You can tell he's raised by a woman if...

I recently made an effort to a) conserve my expensive girly body wash, which Mark uses like it's water, and b) save Mark from future embarrassment in the locker room ("Hey, dude, are you using night-blooming jasmine body gel?"). I decided to buy Mark his very own man-centric scented body wash. 

It was a hard choice. The men's soap aisle is very different from the women's--most products are single-purpose shampoo/body washes, which made me giggle because that little fact singularly defines the difference between men and women. (You'd have a hard--no, impossible!--time selling a hybrid shampoo/body wash to any woman I know!)

The alternative was the Axe product line, which markets itself not as soap, but as animal magnetism in a bottle, guaranteed to make you irresistible to women. That is not the goal for my darling 11-year-old boy.

So, after studying each and every bottle on the shelf, I settled on this one:

I handed Mark the bottle ever-so-casually.

"This is for you," I said. "I mean, if you want to start using body wash made for men..."

I could see his little chest swell with pride. He puffed up, and in his deepest voice, replied, "Heck yeah, I do!" He held the bottle, and strutted around the room.

"I have MAN soap!" he bellowed proudly.

And then he stopped, fretting. He turned the bottle over, searching the label, and voiced a question only a boy without a father would ask.

"Will it still keep my skin soft?" he asked.

I assured him it would ("See, it's made by Dove soap"). And then I realized I still have much work to do.