Scratchings #2: Marlo Thomas and the Male Vortex

I've been thinking a lot about Marlo Thomas this week.

Ever since girlhood, I have loved Marlo. From watching reruns of That Girl, where she was the perky single gal with the great flip-do (even then I knew she was too good for drippy Donald), to wearing out my LP of Free to Be: You and Me, she became one of my first feminist icons even before I knew the meaning of either word. She was beautiful, talented, independent and had the same color hair as me during a time when all the cool women of pop culture seemed to favor lighter hues. In later years, I admired her acting chops in serious made-for-TV films and as a guest star in popular comedies like Friends. Since taking over her father’s work for St. Jude Children's Hospital, she has exhibited compassion and commitment worthy of respect and admiration.

But all those great qualities are not why I have been thinking about her. No, I've been thinking more about the greatest challenge this versatile woman undertook---entering the male vortex when she married Phil Donahue in 1980. For those who may not recall, Marlo was nearly 43 years old, still the ultimate single gal, when she wed this divorced man with five (count 'em, FIVE) children. Although Phil had one daughter, he has often described the household that Marlo walked into as a virtual locker room of testosterone-laden behavior ("jockstraps hanging from the ceiling," etc.), as his boys were in the throes of their teenage years. Despite some tabloid attempts to portray Marlo as an evil stepmother, the family appears to have survived rather well, as she and Phil are still together after near 30 years and none of her stepkids have come out with a "Marlo Dearest"-type slam of our icon. In fact, the experience helped encourage Marlo to create Free to Be . . . a Family, which deals with a variety of issues such as blended families.

She has said publicly that she learned a lot from her experiences stepmothering a brood of boys. Yet I still cannot imagine what kind of fortitude it must have taken to have tackled that job. I don't care how much she loved Phil, most women in her position would have taken one long look at the situation and run screaming for the hills. Instead, she tackled it head-on and, apparently, rather well. THAT's a strong woman for ya!

The reason Marlo has been on my mind is because I just spent a week immersed in another type of male vortex called Cub Scout camp. This is what you do when you have only boys and a job that's flexible enough to allow you to get suckered into volunteering all week in an outdoor setting that requires constant hiking under a heat index of 105 degrees with a group of tweener males. Whew! I'm still tired!

This wasn't how I envisioned my summers. They were supposed to be with the girls. I grew up a Girl Scout, with a Girl Scout mom, eagerly anticipating the day when I could share the experience with my own little girl. Instead, God blessed me with boys. . . . only boys. . . . with only boy dogs. . . . and a boy hamster. . . and a male (sometimes boyish) husband. Thank goodness for our two parakeets, so I can refer to something in the household as "the girls" (though in all honesty, the girls' tweetings are so annoying I don't plan to replace them once they go to the great nest in the sky).

Don't get me wrong, I love my boys with all my heart. I waited a long time to become a mom and went through much effort to obtain the ones we have, but being the only female in an all-male household can be lonely at times. And despite what some people try to tell you, there ARE differences between boys and girls. While we try not to push gender stereotypes in our household (thus the recent Dora the Explorer-themed birthday party my five year-old insisted upon despite teasing from his preschool pals) differences do come through. As I tell folks, we have a lot of ENERGY in our household. The spiral staircase is not seen as an instrument for reaching the second floor, but as an indoor money bars for hanging upside down. I know everything there is to know about Star Wars and Ben-10 and virtually nothing about Disney's High School Musical. You get the picture.

Sometimes I still wish for a mini-me, especially when the girls in green come around selling cookies. Just yesterday a dad with two boys and a daughter adopted from China jokingly advised, "Just do what we did---buy one!" Even knowing adoption's an option, there's another part of me that believes there is a reason I was blessed with only boys. A few years ago we lost one without ever finding out if it was male or female. Sometimes I imagine that was my girl. Perhaps she was called away for a reason. Certainly that experience made me appreciate my youngest much more. After enduring uterine surgery, fertility treatments, and a very unromantic conception in a doctor's office, I would not have cared if he was a boy, girl, or squid!

I think, like Marlo, I'm supposed to learn something from this all-boy experience, if only to open my eyes to the wonderful uniqueness of these little men. I used to think that it would be awful to have only boys, but now I wouldn't trade the ones I have for anything. They are funny and silly and have opened up a whole world of fantasy/science fiction knowledge I probably would never have had. Some families seem to segregate by gender---mom does stuff with the girls, dad with the boys. I don't have that excuse. Not having girls makes me a better mom to my boys because I have to be involved in their stuff. Some friends have suggested I volunteer to work with Girl Scouts, yet if I did that, I wouldn't have as much time to devote to my boys' activities. So the girls in green will have to wait until my brood has left the nest and freed me from the male vortex.

It's not such a bad place to be. I still haven't quite reached the age Marlo was when she willingly stepped into the vortex. Perhaps that's why she did it. Maybe, having achieved career success that most midlife moms would have envied, she was ready for a little reinvention herself. What bigger challenge can you think of than to step into the male vortex at age 43? In doing so, Marlo proved herself tougher than anyone, male or female.

For that reason, she is still my greatest feminist icon. As my boys would say: Marlo, you rock, Dude!