Welcome to Dudeville

The denizens of Dudeville.

The denizens of Dudeville.

Aside from my TV viewing habits – which skew towards zombies and bald methamphetamine dealers – I am a girly-girl.

I like manicures and gossip and shopping. I’m afraid of spiders. I am not adverse to long conversations about the benefits of Keratin treatments and waxing and discovering the latest Ballard Designs catalog in the mail makes my pulse race a teensy bit.

And even though I was married to a guy who played football in college and favored clicking on sporting events whenever he had the remote, and have sat in the bleachers cheering on my four children in a wide variety of games over the years – basketball, soccer, lacrosse – I can’t get a handle on any of the rules. I get the fundamentals – like, you’ve got to get past the guys on the other team and put the ball in the net – but that’s about it. I don’t understand “off sides,” “box out” or what it means to “foul” somebody. And because I’ve figured out how to master complex endeavors like caring for my swimming pool and driving into Manhattan I’m betting this deficiency stems less from stupidity and more from a general lack of interest.

All of this is not to say that one needs a penis to understand and enjoy sports. Plenty of women do. My college girlfriends are enthusiastic fans and even one of my daughters took a liking to football after spending last winter surrounded by big-screen TVs in the bar of the restaurant where she hostessed. She figured out “downs” and “holding” in between seating parties for brunch on Sundays.

The point of all this is that I tend to adhere to gender stereotypes even though I’ve tried to be all Free to Be You and Me with my kids. “Boys, it’s really alright to cry,” and all that.

Wasn’t I lucky, then, to be blessed with not one but two daughters? We all like to shop together and get manicures together and happily eat kale. When my older two kids were away at school and it was just my high school daughter and middle school son left at home, our weekly menus were definitely directed by her self-imposed dietary restrictions. No red meat or pork. No dairy. And absolutely-positively no cheese. Like, don’t even try to sneak one of those ingredients in or it will be met with tears.

Our weekly meals consisted of a lot of ground poultry and Gwyneth Paltrow recipes like Thai Chicken Burgers and sweet potato hash. We even ate kimchi.

But that picky girl flew the roost Saturday for her freshman year at college and now the onus of coming up with meals that adhere to her strict guidelines lays on her university’s food services staff. I’ve hung up that apron for a bit.

Because now I am living in Dudeville.

Now I am the only girl living in a house of boys. My oldest son – who graduated from college in the spring – is living at home with his little brother and even though we’re only about 36 hours into this new arrangement, I can already feel the shift. I can sense the very manly vibe going down around here.

When their sisters lived at home full time, there was definitely a more feminine feel in the house. Belching in my presence was discouraged and if you HAD to pass gas you needed to go outside and cut the tail before you reentered. I didn’t want anyone dragging the fart back into the house with him or her and stinking the joint up.

But now, all bets are off.

I’ve decided to embrace this new manly dynamic and surprised the boys yesterday morning with blueberry pancakes and bacon for breakfast. Later that afternoon we reclined in a darkened movie theater and ate Reese’s Pieces and drank root beer while watching “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and went home to eat paninis and potato chips. My older son explained the intricacies of his pending fantasy football league draft and when he disappeared downstairs to try to snag a worthy running back for his team, his little brother and I watched the new zombie TV show “Fear the Walking Dead” (which I loved). And when he expelled a long string of farts during an especially suspenseful part of the show, I didn’t even tell my son to go outside and cut the tail. I actually laughed when the explosion occurred.

It’s calmer again with just two children at home. It gets hectic when all four are here and vying for my attention. It’s nice to be able to focus on just two and I sense the boys quickly felt the shift as well. They walked arm-in-arm through the parking lot on the way into the movie theater and my oldest guy – who’s not always willing to engage in any lengthy conversation with me – happily discussed fantasy football and the latest John Oliver show while I made our paninis.

As we ate our dinner, we put together a menu of dinners for the upcoming week. Over the next few nights we will be enjoying pork tenderloin, beef stir-fry and pasta with meat sauce.

“We don’t even have to use ground turkey,” I observed while eating a chip.

“Yeah!” said my little guy. “We get to eat REAL meat.”

I fear all this manly fare may take a toll on my figure but am willing to take my chances. It’s the price I have to pay to live happily in Dudeville.

You can sign up to get all my latest posts sent right to your inbox lickety-split by typing your email into the box below. You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter. And you don’t even have to be a dude.

[wysija_form id=”1″]

 

 

11 thoughts on “Welcome to Dudeville

  1. Even though I have been a male my entire life, I have to say that this is the first time I’ve heard the term, “cut the tail.” And it had to come from a woman, no less.

  2. Many years ago when we only had three girls and I had a particular difficult day, exasperated I said even the goddamn cat is a girl. My wife still teases me about that. Now sometimes I wish the last two would have been girls.

  3. I love your blog! I raised 2 boys, so I can totally relate. I realized how I came upon your blog, and it was through my cousin Robert Paul. Our moms are sisters. I spoke to him in LBI as we drank coffee on the lovely deck and spoke about you. I love your blog and just knew if You were my coworker or neighbor we would be friends! My cousin Rob spoke so highly of you. I just wanted you to know I think you are Awesome!

  4. For the majority of my adult life, I have always lived in Dudeville. And I gotta tell you…sometimes it gets really old. Especially when they have ZERO interest in anything you want to do or talk about. Even so, I’ll keep them – that’s what my girl friends are for.

    • I am right there. Right now my sons are sitting on a couch in the basement screaming at the Mets and I am wandering around trying to figure out what to do with myself. Sigh.

  5. I love the concept of engineering blogs, words stimulate the imagination. It makes the reader conjure up images, strangely enough is a real mechanism towards reality. Again microisms that bring us closer to understanding differences as well as similarities enough room to create a sense of belonging to a story. Life has many stages, some of those stages go quickly, other times there are life long understandings that make us look back and create and recreate what would be, or what could’ve been. Expectations as they are, help me to connect with a strange imaginative element that sees things as they are perfect in an imperfect way.

Comments are closed.