I hate boys - last word

I want children, and so does my boyfriend. We're lucky to have figured this out. I didn't exactly raise the subject on our third date. (Truth is, we never had a third date. Our first six months together felt like an extended sleepover.) There's just one problem. As it turns out, my boyfriend doesn't want children. He wants boys. He wants those three-foot-tall holy terrors who take more than their allotted five minutes on the swing set and then call you "crybaby" because you've burst into tears over this injustice. He wants those thugs who organize "secret organizations" to plot your demise simply because you ratted out the guy who boasted about cheating on the bonus question in geography.

Boys are not children. They are acne; they are designed to humble you with their flashes of cruelty and then recede into the realm of farcical childhood memory.

When it came time to write this column, I gleefully announced to Brian that I would be writing about his hatred of women. Of course, Brian denied hating women. According to him, the real reason he doesn't want to raise a girl is that there are so many ... er ... girl things he wouldn't be able to help our imaginary daughter with. "Like menopause!" he finished. I took a deep breath and informed him that menopause would probably take place 30 years after our daughter left the house.

"I like boys!" he proclaimed. "I am a boy. I understand boys."

Brian's implication was obvious. I didn't understand boys. I am a transgender-lite: a gay man, happy in my male body but genetically predisposed toward more female than male behaviors.

This might be true to a degree. As a child, I longed to bring packed Broadway houses to tears with my renditions of soul-searing ballads like "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," but I'd be damned if I'd perform them in anything other than a suit. I have always surrounded myself with women in hopes that I would soak up some of their superior qualities. But I doubt that I could endure the mind-boggling pain of childbirth, and I'm still no good at giving the men in my life the illusion of control.

Rather, years spent in the company of women have done little more than put a stereotypically female veneer on my unfortunately natural and numskull male behaviors. I routinely refuse to ask for directions and leave dirty laundry pried on the floor. But after I do both, I like to sit down and have a long talk about how it made me feel. Should my son mutter something vaguely antigay, I would probably simultaneously burst into tears and hurl him headlong across the living room. Afterward, I would have to listen to my Kelly Clarkson CD to come down.

In short, years of transgender ambition has endowed me with only a smidgen of that which makes females complex and superior. I like the results girls get, but I'm still not sure how they get them. Which doesn't qualify as Brian's definition of understanding, I guess.

Boys I understand all too well. I know how to be one and sleep with one. What else do I need to know?

Fact is, Brian and I don't need a child we understand. We need a child who doesn't quite understand us. We need a daughter who laughs at us when we overload the trunk of the car or take apart a set of shelves without the instructions on how to put it back together. We need a daughter who will look troubled and put out as she watches us try to stretch the gasoline dispenser over the trunk instead of turning the car around so the tank faces the pump. Brian and I are two boys living in a community where a "boy" can be anywhere between 4 and 45. The one thing missing from our lives is the daily presence of a female who is patient but unimpressed.

The way I see it, Brian and I have had the question backward. We need to stop thinking about what we can give a child and start thinking about what a child can give us. Even if it's the finger.

Rice is author of the novels A Density of Souls and The Snow Garden.

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