The Boy

I am sitting here after too much work today listening to Peggy Orenstein talk about her book "Cinderella Ate My Daughter." After having one of each gender, I can say with all my heart that so much of who they are is in their base genetic code. The inherent "girliness" or "boyishness" is a piece of them. I think that we can exacerbate it to an extent - perhaps sometimes to their harm - but at the lowest level, they like what they like. Neither of my kids are at the gender extremes, and I think they both help to pull each other into a healthy middle. Davinci enjoys princess movies but is by no means obsessed with them (in fact her obsession is reserved for the Nightmare Before Christmas). Little D likes knights and spooky things but is not car, machine or ball obsessed. Basically, Zach and I have created a carbon copy of each of us. I know you might say it was our parenting that made them this way, and again, that accounts for some of it but by no means all (or even most) of it. I am thankful that they are not so easily fit into the boxes of their genders, but I believe it has much less to do with our parenting than it does with our DNA.

As I listened to Orenstein talk, I was reminded of when the true extent of Little D's Boyness was thrust upon me. He was two-and-a-half and I was dropping him off at his hippy dippy preschool, where they eat quinoa and all of the toys are made of wood and silk. Two of the boys are up in the loft, pointing combs menacingly at everyone below. Little D sees this, and rushes up to the loft to join them. I thought "Oh man, why can't he just go play with the kitchen stuff like he usually does?" when he sweetly picks up a baby doll from her crib in the loft. My heart soars with the sight of my sweet little nurturing boy in the midst of so much violence. And then. Then he flips the doll onto her back, pointing her head-first towards the people below, aiming her like a gun - a word which he at this point did not even know, much less had he seen one used in all of the Little Bears, Koala Brothers, or Maggie and the Ferocious Beasts he had watched on TV. My son, turning innocent dolls into weapons of doom.

P.S. Two weeks ago at work I was worried that we would not have enough teen volunteer applicants for us to be able to be picky and select the cream of the crop... Well now applications are open for one more day, and we have almost 3 times as many applicants as spaces available... be careful what you wish for.