My friend took his little 18 month old son on a "play date" recently, with a whole bunch of other little kids. They went to one of those places that's full of fun interactive things to play with and on, kind of like Chucky Cheese, without the food, I guess. Anyhow, his little boy seemed to really like the big bin with all the coloured balls in it - you know, the one you can get in a swim around in the balls?

Anyhow, I guess what he liked best was picking up all the balls that fell out of the bin and putting them back in (we debated later what it meant that his 18 month old boy was having the most fun cleaning, but that's another story). At one point, he was collecting stray balls and there were these orange pylons in the way, so he moved one. The next thing the poor little guy knew, there was this 2 1/2 year old girl in his face, yelling at him for moving the pylon and telling him it needed to stay where it was and he shouldn't be messing with it. I guess he just stood there, dumbfounded, while this little girl yelled in his face.

My friend noticed this going on and went over to his baby and said "Sorry, son, but you've just learned a really important life lesson. For the rest of your life, women will yell at you and you will have no idea what you've done wrong. I know it's disturbing, but it's best you start getting used to it now."

I laughed when he told me this story. And then he mentioned that, not only did boys not know why the girls were yelling at them, but usually, the girls didn't know either.

I've been thinking about this today as I get madder and madder at a boy for something that I wonder is maybe unreasonable. Do we usually know what we're yelling at them about? I think we do. Sometimes we have trouble, in the moment, articulating it, but I think we know what it is. So why is it that they never seem to know?

Maybe we really just see the world in two different ways and have different expectations. I don't know. All I know is that I'm mad and trying really hard not to yell, cause no one likes to be stared at with that "What the heck is wrong with you, what did I do?" face.