A fleeting lunchtime encounter with a little hooligan has made me think differently about raising my son.
Today I got wolf-whistled by an eight-year-old boy. I am a 41-year-old mother of a two year old son.
Striding out from work for a ridiculously late lunch grab, two boys were mucking about as I passed them and I could sense they were up for mischief. I was just waiting for something as I paced up the hill. One of them wolf-whistled. A third was slouching over the balcony of his medium-rise apartment.
“Excuse me!” he yelled. I looked up. “My friend’s got a crush on you.” I turned around to see the mouthy one simulating something very lewd, and screaming up the road my way, “You’re sexy.”
I did all I could to eek out a “Show some respect!” before I continued to lunch.
But God, I was seething. I wanted to find his mother and whip her around the head with a copy of “Raising Boys”. I wanted to head back down the hill and smartly sit him down and unload just how inappropriate and unhealthy and before-time his behaviour was.
I wanted to find out if he knew what he was really saying. Where he got it from. If he knew what it ‘meant’.