The Difference Between Boys and Girls

I don’t know nothin’ about raisin’ no girls.

I have two sons, three years apart, and my child-raising years were full of adventures like tiptoeing through a minefield of Hot Wheels and Legos in the middle of the night, breaking up wrestling matches, and searching under beds for dirty underwear on laundry day. (If you have to ask why it was hidden under the bed, you’ve never had boys.)

I always suspected that it would have been different with girls. Last weekend I had the chance to find out.

Keeper and I have been wanting to visit the California Academy of Sciences ever since it opened. We’ve followed the rave reviews, read about the four-story rainforest contained therein, and made vague plans for a field trip there sometime in the future, maybe when relatives visit.

Our excuses for putting off our museum visit were threefold: the challenge of parking in Golden Gate Park, fear of militant parents with giant baby strollers, and the dread of our arches falling sometime in the third hour of exhibit-gazing.

Finally, I hit upon a plan that promised to outweigh all our objections to taking a field trip to the Cal Academy. “Let’s take the girls!” I said to Keeper, and he readily agreed that taking kids along would make it much more fun.

Now, you may be wondering if we have female grandchildren we haven’t told you about. No, no – I don’t keep any secrets from you, except maybe the true number of times I have wished death upon people cutting in front of me on 101. That’s between me and Father Stephen.

The girls—Jenny and Melissa—are my student and her sister, ages 11 and 9. I started working with Jenny as her tutor through Project Read and soon fell in love with her smart, sassy self and her little sister as well.

I help Jenny with her reading and pronunciation (English is her second language) every Thursday night. Sometimes we do worksheets or homework, and sometimes we just talk. In our chats, I have learned much that I never knew about kids and their challenges today, and I have come to admire Jenny’s steadfast sense of right and wrong as she sees her classmates cheat, lie, and set fires in the cafeteria. She tells stories about fights on the playground that end in “I stayed out of it.” The same stories, told 20 years ago by my boys, would have been concluded with, “And you should have seen his nose gushing blood!”

Jenny and Melisa are polite, quiet, and delightful. They are girls.

We gained their parents’ permission to take them to the museum and picked them up at their home on Saturday.

On the way up the San Francisco Peninsula, there was silence from the back seat except for timid answers to our questions: No, they had never been to Golden Gate Park. Yes, they were afraid of snakes. No, they had never seen penguins.

There were no fights in the back seat. There was no burping contest during lunch. There was no shoving, pushing or other foolishness in the aquarium. There was no threatening to push a sister over the railing at the top of the rainforest. There was some mild snickering over the question of whether bats poop upside down.

On the way home, in the midst of a daydream about how much easier it would have been raising girls, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw arms flailing.

My kids used to call the game Slug Bug. The rules of play? Whoever spies a Volkswagen first gets to punch the other one. Melissa appeared to be ahead.

It was somehow reassuring to discover that in some ways, kids are all alike.

© 2010 Mary Hanna