No comment.

Being the mother of three boys makes me the recipient of a whole lot of comments. Some comments are positive, some are negative. Some are insightful; others are inane. But whatever they are, comments are frequent and inevitable.

I don't consider myself to be, as the Dutch term it, a person with "long toes." That is, my feelings are not easily hurt, my toes not too easily stepped on. I can be hurt, for sure. I am sensitive about some topics, just like anyone else. I wouldn't call myself either thick-skinned or "thin-skinned." I am somewhere in between. But when it comes to the topic of parenting three boys, I have my peeves. So as you might imagine, some comments rub me all the wrong way.

You're so lucky you'll never have a teenage girl!

There are a few things I take umbrage to in that sentence, and not just because it's not just a little misogynistic. First of all, the movement against teenage girls kind of irritates me... a lot. Yes, they are dramatic, emotionally exhausting, they can be mean... there are a lot of things about teenage girls that can be intimidating or exasperating. I get it. You have to worry about a daughter, I know. But I happen to think that along with all those qualities, teenage girls are pretty kick ass. With all the drama and all the heightened emotions comes an exquisite, complex emotional beauty too. Creativity. Industry. Poetry. I love that teenage girls are so bursting with their emotions that they end up spilling all over the place whether they want them to or not. I love the vulnerability. I love the way they figure out the world. There is a reason my college thesis was on adolescent girls coming of age: it's an amazing, awesome process. When people give me this line about how I should be grateful I'll never have one of my own, I kind of want to punch them. Shut up. To raise a daughter is a privilege. To bear witness to the process of that daughter becoming a woman? That's a gift.

Boys are so much easier than girls!

For once and for all, people: if I had wanted things "easy," I wouldn't have chosen to have a child, much less three of them. I would have enjoyed a lifetime of Saturdays watching Lifetime movies and eating ice cream out of the tub, long bubble baths, and frequent vacations involving bed-and-breakfasts. I didn't sign up for "easy" when I embarked on the path to parenthood. Plus, watch me stumble through a day, trying to avoid the ER, feeding three ravenous young boys, eliciting more than one-syllable responses from them about various topics, and then tell me how much easier I have it. It's condescending and it's just plain wrong.

This statement usually accompanies something about how teenage boys are easier than teenage girls. First, see above. Second, while I hung out at bonfires roasting marshmallows with my anti-drinking Mormon friends and then went on to an Ivy League university, my little brother jumped off his bedroom balcony in the middle of the night to meet up with his friends for his own sort of adventures: drugs, sex, and rock 'n roll. The police brought him home more than once, and he had a daughter before Thanksgiving of his freshman year of college. Tell my mom how much easier a teenage boy is. There are no guarantees. In fact, I'll hazard to say that the only guarantee is that all teenagers are hard. There are no easy teenagers!

At least you don't have a girl. You won't have to worry about a daughter getting pregnant.

No, I won't. But I will have to worry about my sons getting pregnant. Of course, there is a difference -- as a woman, I understand that it's a whole different ball game when it is your child who has a baby growing inside her belly. But there is a ball game over on the boy side of this problem too, and no one ever talks about it: when it is your son who impregnates someone, you have no control over anything. You have no control over whether there is an abortion, or an adoption, or who raises your grandchild. And it is, just as much, still your grandchild in question. My parents learned this first-hand. It's not right or wrong -- it just is. There is a different kind of heartache, parenting the father of such a baby. You are at the mercy of the mother and her family. It's not a good place to be. So let me just assure you, I won't be coasting through those teenage years, nothing to worry about here. There will be a lot of worry and a lot of condoms on bananas.

There are other comments I don't love -- Aren't you going to try for the girl? It's so much easier for you to have boys since you already had all the boy stuff! You wouldn't even know what to do with a girl! -- but they don't carry as much baggage for me as those first three do. My biggest advice is this: when you learn that your friend is going to have a baby boy, whether it is her first, her second, or her seventh, the proper response is this: That is wonderful news. Congratulations! Let her follow up with any other comments. No editorial needed.