Boys & Girls

My oldest – then only – child entered kindergarten a little young, a little shy, a little small for his grade. At line-up he and his classmates were instructed to choose a partner, the kind of cold-blooded sorting that got the day off to a really bad beginning for about half of them. Many of the boys had apparently already met, or at least recognized one another from some essential boyishness - favorite ballplayers, wrestling moves, poop quips – and the girls were of course very quick to identify the power of associations, for the most part leaving my son grateful to be holding hands with anyone at all.

Those first couple of weeks I took the dog for a walk around noon when my son and his class were scheduled to emerge from lunch for their recess, and we’d spy on him then as he wandered between a spot in the middle of the yard where they’d piled their lunchboxes and an orbit of similarly wandering misfits – the girl with the helmet, ESL kids, and one boy who was in the habit of spectacularly hollering and kicking his father in the shins and dashing for the exits every morning, then partnering addictively with my son.

They were five years old of course, but I was new to this, and worried over the likelihood that such positioning might amount to a permanent arrangement. Worried about Napoleon Dynamite vaguely. The situation wasn’t helped very much by the sort of old-fashioned, big-hearted,  bear-hugging, loud-joking teacher who as often as possible seemed to segregate the class by its gender – in columns and playgroups and art projects – and even suggested that my son would benefit from spending a little more time rough-housing with the boys, one of whom teased him relentlessly and remains to this day a neighborhood scourge. I’d like to be generous here, not with that burgeoning sociopath (he’s thirteen these days; it’s amazing how many kids really don’t get better), but with the teacher, whose boys-will-be-boys philosophy was, I think, a relic from the age when parents-would-be-dufuses.

That we are victims of naiveté, particularly where it concerns raising our children, does not usually become apparent until many years later. Most things are like that. You think about your righteousness in those early days, the protectiveness, the certainty you carried around like an amulet, sometimes hidden, sometimes not, that your offspring was in fact magnificently gifted, and everyone would eventually discover it - you remember all of this narcissism and, hopefully, you wince. With the perspective that we probably gain from having other children to obsess about, or simply watching the development of that first one who doesn’t, in fact, turn into Napoleon Dynamite, or the youngest-ever starting shortstop for the Yankees - with all of the things we were wrong about, it’s nice to occasionally have something to point to - some truth – where our convictions remain what they were.

So here is what I thought, and what I think: that children have a hard enough time getting recognized in a classroom full of twenty-seven others – some prettier, more athletic, taller, funnier, yellow-dot readers or red - without also needing to worry about the fickle, even arbitrary demands of boyishness or girlishness. Our contemporary culture offers plenty of incentives already for boys to be boys, and girls to be girls, notwithstanding the gender-related excuses we are terminally providing for Ethan’s over-exuberance or Skylar’s whiny meltdowns. A wink. A chuckle: “Ahh. What can you do?”

Stop kidding yourself, for one. Heads up, parents. Ethan isn’t grinding a kid’s face into the blacktop because he’s a boy.

Of course there are so many ways we like to divide ourselves into meaningless categories, it’s very likely etched into our chromosomes, still books that make it their mission to intervene at the earliest possible age between those X’s and Y’s strike me as particularly bold, subversive, and maybe – who knows? – useful. How many little boys are there probably out there who like to dress up and dance more than learn to throw a perfect spiral? And how many of those boys have the courage to defy their fathers, their classmates, everyone, and forge ahead with a talent show demonstration like the boy in Oliver Button is a Sissy. The stakes in this book are as plain as they sound, but also as unapologetic.

In William’s Doll, the boy with the choices actually gives basketball a pretty sporting try. From the look of the pictures he’s not such a spaz at it either, the first of a number of surprises and subtle developments – in character and plot – that make for a careful, and finally uplifting little story, whether you are the type who likes dolls, basketballs, or stamps.

And yet for every William you will ever find on the shelves of your bookstore, your library, your school, there are generally hundreds of Fancy Nancy’s. Okay, I’ll say it: Do we really need another installment in the life of this insufferable drama queen? Fancy Nancy and the Very Shiny Chainsaw?

To ponder over the infinite accessorizing available to today’s little girls is to come face to face with everything that makes their inevitable teenage rebellions seem at once so exotic and completely understandable. Pity the tomboy. In Horace and Morris but Mostly Dolores (yes, that really is the amazing title) the two boy-mice in an inseparable trio of adventurers leave their friend Dolores at the doorstep of the Mega-Mice clubhouse where everyone is sword fighting, sling shotting and otherwise nailing each other’s shoelaces to the floor. “No Girls Aloud Allowed” reads the sign on the porch.

“A girl mouse must do what a girl mouse must do what a girl mouse must do…” decides Dolores, and redirects herself to the Cheese Puffs club where that day the scheduled project is “Gifts for Mother Made from Muenster.”  And the next: “How to Get a Fella Using Mozzarella.” Pretty grim pickings in other words. And Dolores doesn’t stand for it – swordfights or dating tips? -  just like we hope she won’t.

Our kids have the rest of their lives to grow up and join clubs which keep getting bigger and more nebulous and yet somehow, curiously, less inviting. From Cub Scouts to slackers to yuppies to Democrats to Christians and so on until we’re lucky if we can remember where all the partitioning began. Still, some of us have these reminders, and we are lucky. Seven years after kindergarten my almost-high-school-age son is faring better socially than I ever would have guessed. And seven years later, that play date that never materialized has become some kind of expert in any manner of potentially elephant-slaying martial arts.

The times may be different, but so are the kids. My current first-grader wears a dazzling fake-diamond ring to school whenever he remembers, though nobody gives him very much grief about it, probably since he is taller than most, with surfer blond looks, and a thirty-seven mile an hour fastball. Or maybe he just doesn’t care, still I hope he sticks with it, through hardship or not, and otherwise continues crossing these bridges where he can find them.