When Do Good Boys Become Bad Men?

My 3-year-old son can’t fall asleep without me. We’ve recently transitioned him from his crib to a bed, and it’s not going well. At 7 p.m. we give him milk, read him books, and then I gently tuck him in, only to be met with piercing, distressing screams. “MOMMY! Lie down with me! MOOOOMMMMY!” And so I sigh and remind myself to buy some books about toddler sleep training, and then I snuggle up to him and let him stroke my head until he starts to breathe heavily. I think about how I’m hungry and tired and would like a glass of wine. I think about my two little boys and this fucked up moment we’re living in. There are so many bad men everywhere. How did they get that way? Then I count to 100 to make sure he’s down and sneak back to our living room.

My other baby, my almost 9-month-old son, is already crawling and pulling up and trying to walk. He trails his brother like a tailgating car, bumping into him when he stops short, surprising them both. He thinks it’s funny when I tickle his face with my hair, and he squeals in the bath when I pour water over his head. He has 5 and a half teeth and a sideways smile and his breath is warm and minty. I still nurse him to sleep (I know—sleep training. I know, I know). In the dark, when his little body is pressed against mine, I sing him a lullaby, over and over, “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess. “Summertime, and the living is easy. Fish are jumping, and the cotton is high. Your daddy’s rich, and your mama’s good looking…”

What happens in between where my sons are now and where some men end up? I see someone like Brett Kavanaugh—sputtering, denying, entitled, angry—and I wonder how to guide my babies toward kindness instead of abuse, gratefulness instead of take, take, take, mine, mine, mine. What did Kavanaugh’s mother think as she watched her son’s display, his evasion and defensiveness, the tone he took when Senator Amy Klobuchar asked him about drinking to the point of not remembering. “You’re talking about blackout,” he spit at Klobuchar. “I don’t know. Have you?” Did his mother shrink her in skin? Did she think: I taught him to be respectful; Did she think: Where did I go wrong?; Did she ever think: Maybe he did it?

I always thought I’d have a daughter. I’m a woman and I’ll give birth to another—how could it be any other way? I’d know what to say to her when she felt left out at school, or had an unrequited crush, or didn’t like the way she looked in a certain dress. I know because I’d been there, suffering as only girls do, thirty years before. Boys who were “cool,” who, like Kavanaugh, partied and played sports, mostly terrified me. They were often mean, quick to make fun of your appearance, had mysterious inside jokes that they’d laugh about loudly. So when my doctor told me, for a second time, that I was pregnant with a boy—“you only produce sons!” is how she put it, happily—I felt momentarily strange, like I’d lost a friend, a future female comrade in arms. I’m intimidated by men, their wildness, their flashes of violence mixed with insecurity, and now I have two. There are so many penises in my house! (I also have two male cats, but they’re neutered.) Girls, someone once said to me, you have to protect from the world. Boys you need to protect from themselves.

My husband is British and doesn’t understand the American obsession with masculine strength, this idea that men are men and weakness is a liability. The misplaced confidence, the showing off, the bro mentality, he just doesn’t get it. More than that, he thinks it’s grotesque. We recently walked by a father and son playing catch in the park. The boy, a delicate wisp with stick legs, missed the ball, and the dad barked menacingly, “Come on, buddy! You can do better than that.” My husband was deeply bothered, he stewed about it all day. “This country is a violent place,” he said at dinner that night. “And why would you call your son ‘buddy’?”

My husband calls our sons “my beautiful boys.” He kisses them and reads them books and tells them that they mustn’t be sad. He does goofy dances to make them laugh and carries them when they’re tired and wanders our apartment with them in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep. Will it be enough? Or will the forces beyond our immediate control—our patriarchal society, its continual rewarding of bad behavior, peer pressure, school, friends, the internet, I don’t know what else—mitigate the influence of my sons’ gentle British father and their well-intentioned if neurotic mother? I give my toddler time outs when he’s bad, I’m teaching him about controlling his emotions (thank you, Daniel Tiger), I’m attempting to get him to share, mostly unsuccessfully, with his brother. Please, please, please, be good boys, I think every minute of every day. Please, please, please don’t get hurt. Don’t hurt anyone else.

So, I guess like Donald Trump Jr., I’m also scared for my sons. Not that they’ll be falsely accused of something—we know how rare that is—but that they’ll bumble into the world as privileged white guys, breaking things along the way (like Kavanaugh, and like basically all of our ruling class, their daddy’s rich and the living is easy, as the song goes). Right now, they’re so unformed and delicious, so smiley and funny. They’re so sweet and I worry the world will make them cruel.

As I was lying in bed with my 3-year-old the other night, he grabbed my hand and said “Mommy, don’t go. I need you. I’ll be alone if you go.” What happens in between here and there?