I’ve experienced a few “mini-man moments” recently, and they’ve got me thinking…

The other day my son needed some icy-hot kind of cream for his back. He’s been having a few muscle spasms since his soccer tournament last weekend, and the cream seems to help relax the muscles near his shoulder blades. I gave him instructions of where to find the cream he needed:

In the bathroom, under the magazines there are 3 small Rubbermaid containers, and in one of those is a small plastic jar of the cream. You’ll need to take the magazines down and look in each Rubbermaid because I don’t know which one it’s in.

He successfully found what he needed, and brought it to me to put on his back before bed.

When I went upstairs to get ready for bed a while later, the bathroom looked like a war zone! He had indeed moved the magazines, and looked in each Rubbermaid, and had put NONE of it back….

The next morning, I asked him to come upstairs. I said, “Last night, when you got the cream for your back, you took everything apart in the bathroom and left it there.”

He looked back at me with a completely blank stare. “Yes, I did,” he said.

I asked, “So, you didn’t think the stuff should get put away?”

Again, blankly, he looked at me, and responded with a bit of confusion in his voice, “Um, I didn’t think about it.”

“Well, think about it now,” I said.

Then, I think he finally figured out what I was talking about, because the blank look left and was replaced with his goofy look. He said, “OH, you mean, you want me to go put the stuff away?”

“That WOULD be nice. Thank You!” I responded.

It was a perfect example of a “mini-man moment”. That moment where I realized that I was looking in the face of a man, in mini form, and that as a man – a smart, caring, innocent young man – he wasn’t seeing what I was seeing.

There ARE certain things men don’t think about, and certain things that men don’t see. My husband might have done the same thing. My son didn’t do it because he was being messy, or to bug me. He didn’t put the stuff away because that’s NOT what he went into the bathroom to do. I hadn’t explicitly told him to put things back when he was done (see instructions above), and even if I had, the focus of the task was getting the cream, and once that was done, nothing else really mattered.

It’s happened in the kitchen, too. This son is meant to be doing the dishes. He leaves the kitchen, saying he finished the dishes, but when I go back in there, OFTEN there are many dishes still not washed. The dishes IN the sink have been washed, but the dishes around the sink, or on the stove, or on the table have not been washed.  Why? Well, calling my son back to the kitchen, I can easily tell that he never even saw those other dishes. When I show them to him, he’s obviously completely unaware that they were ever there.

My younger son does similar things. I ask him to hand me the DVD case behind him… he turns around and looks right over the case, but can’t find it. Or I tell him to pick up all his dirty clothes in the bedroom, and when I go in to get his hamper, there are STILL dirty socks in his toy bin, dirty pants hanging on his bunk bed ladder, and a dirty shirt on his train table. Apparently he was picking up the clothes on his floor…. and once that was done, picking up clothes was done, because he never even saw those other clothes, somehow…

It looks fine! I don't see anything...

Both boys will do this when it comes to cleaning things up in general. They’re ready to play on the Wii, and I look around and say, “There are about a million things that need to be done, and we need to do some of them before we play on the Wii.” They look around and say, “It looks fine to me.” Never mind the pile of Legos by the entertainment center, the plate on the computer table, the crumbs on the futon, the overflowing wastepaper basket by the laundry room door, or the stack of drawing paper that has spread out across one whole side of the room.

It’s all very foreign to me. I look around and can see (nearly) every lint ball on the floor, every dish left out, every stray toy, and every task that needs to be done.  It boggles my mind that my men miss these things all the time. They don’t even see them!

My husband has confirmed that my observations are correct. There are lots of things he just doesn’t see, unless he’s really looking for them, and lots of tasks that are finished once the objective is reached, whether or not there really is any more that should be done (like clean-up, for example).

I’ve had to come to the realization that for the vast majority of these ‘offences’, they aren’t leaving things undone to bug me, or because they are lazy or sloppy (though there ARE some of those moments with the boys, to be sure). I’m wired to see those things as a mom…. they aren’t. That’s OK. I need to be gracious in how I deal with them, and help them to get things done and to learn how to see something through to the REAL completion.

I’m sure that men are completely capable of taking care of themselves, and I mean no disrespect at all with this post. But I do think that there’s a reason boys have mothers, and there’s a reason a man needs a wife.  Otherwise, all those unseen things that they miss would start to pile up and take over.

These “mini-man moments” remind me that my men aren’t broken; they are just wired differently than I am. Rather than expecting them to be like me, I need to help them to learn how to be conscientious and aware of the things they don’t currently see. I don’t need to ‘fix’ them, but I can help train them so they don’t drive their own wives completely insane down the road!  And if I can teach them in a spirit of grace and acceptance, hopefully they’ll be able to extend that grace and acceptance to others in their lives who see things differently than they do, too.