My son is twelve years old. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of raising a twelve year old, it’s really quite simple. Your only role for the most part is to keep him from killing himself. Meanwhile, he’ll be climbing anything he can find and searching for creative ways to break stuff. It’s also important to realize he’s fully convinced that he’s invincible, which is the name of the game while being a boy.

Being a former boy myself, none of this bothers me, nor do I fret over it. My job as a dad is to guide my kids, first through example and then through experience. I do this knowing full well that most of what I teach my child actually belongs more in the category of prophecy than lesson. It basically works like this: “What I’m going to teach you is true, and it’s going to happen to you. But you're not going to appreciate and accept it until after you do it yourself.”

We grow more from pain than pleasure, and that’s just the deal. It’s almost as if the only reason the parent is even there is for the satisfaction of being able to say "I told you so." Trust me, it’s a lot of fun, because it makes me look like a genius when it comes to life lessons. While the truth of the matter is, I only know this stuff because I got to screw up first.

Another upside to being a dad to a boy is that it allows you to remember the unique male stuff that helped mold and create the one-of-a-kind persona that is a man. This is stuff women cannot understand about us and quite frankly aren’t supposed to. God allows for gender-specific attributes to remind boys to be sure they spend time with each other, basking in the glow of knowledge that some sweet truths are only for us.

This brings up the topic I wanted to get to all along. It is something I have never seen written about by a woman, and thus makes it uniquely male. The topic is, of course, the fart. To a twelve year old boy on a sleep-over nothing is more salacious and culturally taboo than not only speaking of farts as often as possible but preferably working up a good, ripe one to descend and overwhelm his buddies as proof of his superiority and masculinity.

What is uniquely common among the male species is that even though we laugh and mock any guy delivering a dreaded fart in our direction, and we make sure he knows how putrid the smell is and how we despise it, when it emerges from our own nether regions it takes on somehow a sweet savor, an aromatic bouquet that only the connoisseur can truly appreciate. Kind of like a fine wine.

Farts for the most part smell the same. Boys know that for some reason though the smell emanating from someone else is horrid and putrid whereas the same substance coming with the same ferocity of fragrance is somehow not nearly as abhorrent when it’s our own. It’s kind of like sin I guess. I once heard the late Ed Cole make this interesting observation, “We tend to judge others by what they do; we judge ourselves by our intentions.”

That being said, I’m here to tell you that I would recommend getting yourself a son at all costs. If you’re a mom I must forewarn you, though, it will come with a lot of angst, confusion and smells, which you will by no means understand. Then again you’re a woman, you’re not supposed to