My baby boy is all grown up. Or really, he just graduated from pre-school. But between playing proud momma and getting him ready for kindergarten, I'm thinking about what the big bad world will do to my sweet little boy.
When my little guy was first born I had beautiful visions of raising him 'gender-neutral'. After all, it was just me and him. There was no daddy in the picture to taint my efforts, and my crew of feminist friends were behind me 110%. I bought cute little 'boyish' outfits as well as some that were more 'girly'. He wore yellow, green, purple, black, pretty much anything that was cute and fun. He played with the kinds of toys that most small ones play with.
Then he started preschool and things started to change. I'll never forget the day he had a friend over who told him that some of his toys were for girls. These children were three years old and already ideas about gender were being spread between them. I could have played Bad Momma and not let him play with that friend anymore, but there was really no point. And that would have been an awful thing to do. But it was getting worse. Suddenly he had nothing to do with his purple shirt with the adorable ice cream scoops on it because, he said, purple is for girls. The things he would pick out at the store were ever more boyish.
Prior to this his best friend had been a girl, the daughter of a feminist friend of mine who had been pregnant at the same time as me. I reminisced about the days when I controlled who my son's friends were and who I allowed him to socialize with. Only after verbalizing my anxiety did a dear close friend - a veteran mother of three - set me straight.
"Girl, do you really think you're helping him by trying to control every aspect of his life?" she said. And she was right! I'd been so focused on raising a 'gender-neutral' child that I hadn't even thought of the social alienation I would cause by trying to keep him out of the big bad sexist world. Dare I say, it was as bad as the fundamentalist Christians keeping their kids out of the school system for fear they would encounter Satan himself.
From then on I decided I would go with it. My son is a smart kid, after all. We started talking about gender instead of ignoring it. I would say things like, "There are a lot of silly people in this world who think that boys aren't supposed to play with dolls," and "Some people think that girls shouldn't play sports." Thankfully he thought this was ridiculous as well, and even though he continues to dress in ever more gendered garb, I know that this isn't the end of the world. I mean, I dressed up like a princess as a girl, and I turned out pretty well.
So my baby boy is off to public school in the fall, and I know I cannot keep him in a safe feminist vacuum forever. He won't be 'gender-neutral', because that's really not possible without restricting him from having the kind of childhood that will let him figure things out for himself. But I can rest easy knowing he'll be at the very least gender-AWARE. His claim that Rapunzel was 'silly' for not leaving the tower herself tells me that.
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