The Shocking Side of Boys

By the time I was in high school, most of my friends were boys. Oh, I had a best girl friend and a few other go to girls, but most of my closest friends were boys. Between my brother,  my stepbrothers, my cousins, and my buds, I spent a lot of time around boys. Generally speaking, it's easy to be friends with boys. They don't crave drama (Heck, they don't even like it!), they don't hold grudges, they don't need to make you feel fat to make themselves feel pretty, and they almost never try to steal your boyfriend.

When I was in the 4th grade, I had my first real best friend. She and I were inseparable. We had sleepovers, talked for hours on the phone, explored every inch of the woods behind her house, and took countless trips to the mall. For 2 years, I told her all of my secrets and she told me hers. It was a beautiful friendship until for some reason I will never know, she dropped me. Just like that. No fight, no note, no words at all. She suddenly just didn't want to be my friend, so she pretended not to even know me. When I say there were no words, I mean literally, she never spoke to me again. I eventually moved to another town, for different reasons, where I met another girl who did the exact same thing. That's when I really started to recognize the ease of hanging out with boys, but I will say, I eventually made a few trustworthy girl friends.

All in all, boys are great, but they are not perfect (well, except for Jesus, though I often wonder what He was like as a boy). Boys like to blow up stuff, melt stuff, wreck stuff, shoot stuff, and shock stuff. I may never understand, and therefore, never truly appreciate this destructive and death defying side of boys, but I'm not convinced that it doesn't serve a purpose. It is, after all, the source of some major male bonding.

My husband, George, has many a hair-raising tale he has shared with me over the years. Some involve trespassing, speeding motorcycles, bicycle shenanigans, dark country cemeteries, and pellet guns; but there is one story George loves to share with our boys, much to my chagrin, about a game that he and his younger brother, Donovan used to play. You see, for some oddball reason, they had a stun gun, and they would put this stun gun in the center of the room. Each boy (I use the word boy here loosely because in all actuality, they were old enough to know better) would go to opposite corners of  the room and then, they would race to see who could get to the stun gun first. Can you guess what happened next? Well obviously the boy who won the race to the stun gun got to shock the poop out of the other one. Suffice it to say, we don't have any stun guns in our home.

In spite of all the daredevil mayhem that ensues in a boy's life, I'll take the honest curiosity of boys any day over the mean girl hi jinx that run rampant in middle schools and high schools. Boys, you gotta love them and all their mischief. As the mother of 3 boys, I 'd love to tell you that they outgrow all of the foolishness, but as you can see from the recent video of my wonderful George playing with a bark collar, some things never change. As the mother of a girl, I will tell her that not all girls are mean and while boys make great friends, there are those amazing girl friendships that can last a lifetime and will bless her beyond measure.