Miguel the importance of making a difference in the world, always choosing to act right, and knowing when to walk away from trouble or danger. Sometimes I am gentle, other times I am heavy-handed.

While we stood outside a mall today, I saw two young people, around 18, smoking cigarettes. I said to Miguel, "If you ever smoke I will cause you bodily harm."

"Really?" he asked.

"Really."

"Really?" he asked again, his eyes widening.

"No, but I will ground you for life and make your life miserable."

I also hope he learns about being a man from watching me and not just listening to my rants. I am a decent role model--now that I have abandoned my fanny pack--and sometimes the lessons he sees are the best ones for him to absorb.

But the world can be a crazy place and not everything is easy to control. Some of the music he tries to listen to, for example, contains messages I often abhor. Then again, some of the rock and roll and R&B I boogied to had some questionable lyrics as well.

And I am not even talking about the drinking and partying that so many kids in our county engage in on weekends. Or the stress levels among teens. The suicides and other dangerous behaviors and peer pressure. It is a veritable minefield out there at times for boys and girls. Bullying, drugs, alcohol, unprotected sex.

A man chooses wisely. But Miguel is still in so many ways a boy, whether or not he enjoys the pleasure of a Gillette Fusion gliding across his baby face.

Maya At 5

Maya turns five tomorrow. Or Maya turns 25. Or 2,225. She's an old soul, for sure. Many of her insights and comments, filled with wisdom and compassion, make me shiver in awe and wonder how long she has been around.

Yesterday, while I was scrambling to prepare her breakfast and tend to Miguel (who has strep), Maya said, "I wish Mommy could come out of the stars and come down to see us. Then she could give us a big hug because her back doesn't hurt. But Mommy isn't alive anymore."

Boom.

Maya knows and sees so much. Before Maya was born, Verna and her friend Tony went to see some program at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The presenter, also a psychic, told Verna that her baby-to-be would be a healer. Verna was diagnosed a few weeks later with cancer, Maya was yanked out early, and Verna and I assumed the healing the psychic referred to was for her life threatening illness.

And Maya's arrival did provide Verna (and everyone) with physical and emotional solace and focus. While Verna labored through chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, and days filled with horror and sickness, pain and fear, Maya's life force centered us on living and hope and the future. We still had a tiny life to nurture.

As Maya grew, oblivious to Verna's illness and the subsequent specter of cancer and disease that haunted us since Friday, January 13, 2006, she clearly absorbed life around her. It saddens me that Maya has had to grow up faster than most girls ever, ever should.

Last week she said to me, as we lounged in bed after I'd turned off the lights, "I don't want to be a Mommy, just a big sister. I don't want breasts."

I wanted to cry.

She added a few days later, "I hope I don't get the cancer. I don't want to die. Then you'll be sad."

Beyond sad.

Maya's world was irrevocably altered by cancer. Cancer robbed her of her Mommy and revealed (yet again) the grim reality that life is often not fair or just. But Maya shouldn't be acquainted with that painful reality as she learns in preschool how to identify numbers or that dinosaurs are extinct or sings songs about the seasons.

But Maya is still, in many, many ways just five years old. She wants to marry Daddy, believes in Santa, and wonders if all the characters in The Nutcracker ballet sleep behind the stage at night.

She is innocent and wise. She is my angel and princess. And I celebrate her birth (and also the amazing woman who birthed her, my late wife, Verna).

Maya the (almost) five year old is a total girly girl. She loves sparkly jewelry, bracelets and necklaces, and wearing her psychedelic pink and purple peace sign sneakers that sparkle when she stomps. She plays elaborately imaginative games in the house while I make dinner and Miguel does homework or, more likely, glues himself in front of his Play Station 3. She is the Mommy or school teacher, tenderly caring for her stuffed animals, baby dolls, Barbies, or Disney Princess dolls. Or she sets up tea parties in the living room on the blue table with the large pencil legs.

Maya is all smiles and sunshine and laughter. She embraces and enjoys life and friends and playing. I love how she and I make up silly words. I call her 'Basha basha' and she calls me 'Boopie loopie'. How she loves for me to tickle her back before she nods off to sleep or sing her a song about Bella (the Princess) who lost her umbrella and always enlists the aid of the other princesses: Aurora, Jasmine, Tiana, Cinderella, Snow White, and Ariel.

I adore Maya because she has such a big heart. She brought a gift from her own toy pile to a friend's younger sister because we were celebrating the elder's birthday. "She will be sad," Maya said. "So I am giving her something, too."

I will never, ever forget what she said to me moments after I told her that Verna had died. First, she raced downstairs because she didn't believe me. Then when she came back to bed after having seen that the hospital bed was empty, she said, "Mommy died, I am sad. Poor Daddy, I will take care of you."

Where does that come from?

She constantly jolts Miguel and me with her sublime view of the world. She loves to hug and kiss, and continually affirms her love for you. She is going to be five and has lived lifetimes through her mother's illness and death.

Through all of the madness of our Twilight Zone-like nightmare, though, Maya still clutches tightly to the reins of life as someone who has been alive for 60 months. She said to me last week, her eyes brimming with joy and abandon, "I am so excited. I can't wait to be five. I'm going to be a big girl."

Amen, sweetheart. Never, ever forget to let the sunshine in.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Maya has a love-hate relationship with water, which is one reason why we warn her before her bath. Last week I said, “Maya, tonight you’re having a bath. But I’m not washing your hair, just your body.”

“Not my hair,” she said. “But you have to wash my booty.”

Wash my booty? Where’d she learn that one? Oh, thank you, big brother Miguel. In fact, Maya happily shakes her booty in public, at home, just about any place. Put on music with a good American Bandstand beat, and Maya is swaying her hips and wobbling her backside.

And her Elvis wannabe routine scares me. Not because I fear she’ll morph into a tiresome Vegas lounge singer who gorges herself on massive amounts of food and drugs. No, it’s because she’ll be a teenager in less than 10 years, and the boys will be swarming.

At the park last week, Maya was giggling and playing with two girls, one who is four, the other almost two. At one point the three of them laid down on the ground, hands clasped, and posed for a picture my neighbor wanted to take with her cell phone.

I leaned over to my neighbor’s husband (his daughter is the one who is almost two) and said, “I know you are renting, but if you can manage to stay here for another ten years or so, we can form a united front and keep the girls indoors until they’re 30.”

He laughed. His wife (the photographer), who is from Romania, said, “Be careful what you wish for. There was this girl from my town and her father kept her locked up. You know what happened to her?”

I was about to say, “She unleashed herself in a torrent of pent-up sexuality and screwed every boy in Eastern Europe?”

“She became a lesbian,” my neighbor said.

I was speechless and startled before I mustered a response. “Do you think what her father did caused her to become a lesbian?” I asked. “Don’t you think she was predisposed to that beforehand?”

“No, no,” my neighbor said. “What her father did caused it.”

I wasn’t about to enter into a nature vs. nurture debate with my very sweet and young neighbor, but I couldn’t help wondering Margaret Mead-like about the essential core of our discussion. Are people born with certain behaviors or lifestyles or do we choose them later on the basis of our life experiences?

I am inclined for the narrow purposes of this debate to opine that sexual lifestyle is a calling, a biological imperative that we pursue with determination. It is obviously controlled and influenced by environment. But it is way too dismissive and insulting in many ways to assert that homosexuality is the almost deviant offspring of a parent’s (or anyone’s) paranoid behavior.

And none of the debate about sexuality was comforting to me. Because Maya is precocious now I fear that will lead directly to recklessness later. So let’s play along and agree my neighbor is right. And I know that would be a colossal stretch of any imagination. But if she is correct does that mean I will be better served by sequestering Maya until she is 50?

Do I hear 60? When I’ll be 107! Oy!!