Why crying?

Remember that Luke was once a sensitive little angel when he rocked and strollered his little pink doll (despite occasional "playful" activities like crashing the stroller or tossing her in the air)? He also used to make a tender little sad face if he saw me get hurt (aw...). I think these will soon be archived into distant memories as his Y-chromosome and testosterone are gradually taking hold of his budding male personality.

A few days ago, I was playing trains with Luke in our living room. There were a lot of crashing and bim-bam-boom! sound effects as usual. Unfortunately, we had a little train accident where Luke's train accidentally crashed into the bridge - of my nose. Ouch. We both paused for a moment to recover from shock. Then I animated my "Mama is hurt" grimace, which I used routinely to induce Luke's empathy and to train him to apologize when he did wrong to others. What I got in return were not his usual pampered little pats on my back and that sweet dither of "sorry mama." Instead, I received a genuinely confused stare and a very dry question, "Why crying?" Duh, mama, it's just a train crash. Be a man! Well, it just happens that mama is a woman so I pressed,"Luke's train hit mama's nose and I'm hurt. What do you say?" I made an even sadder face. "OK, let me help you. Luke fix it," he counter-0ffered as he as-a-matter-of-factly got his hands operating on my injured bridge.

I was completely flabbergasted at his new "you get hurt, I fix it" approach. It bore a haunting resemblance of Matt's "Men are from Mars" style "soothing techniques" whenever I have one of those weird, estrogen-charged emotional days. Matt usually got very frustrated at my "confusing" emotions (which, by the way, made a lot of sense to me) and probably had the "why crying?" question in his mind. He then, typically, so gently tried to "fix" the "problem", which in turn only stoked fire of wrath. All I ever expected was maybe a few words of empathy and some pampered little pats on my back, not a swift, mechanical fix for my "problems" then move on to the next task.

This is a very enlightening experience. I guess I maybe less ready to get infuriated when Matt tries again to "fix" my emotional upheavals, now that I've seen the whole train of thought played out so innocently. I used to think that Matt's being callous. And for Matt, he thinks this is the most hilarious response that vindicated his presumed and villainized "unfeeling" idiosyncrasy. There's a whole of of male bonding between father and son over that issue. I almost thought that we were going to have a bar mitzvah right there. oy vey!