I was a tomboy growing up.....I was really good at baseball, helping my older brother with practice (I was a better hitter) and all. But back then, girls didn’t play baseball. I am so very grateful that I had a son. I lived out my sport fantasies through him.....football, basketball, baseball, soccer, diving. I hope he enjoyed it as much as I did. He wanted to be an athlete and he was athletically inclined. But I told him that learning all the sports would benefit him when he was an adult and could play any position in pick-up men’s games. He is now a successful adult, husband and father. Wouldn’t trade the experience for the world.
Your life sounds much like mine except I was a tomboy with two brothers and then had two sons. Played sports with my brothers, built forts in the woods, played king of the hill in the haymow etc. - fortunate to grow up on a farm. Eventually the hormones kicked in and I didn’t want to be sweaty and disheveled anymore. I wouldn’t take anything for those days.
One of my sons was and is obsessed with sports the other was and is a gear-head.
I see so many women, especially if they have sisters only, who are particularly critical of what I see as normal guy behavior. They keep wanting their husbands to act like women. They bring me long stories about their husbands/boyfriends behavior. I patiently explain how it’s just a guy thing and their response is along the lines of, “But I just think”. They don’t listen or don’t even think about it.
Conversely as a girl, my relationships with other women is sometimes a puzzle to the guys I know. I just tell them, “it’s a girl thing”. They say okay and drop the why don’t you do it this or that way advice.
It doesn’t have to be so difficult. Our culture has made it that way. There wouldn’t be so much “but I just think” if women weren’t conditioned to think that men are inferior in every way.