blueberries_earlyblueThe parenting experience is always unique.  There is no one-size-fits-all baby prototype that runs like clockwork and hits its marks like a veteran actor.  There is no roadmap to where your kids are headed, no matter how many “What To Expect When They’re Expectorating” baby books and “He’s Not A Jerk, He’s Spirited” child-rearing manuals you memorize.  You’ve got to be flexible to survive as a parent, because you’re not traveling a shared road with other parents.      Your kid is unique, for better or for worse.

But there’s one universal truth that all parents face, and it’s a rough one.  It can be summarized with one word, three syllables that bring fear into young parent’s hearts and evoke shudders in those who’ve already faced its evils and lived to tell their survival stories.

That word is puberty.

Puberty turns your sweet and innocent child who loves her Mom, Dad and fluffy puppies into a belligerent antagonist who wears short skirts and black t-shirts and rolls their eyes when asked what time it is.  Puberty doesn’t like things that are fluffy.  Puberty replaces Mom and Dad with a cell phone and an Instagram account.

Or so they tell me.  Because despite my wife’s impeccable organization and insistence on timeliness in our lives, my kids are late to puberty.  And that’s fine by me.

This is not necessarily a surprise to us, as both my wife and I were late bloomers.  I still remember the day when I returned to my summer sleepaway camp with the anticipation of seeing long-lost friends, only to find those friends replaced by Wooly Mammoths with pronounced jaws and enough body hair to hide small animals.  The first morning in the showers, I stared gaping at their hirsute genitals and resolved never to take off my towel in public again.

Scarred and intimidated, I decided to risk exposing my insecurity to my father at visiting day, who would surely have advice on how to overcome this downy challenge.  I found a private moment, cornered my father and sheepishly said “Dad, I don’t have any pubic hair.  Is there something wrong with me?”.  My father, leader of men, filled with sage wisdom of the ages, looked at me with terror, uttered a few broken syllables that sounded something like “Uh, yeah, everything’s fine” and raced out of the room to find fresh air and my mother.  Good talk, Dad.

So when my son started expressing similar concerns, I decided to be much more forthcoming.  I’ve reassured him that growing up happens at different paces, that I had a similar experience and grew to be the strapping man that I am today (if strapping can be defined as slightly above average height with a build that some have described as a rare combination of skinny and lumpy).  Be patient, I told him.  You’ve got plenty of time to grow.

Secretly, of course, my wife and I rejoiced at our good fortune.  We somehow managed to hold puberty at bay, beating back the plague and sparing his innocence while our peers suffered through their children’s development.  We heard stories about their unprovoked rages and newfound interests in the opposite sex and abbreviating life to symbols like LOL and WTF and uttering words like “twerking” that we were sure must be illegal.  We considered ourselves lucky.

But as more time passed, and as our son’s class pictures began to reflect Peter Dinklage on a team full of Dwight Howards, we became concerned enough to seek professional guidance.  We scheduled an appointment with an endocrinologist to analyze his growth patterns.

We arrived at our appointment with X-rays in hand to determine our son’s “bone age”.  The doctor’s initial glance seemed to indicate that his growth process had begun in earnest, but that she’d need to take a closer look at his body to learn more.  She was a warm and pleasant-looking physician, so my son showed no trepidation as she asked him to remove his clothes.

What followed was one of the strangest physical exams I’d ever seen.  After taking height and weight measurements, she asked my son to sit on the exam bed while slowly looking at his physique.  Standard stuff, until she quickly lifted one of his arms and proceeded to take a good solid whiff under his armpit, as nonchalantly as if she were smelling a bed of roses.  My sons eyes rose as she declared “nope, no smells there”, without even a hint of relief.  Thank god she didn’t smell his feet, which he neglected to wash for an entire month one summer and caused a nice pair of sneakers to dissolve.  That odor could have killed her.

She then asked my son to remove his underwear, explaining that she needed to see if any pubic hair had emerged.  She also explained that part of the analysis involved examining the size of the testes to determine the current stage of development.  For some reason I momentarily flashed back to my son’s circumcision ceremony, and considered the possibility of grabbing him and running towards the hospital exits before it was too late.  But I quickly realized that this was only an exam, nothing was going to be removed here, and the beads of sweat that had formed on my forehead began to subside.

My son dropped his underwear (all too eagerly, in my personal opinion…not a shy one is he apparently), and the doctor quickly got to work.  She examined the upper area of his groin and astutely declared “there’s a distinct lack of pubic hair there”.  We nodded in obvious agreement.

Now on to the sensitive part.  She turned to the desk next to the exam table, opened a drawer and pulled out what looked like a large pearl necklace, only instead of pearls there were a series of wooden oval beads.  “I’m going to need to see where in this scale your son’s testicles currently lie”.  I looked at the beads, organized in size order.  I found myself staring at the largest one, which appeared to have been removed from an elephant, and began to feel a deep sense of inadequacy.  I quickly glanced down at my own groin area and imagined the process of stuffing a pair of those into my boxer briefs each morning, and silently thanked the gods for my average endowment.

The doctor moved to my son, placed examination gloves on her hands, and stealthily grabbed my son’s testes and fiddled for a moment (evoking a minor fit of hilarity in my son while simultaneously implanting in his subconscious that he should marry a doctor down the road). She then picked up the testicle necklace and began moving down the line towards the smaller set of beads.  “He’s definitely small” she said as she moved from the porn ball section down to the kiddie area.

It was then I noticed a small and unnecessary detail.  Each of the beads were simply stained with a wooden gloss, except for the smallest three beads.  Those were colored blue.  Yes, the makers of a bracelet used to analyze the most sensitive area of the male anatomy chose to make some of the balls blue.  “You know, doc…”, I started to say before looking at my son and stopping myself. “Never mind”, I said.  We’ll save that lesson for later. But good to know that someone in the medical supply industry has a cruel sense of humor.

After the exam was over, the doctor informed us that our son was still within the pre-pubescent range, and that we should expect him to experience at least some considerable growth ahead and likely did not need any medical assistance at this time.  Based on the bone scan and her examination, we asked her to estimate where he could end up on the height spectrum.  “Well, how tall are the two of you?”, she asked.  We gave her our heights and she replied “take the average of the two and add or subtract an inch or two, and that should be about right”.  Money well spent.

After activating the supercomputer in my brain, we now have a bar for what to expect in terms of our son’s physical growth to come.  He won’t be tall, by any means, but he seems satisfied with the numbers presented to him.  And we want him to get there…just not too soon.  We know the puberty pains that lie ahead for all of us, so if I can help it, and for as long as possible, we’ll try to keep his balls blue.  Sort of.