Little Labors

Baby girls and men

On up until I was about thirty, I had a strong preference for men over women. I mean specifically as friends, as people to talk to. If a male and a female exactly alike were to enter a room, in my deformed perceptions the male was magnified into glory. It wasn’t until this primitive preference began to expire, for whatever reasons, that it began to bother me that it had previously existed. I didn’t blame my mother for this trait, but I did feel that I had inherited it from her. Despite my having a mother who is extremely intelligent and capable and giving, I still grew up with a sense that it was always nicest to be around men, and I decided that maybe this dated back to my mother’s father having died before she was born, and her mother then being alone, with two young girls, in the household of her in-laws, and there being no male taking his place, ever, and so this atmosphere of any room being short a male seemed to have been passed on to me, and then, when my father similarly was suddenly gone, this atmosphere thickened… until it lifted. Or at least lifted for me. Did it ever lift for my mother? When I saw how fully she fell in love with the puma, I felt that the both of us had fallen in love with a girl in some healthy, unprecedented way. My mother recently sent me a text that read: “I love the channels between 210–223. Amazing information/world views. They just said that Chelsea’s husband runs a hedge fund that lost 40 percent since he bet the wrong way on the Euro crisis, then they went on to bad-mouth him — you create a job for him and pour money into it since Chelsea was unable to get any better husband for herself.” Was this my old mother (and self)? Shortly thereafter my mother followed up this text with: “Doubt it is true about not getting a husband, she looks pretty good on TV. I think it was a malicious angry comment of the commentator.”