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was horrified! My magazine?! (It was a special edition of my weekly women's magazine that had the photos of the Olympic athletes posing naked for a calendar shoot).

I did the only thing I could do in the face of this shocking revelation! I called my husband and chucked a major Chernobyl! What's a Chernobyl, you ask? It's not just an over-reaction, it's a nuclear reaction, that's what! I was so engrossed in my over-reaction that I barely noticed the sound coming from the other end of the phone. It was my husband. He too went into fits of hysterical laughter as he listened to my tirade relating this incident to him on the phone. Well I wanted to just choke the life out of him at this point! What the hell was so funny about that? Can't he see that our son had turned into an alien?

I don't know how but I managed to calm down and my husband and I had a discussion about "the incident" and he explained to me that it is normal for boys to do that sort of thing. I protested that I never did anything like that when I reached puberty! And he calmly reminded me that I was not a boy! Oh and he also said that most of them never grow out of it. Well, that did nothing to pacify my concerns. I was so sure that if we didn't find a way to steer Z away from his newfound horrible habit, his life would be ruined! My husband did his best to assure me that everything will be fine and that this is really just a natural occurrence with boys. What?! OMG, and I have two more boys to follow who are on the verge of puberty too! How could my mother not have told me about this?

Well, I had to work my way towards a complete paradigm shift and fast! Needless to say, my relationship with my sons evolved greatly during that period and has once again reached a new level, with my youngest son turning 12 last year. I'm a bit better equipped now to handle this "puberty stages", having gone through it with eldest son Z and then his younger brother M, which I have to admit was an easier process in comparison. However, being a girly-girl and the only woman in a household full of males, it is more than a bit disconcerting sometimes to realise how different boys are from girls. But I learned a lot from the process that I went through with big "Z" and I guess that his "early" emergence into puberty really pushed me to hurry along, ready or not, with my own evolution as a parent, and as a woman, to reach the point of being able to understand and acknowledge that difference. "Vive la difference" as they say in French! Amen to that.

Learn more about this author, T. J. Starr.
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