I remember my twenty-week anatomy scan like it was yesterday. “It’s a boy!” exclaimed an eager ultrasound technician. Instant relief. A boy – Thank God – boys are easy.

In my defense, I was hormonal, naive, and Obama was still POTUS. It was a different time. The world felt promising and I had no problem falling ignorantly and blissfully back onto the belief that raising a boy would be “simple” compared to girls.

Fast forward half a decade and I’ve been shaken violently out of that delusion by #metoo, #timesup, and what feels like a never-ending demonstration of the perils of toxic masculinity.

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If I were to sit here and tell you how confident I feel in my ability to parent effectively in 2019, I would be lying. It’s daunting. It’s overwhelming. And some days I really don’t feel up to the job – but I do it anyway. Because my sons (I now have two of them) have taught me that boys have never been “simple,” they’ve just been oversimplified – praised only for their masculine qualities and then left to deal with life’s complexities with only half of the tools required to do so with any real success. Now it’s up to us, as their moms, to make them whole again. (No pressure.)

So does a modern day mama do?

We do our best. We try to raise happy, confident, compassionate, kind boys who will one day grow to be allies: men who are man enough to be good role models and share the importance of respecting women and girls with boys and young men around them.

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We encourage them to be nurturing. We show them how by encouraging their curiosity about babies (both human and animal) and reminding them that we all are instinctively inclined toward love and care.

We instill in them the importance of respecting nature. We explain that plants are living things that deserve to be treated with kindness and appreciation, just like every other living thing / being they come into contact with.

We are vigilant about the men we present them with as role models.

We praise them when they’re helpful. We hug them when they’re angry. We teach them about consent and autonomy in terms we pray they understand. We equip them with an emotional language and help them distinguish one feeling from another. We work hard to present ourselves as women they can both love and respect – we know that they will use our image to form their perception of our sex and we will be damned if we are anything but a strong, positive representation.

This raising boys in 2019 business is not for the faint of heart. It takes a toll emotionally and requires a kind of relentless self-awareness I’m not sure any of us could have foreseen back when we found out we were destined to be mothers of men. But what can we do except take it day by day – one hour, one minute, one fucking “teachable moment” at a time?

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Coretta Scott King once said: Women, if the soul of the nation is to be saved, I believe that you must become its soul.

As far as I can tell, our best shot at doing that is to pass down the strength and power of our own femininity to our sons and hope to God that it might play a part in removing some of the toxicity that has come to define modern masculinity, allowing for a new generation of people who aren’t defined by arbitrary stereotypes; a generation of people who genuinely believe in the importance of equal ease of access to resources and equal opportunities for everyone; a generation of people who use their voice and their privilege to empower others.

I’m raising my sons to grow up to be happy and fierce and empathetic and assertive and nurturing and strong and compassionate and brave and kind. I want them to be independent – to be able to take care of themselves and others too. In my house the moral bar will always be set high and my kids will always be expected to rise to it.

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Someday they will rebel I’m sure – turn fifteen and know it all. They’ll tell me I’m annoying or ridiculous or totally of my rocker, but I’ll still hold out hope that one day, when they’re full grown men, they’ll come to understand that what our society has named “masculinity” and “femininity” are simply two parts of a whole. The yin and the yang. Equally powerful. Equally beautiful. Equally vital.

Equal. Just plain equal.

(Fuck I really hope this works)

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Original Photography by Ariane Laezza

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Featured Image via @structuredmag