I just watched the PBS documentary Raising Cain: Boys in Focus, about the emotional life of boys and about how what we really need to give our boys is permission to have their inner emotional life be the way it is (i.e., violent and hormonal) and not label it as scary or bad. Boys are more active and we have to let them be that way. And we have to give them role models of men being openly loving and caring and respectful, to counteract the macho crap. Dads have to be really engaged with the family, so that boys see that men are defined by their own standards of masculinity--that you can be a "real man" and still be a caring human being.
What I took away from this was OH, so THAT'S why I married Jeff. That's why I must not divorce him over the sock thing or the couch thing or the TV thing. This guy rocks the party when it comes to sensitive manly manliness. He has more patience in his squat pinkie finger than I have in my whole langer loksh body. He can lift his diesel F-250 up off the driveway with one arm yet he's more gentle than I am on even my least psychotic day (which must have been sometime in 2001, because motherhood has rendered me permanently shrill). He could parachute into the Amazon with only a Leatherman and he'd hack his way out in three days, after discovering a lost tribe, recording their lexicography, teaching them to play baseball, and setting up a flu mist clinic. THIS is the guy you want raising your boys--and your girls too. But you can't have him, because he's mine.
