Julie Jay: Boys are an enigma to me, so how can I be expected to raise good ones?

Members of the opposite sex are still a complete and utter enigma to me, so it is ironic that I, of all people, should be charged with raising two of them

Even now, as a woman in my 40s with a bit of life experience and a few years of being outnumbered by men in my own home under my belt, I don’t get the opposite sex in the slightest.

LATELY, I have been pondering how hilarious it is that I, of all people, have been charged with raising two boys, given that I have been totally unable to decipher what is going on with the opposite sex ever since I was subjected to WWF by my brother on repeat as a youngster.

I was never one of those girls who were popular with the opposite sex or who even got on particularly well with them. For all the talk of women being an enigma, for me, much like the rules of any card game beyond Snap, men are an eternal mystery. Because of this, parenting boys is just that little bit more mind-boggling for those of us who had few previous dealings with our hairier counterparts.

Even now, as a woman in my 40s with a bit of life experience and a few years of being outnumbered by men in my own home under my belt, I don’t get the opposite sex in the slightest. If anything, the older I get, the less I’m able to see things from the male perspective, probably because having boys has shown me just how much women’s and men’s experiences are very much not the same.

The only thing I know less about than men is golf, which made the heightened emotional response of male Ryder Cup fans just last month even more confusing. USA supporters jeered and booed European players with such intensity that they must all still be harbouring resentment over Tina Turner’s decision to relocate to Switzerland in the mid-1990s.

Being clueless about what makes boys tick is nothing new for me, but it is also one of the reasons I constantly fret about whether I am failing in the raising-boy stakes. I was always the last one of my friend group to be asked for advice when it came to their interactions with the buachaillí, because any suggestions I offered generally resulted in immediate ghosting, or, as we called it in the early noughties, playing hard to get.

I know I am not alone in still being baffled at the differences between men and women. Just last week, a friend recalled a conversation she had with a happily married acquaintance who said that if she were ever to seek out a suitor again, she would most certainly consider a female life companion. “I just want someone who wipes down the sink,” she reportedly said.

Upon hearing this anecdote, I instantly got it.

After all, men and the way they see the world are still a total riddle to me, especially their inability to see water marks on the draining board at any given time.

Thankfully, even my two-year-old has been inducted into the joys of a clean sink, so this part of the impending masculinity crisis has been somewhat averted, but I don’t expect much to change on a wider scale.

More often than I can count, I have asked myself how I can possibly be expected to help my children grow into good men when I don’t have a clue what that means. I am just winging it and hoping for the best.

I want to raise my two boys to be soft, but not too soft; tough, but not too tough. I want them to be in touch with their emotions, but not so much that studying Back In The Playground Blues for their Junior Cert poetry pushes them over the edge completely.

There is no guidebook to raising good men, especially when I grew up in an era rife with toxic masculinity. Most of my male teenage peers in the late ’90s likely felt the pressure to fulfil stereotypes that weren’t helpful to them either. These stereotypes were even less helpful to us young women, who not only had to contend with the rampant sexism during this time, but also had to deal with the horror of fur gilets (too short to wear in the cold, too warm to wear in summer).

AS parents, we hear so much about toxic masculinity that I think sometimes we forget how far the world has come in terms of the expectations placed on boys about their role in the world. I can categorically say that the teenage boys I meet every day in my day job as a school teacher are a million miles away from a lot of the young men I went to school with, many of whom no doubt felt forced to be people they were not, simply because of their gender. They also had to contend with dousing themselves in so much Lynx Africa that they were highly flammable 90% of the time.

We want the next generation of men to be respectful, but we also want them to know that, as men, they are entitled to express the full spectrum of emotions.

One of the things that warms my cockles about some of my favourite men in comedy is that they are soft at their centre, not afraid to vocalise their vulnerabilities. This is particularly true of the younger generation of comedians, and if my boys can be even half as ready to share their insecurities and fears, I’ll be a happy mammy.

Mostly, I want them to know that they can shed tears free from judgment and express feelings free from ridicule. Because the days of boys not crying are well and truly over — you only need to watch the emotional outpouring at the Ryder Cup to know that.