What a Woman Really Wants

A friend of mine forwarded me an email today that she labeled "obnoxious" but which she said carried a useful moral. Always in need of a life lesson, I decided to read it.

It was a fairly lengthy tale of Young King Arthur. He was imprisoned by a neighboring king and, rather than being killed on the spot, was offered an alternative--he could have one year to figure out what it was that women really wanted. If he produced the true answer to this question after 365 days, he would live. Quite a challenge.

As the story goes, he did what most of us procrastinators would do and waited until the very last day of his research period to go to the source he suspected would possess the best information on this topic. She was an ugly witch who swore to give him the facts he needed if Arthur arranged for her a marriage to Sir Lancelot, his fellow knight of the Round Table.

To make a long story short, Lancelot made the sacrifice and married the hag in order that noble Arthur might live. And the witch, in turn, produced this pithy quote: what a woman really wants is to be in charge of her own life. Then, she told Lancelot that, as his wife, he could have her be beautiful half of the time...either in the public eye of the daytime or in the intimacy of the night. What did he choose? He said it was up to her, the magical response that she sought and that prompted her to make herself be beautiful all the time (I guess witches can do that).

Anyway, I read this story and thought, 'Huh. Isn't that nice,' which is what I think after most chain emails of this sort. 'A charming enough tale, but a bit contrived,' I further concluded, and then I went about my afternoon.

That afternoon included our four-year-old beginning work on his checkerboard Halloween costume, for which I bought supplies earlier today. I wasn't actually prepared to start putting it together (I'm an engineer, after all, and need to plan these things), but he was gung-ho and gathered up a red marker, one red and one black crayon, some glue, a stapler, a scissors, and one piece of black construction paper, diving into the task while I folded laundry.

A few minutes later, the construction paper was hacked into random-shaped bits on the coffee table, and he was seeking instruction on the operation of the stapler. Perhaps unwisely, I demonstrated for him how to stack two scraps of paper, place them beneath the teeth of the staples, and push down hard. He quickly got the hang of it and began cobbling together a black checkerboard that he called "strange" and "handsome."

As we each worked on our own little projects, we discussed what we'd be doing over the coming weekend. I told him that if it wasn't raining on Saturday, we'd go to the park but that I wasn't sure that would work out. After a few seconds' contemplation, he responded, "You could turn into a weather reporter, and then you could tell me what the days would be like."

"I could turn into a weather reporter?" I asked him. "How would I do that?"

"You know," he said with a little shrug, "just grow up into one. Like when you're done having me as a kid."

I paused for a second, taking this in. Then I said, "I guess I could."

Once again with nonchalance, he said, "Or you could just stay a mommy and a daddy." Apparently he was including his father in his line of reasoning as well.

Curious to learn how he would feel about my heeding his advice, I asked, "Which would you like me to do? Stay a mommy or become a weather reporter?" Isn't this the question that every woman who works or considers it wants her kids to answer?

Still focused on his stapling, he responded pleasantly, "Whatever you like, Mama."

Guess he's a (young) man ahead of his time...and WAAAAY ahead of King Arthur.