Monday, June 20, 2011

BoyBrain

“Can you give these books back to your mom?” I said to my son’s friend, handing three novels out my car window.

“No, I can’t take them,” he said. “I’ll probably lose them.”

“Just bring them into your house,” I said.

“I’ll lose them before I get inside,” he said.

We were having this conversation at the curb just a few yards away from his front door. I took the books back and replaced them on the passenger seat of my car, because I suspected that he was probably right.

“Remember yesterday, B went to the bank to get a debit card,” my son said. I nodded, one of the few things I did remember about yesterday. “He lost it before he got home.”

“Come on!” I said. These boys are all prone to exaggeration.

“He really did. He left the bank with his parents and went straight home and by the time they got home it was nowhere to be found,” reported my son’s friend.

I wish I could pin this phenomenon on teenage boys, but the 11-year-old and two of his friends were scouring the house this weekend looking for his lost video camera. “It was right next to the computer,” one said. “Yes, it was. We all saw it there,” another concurred.

“One of you must have moved it,” I told them, “picked it up and accidently put it down somewhere when you went to get something.”

“We didn’t. No, no. No one touched it,” they insisted.

“You must have picked it up and you just don’t remember taking it with you somewhere,” I said. I offer up these pearls of wisdom, not to make them feel inadequate, but in an attempt to expand their thinking. To break the vicious little cycle they create for themselves of walking to the computer, then over to the front door, then back to the computer, then back to the front door, looking in the same two places over and over again like a small contingent of ants whose brains are the size of atoms (I’m guessing) and cannot conceive of any reality beyond what they’ve been programmed for.

The ants, however, reject my theory out of hand, in that inimitable way that only pre-teen ants can. “Well, I’m going to look for it other places,” I said, and in under a minute the camera was in my hand.

“It was on the kitchen counter,” I told them.

“Oh, you must have put it there when you got us Vitamin Waters,” one ant said to another.

“No,” said my son, the most stubborn ant of all.

We have a game we play in my house. It’s called, “Do you think it will take me more than 15 seconds to find your lost thing?” At least that’s what I call it, because finding other people’s lost things – especially boys’ lost things – is apparently my one and only superpower. I almost always win at the game, and part of the reason for that is because 90% of the time, the cell phone is wedged deep within the sofa cushions and I guess I’m the only one who remembers that fact from one lost cell phone to the next.

But the other reason is a little scarier, which is that after all this time I believe I have actually come to think like a boy. In that scattered, too-many-things-going-on, pinball machine way that boys appear to process information – which is to say from every direction and not at all both at the same time.

When I witness boybrain in action, I don’t even think “Oh, you poor, poor creatures,” anymore. Instead, I just put the books back on the passenger seat and say, “Yeah, I get it.”

3 comments:

  1. Pssst...the disease has crossed gender and is spreading---there are now reported cases of girlbrain too, including a classic case under my very roof. :)

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  2. Indeed, I recall a particular episode in my previous marriage, when my then wife was given a gift certificate to Zabars as a birthday present. (Does Zabars still exist? At that time it was a very happening place.) Anyway, realizing that she would merely lose the valuable slip of paper, I snatched it up and put it in my wallet. Six months later we decided to make the big trip to Zabars. I took the now wrinkled coupon out of my wallet and handed it to her. She walked down the hall to the kitchen. I put on my jacket. We were ready to leave. Where was the Zabar's coupon? She had lost it. In the two minutes and 15 foot distance from the living room to the kitchen. Two hours of searching later I found it under the sink, among the cleaners and poisons. She had apparently walked directly to the kitchen and thrown it under the sink.
    And so, you see...not boybrain at all. Something else at work...

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  3. boy brain becomes man brain. this would explain why jp can look in the fridge, yet NOT see that we already have mustard. so why buy another? why open another? "i didn't see it". oy.

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