TITLE: Clueless or... Cave-dwelling Yabots... You Know? By Cheri Hardaway 07/04/08 |
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I was cleaning out my PC files and found it. I'd forgotten it even existed.
Hope you enjoy it. Any and all comments are appreciated.
Blessings,
Cheri
Clueless or...
Cave-dwelling Yabots... You Know?
By Cheri Hardaway © 2005
I overheard this encounter between father and son...
“Hey, Dad, I need your credit card number to pay for that Internet subscription we talked about.”
“I thought we agreed to wait until we get back from vacation,” Dad responded.
“Yeah, but... I thought we’d go ahead and get it started this weekend,” Son countered.
“But we leave Monday, and you lose ten days of the time we pay for. That’s why I thought we agreed to wait until we get back from vacation. You know?” the older man explained logically.
Eighteen and wise beyond his years, Son repeated calmly, “Yeah, but... I thought we’d go ahead and get it started this weekend.”
This ended their exchange, and I looked from my husband to my son in confusion. What just happened? What was decided? They seemed to know, but I was clueless.
I grew up with one sister, a quite dominant mom, and a fairly passive daddy. This combo left me woefully ill equipped for my introduction to the world of men. My deficit wasn’t too noticeable during my two sons’ younger years, but as they approached puberty and beyond, I was mystified by their ways.
Take sleep overs, for instance. When boys have friends over, I see very little of them. They stay in their room playing video games, mastering the computer, or watching movies, emerging only for food. “Food” consists of a variety of frozen entrees such as: pizza, corndogs, burritos, Pizza Rolls, or Hot Pockets. And please! We must be sure nothing green ever slips in! A sleep over is deemed successful as long as there is a fully-stocked freezer, electricity, and the computer doesn’t crash. My friend, who is the mother of only boys, fondly calls this cave-dwelling.
Now when girls have a sleep over, they laugh and giggle all night long. They bake cookies, watch scary movies, tell stories, and play games that involve other human beings. They even want Mom to join in. We talk about their hopes, their dreams, and their future plans. This I can relate to and understand.
When my mom died, my sons were thirteen and nineteen. Their reaction to the death of their grandmother was baffling to me. The older one was verbal about his loss. His words were deep and profound: “That’s too bad, but at least she’s not sick now.” The younger one wanted to know what his sisters were crying about.
I came to understand that these two were not heartless, nor were they unfeeling. Their grandmother had suffered from cancer, which ravaged her body the last year of her life. They grieved, but logic dominated their emotional responses. My daughters, on the other hand, wanted to discuss everything with me. They had a need to talk about and process how they felt, and logic did not enter into the equation.
Over the years I have come to realize that our loving Creator intentionally designed males and females to be different, in order to unite us in our need for each other. Men need the sensitivity and compassion in women to balance their analytical logic. Women need men’s firm and unwavering wisdom to balance their sensitive bent. Together, in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), we bring to the world a picture of our heavenly Father, Who is at once both compassionate and righteous.
Just this morning I had to remind myself again of God’s plan and His reasons for it. My two girls had had a sleep over with three of their friends. My youngest son, now eighteen, found himself woefully outnumbered. He came to me with a pained expression, “I have to try and get into the bathroom upstairs and get my face cleanser.”
“What do you mean you have to "try" to get into the bathroom?” I teased. “Be careful, because there’s quite an overflow of girls upstairs,” I warned. “They’re even using my bathroom down here.”
“I know. They’re everywhere,” he muttered good-naturedly.
Moments later, my sixteen-year-old daughter came in search of a third bathroom mirror. (As we’d maneuvered through adolescence, my son had been reduced to using the guest bath downstairs when his sisters were tying up their shared bathroom upstairs). As she zoomed toward the guest bathroom, I heard her call over her shoulder to her friend, “Just let me check to see if his bathroom is toxic before you go in there.”
Oh, the joys of living with cave-dwelling yabots... you know?
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