I was having a conversation with a longtime friend the other day about how God had blessed her with two beautiful boys, but that she has always secretly wished that at least one of them had been a little girl.
“For some reason,” she explained, “I just always thought that when I got married and had children, they would be girls. In fact, it never really entered my mind that they wouldn’t be girls until the doctor showed me ultrasound photos both times proving that they were indeed going to be boys. I mean, what did I know about raising boys? Plus, I had always dreamed of dressing my baby girls up real pretty and then doing all kinds of girly stuff with them as they got older.”
“You realize don’t you,” I said, “that little girls usually get along a lot better with their father than their mother, and that little boys are usually crazy about their moms and have a love affair with them throughout their lives?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that, and my boys really are affectionate towards me, and I am of course crazy in love with them, too, and can’t image the world without them. But I just wish they peed better!”
“What?” I asked, smiling.
“I’m serious!” she said. “My boys are 8 and 9 now and they still can’t hit the pot on a regular basis when they go to the bathroom. And I am so tired of cleaning up after them and having the bathroom always smell like urine. You know, that’s the real reason most women want their own bathroom – so that they no longer have to deal with male pee sprayed all over the place.”
“Maybe your husband just needs to take your boys aside and give them a little refresher course on how to aim better?” I suggested.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “He’s just as bad as they are! Tell me, how can a man have been a marksman with a rifle in the U.S. Army and still not be able to properly aim when he goes to the bathroom? And that’s not all. He’s always flushing the toilet before he is completely done and who wants to go into a bathroom and find the toilet still half full of urine? Honestly, why do men do that?”
“Well,” I said, “I think it has something to do with not wanting other people to hear us while we are going to the bathroom, so we sometimes flush a little early and then forget to flush a second time.”
“Well,” she said, “I have actually learned to live with flushing the toilet behind my husband, but I will never get used to having urine all over the place because the male sex can’t figure out how to properly aim those things. I have even thought about having my boys just sit down on the toilet seat like little girls do but I don’t know if that would mentally harm them in some way. Do you think it would?”
“I actually know a mother who did that,” I answered, “and when her son grew up, he didn’t go around robbing banks or anything, so I guess it would be okay.”
“To tell you the truth, Daryl, it’s not just the peeing. I also have to almost bribe my boys into taking a bath and they seem to have no concern whatsoever for good hygiene. They just don’t seem to care if they smell like dead fish. Were you like that at their age?”
“Well,” I said, “I think all boys take much longer to get interested in good hygiene than girls do, but my problem wasn’t with going to the bathroom or showering, it was with my hair.”
“Your hair?” she asked.
“That’s right.” I said. “You see, way back when I was growing up, all the boys slicked their hair back with creams and sticky gels and since I had especially unruly hair, I often went a little overboard in making sure mine was completely slicked back. Plus, I wanted to have Elvis Presley black hair and the more Byrlcreem I used, the darker it made my hair look!”
“Byrlcreem?” she asked.
“Yeah, that was the most popular hair cream back then and although the commercials said `a little dab will do you’, I really poured the stuff on. But my problem was that a tube of Byrlcreem wasn’t cheap, and my mother would only buy one for me every now and then. So, what I started doing was using lard that my mother stored in the kitchen for cooking, and that eventually led to all kinds of hair hygiene problems.”
“Let me get this straight,” said my friend, now the one doing the smiling, “when you were young you used to use lard in place of hair cream? Lard is nothing but pig fat, right?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said, “and although I showered pretty regularly, I hardly ever washed my hair because it would be unruly after doing that, and over time, my mother started to notice a rather nasty rancid smell in the house, and soon figured out it was coming from my head. But when she dragged me over to the sink and started scrubbing the life out of my hair, she found all these nasty scab-like things where the lard had hardened and stuck to my head. So, it took her forever to scrape all that away with a dinner knife and she kept screaming `Daryl, this is absolutely disgusting!’ the whole time she was doing it.”
When my friend had finally stopped laughing, she said, “What if a poor girl had ever wanted to run her fingers through your hair?”
“Well,” I said, “girls didn’t do that back then. In fact, girls weren’t allowed to do much of anything back then!”