My mom visited me twice last week, driving over with my dad, who is fixing up my breezeway. She and I sat at my dining room table and yakked up a storm. At some point during her second visit, she said to me, "If any of this turns up on Facebook, you're out of the will."
I choose to interpret that injunction as applying to only the subject we'd been discussing for some time at that point: the disposition of estates, family finances, and my father's life expectancy, which I promise you we had a good reason for discussing beyond "when can we get our hands on his hard-earned loot?"
But the conversation we had two days earlier? I figure that's fair game.
Also, my mother didn't say anything about my blog.
My dad is a man for whom actions speak much louder than words. Indeed, his actions often contradict his words. He complains about my mother's disability, but when it comes to caring for her he is, if not quite tender, then certainly kind and indefatiguable. Over the last decade he has taken over all the cooking and housework, after 50 years in a marriage with such traditional division of labor that my mother even fixed him lunch on Saturdays, something it would never occur to me to do for Raider. When my nephew, Word Boy 2, was born three years ago, my 75-year-old dad even took up diaper-changing so my folks could baby-sit him.
He built my mom a little half-step that he carries in the car to help her get up short unavoidable flights of stairs, like my front stoop. For some reason, this little wooden home-made step warmed my heart. Quintessence of Dad, right there, to jump in and build something to solve a problem.
Anyway, on Wednesday my mom and I sat around for three hours and told family stories. I like re-hearing the stories I heard as a kid, if only because it reassures me that I haven't made stuff up. Or because it lets me correct the misunderstandings and mistakes in my versions.
But sometimes, my mom surprises me by telling a story I haven't heard before, and that happened on Wednesday.
I used to joke, darkly, that I came from a long line of women who didn't want children. The only thing in that line that's not true is the "long" part. I don't know how my maternal great-grandmother, parent of 13, felt about having children. I do know that the family story goes that my grandma, number 13, didn't have a middle name because her parents had flat-out run out of ideas.
My grandma, though, didn't choose to have children. The defining story of her life is that at 17, a senior in high school and on-track to be valedictorian, she fell pregnant and was forced to drop out of school to marry my grandfather. She always regretted school; she was proud of her accomplishments there, and hoped at least to go on to nursing school as so many of her sisters had. She sometimes regretted my grandfather; their marriage was not an easy one, marked by conflict, some of it physical, and it wasn't until their children were grown and gone that they enjoyed some measure of financial stability.
She blamed my aunt for ruining her life, as if my aunt somehow got herself conceived and born, and she had a remarkable capacity for not forgiving. She carried childhood slights to her grave, and apparently never repented of her tendency to blame her children for the disappointments of her life.
She was 17 in 1927; she had three children while she and grandpa were still living with her parents. And here's the new story my mom told me:
Apparently, the road they lived on was a long, straight country road with no stop signs. Cars got moving pretty fast, and when the road ended in a T, it took many drivers by surprise. You could tell how surprised they were by the wreckage of their cars up against a big tree that stood straight ahead and brought them up short if they didn't make the turn onto the cross street.
My grandmother, not very happily married and with three young children, found herself pregnant again, and despaired. She told my mother that she drove down that street, thinking about that tree, and it was a powerful temptation.
"Well," my mother said, "I was her fourth child. Talk about your unwanted children!"
My grandma didn't want that fourth child so strongly that she thought about suicide. My mother, pregnant in 1965, didn't want that baby, either. She wanted an abortion, but she couldn't get one.
My mom told me about grandma and the tree without apprently referencing or remembering my own status as the baby who wouldn't be here if she'd had her druthers. And one direction this writing could go in might be about my mother's and my shared wound, of knowing that we were unwanted children. Or it could turn into a story about how my mother, recognizing her own wound, nonetheless turned around and inflicted the same one on me. I've always thought that the "I wanted an abortion" story was one I could have lived my whole life without hearing, and knowing that she was told her own version of it does make me wonder, just a little, what she was thinking, not keeping that to herself?
(It also lends a delicious irony to her distaste for people on Facebook who don't know when to shut up.)
But I don't see the story that way right now. What it has had me thinking about for days is my grandma, my mom, and me, and how our lives were shaped by the times we lived in.
My grandma became sexually active at 17 in a time when birth control was not only not readily available, but frowned upon for "decent" women. There's a story (there's always a story!) about her turning my grandpa out of her bed unless he bought protection. He drove to a neighboring town to buy condoms, because no decent man would use condoms with his wife.
Well, somebody saw him there. And word got back to my grandma that LJ was cheating on her. Because why else would he be buying condoms? The story goes, my grandma just laughed when she heard that.
I don't know if the condoms failed them, or they didn't use them for long, but my grandma got pregnant three more times after my mom, the unwanted fourth child, was born. One of the babies was a full-term stillbirth, which she birthed at home, all alone. Grandpa had to go to work, and although he had stopped by on his way to tell his sisters my grandma needed them, by the time they got to the house it was all over. My grandma had given birth, stripped the bed, bathed and dressed herself, washed and wrapped her stillborn baby and laid it neatly in a clean shoe box.
Because back then, women like my grandma were tough, strong, matter-of-fact people who did what needed to be done. I wonder how she felt about that baby, buried under a walnut tree somewhere on that farm. Grief, I imagine, and also relief. In what measures? We'll never know.
That's my grandma's story, in her time and place: seven pregnancies she had almost no control over; six children to raise in poverty. Wanted or not, the babies came.
My mom got married 40 years later, in 1957. She was 24 years old and had been living on her own and supporting herself for eight years. She and my dad had their first child, my brother, four years later. Sooner than they'd planned to; they were putting my dad through college and wanted him to graduate first. And they had me not quite four years after that, also at a time not of their choosing.
My mom and dad at least had some option for family planning. In the pre-Roe, pre-Pill days of their early marriage, though, their children also came as they would. Two birth control failures. That my folks wanted at least one child is implicit in the plan to "wait" until after graduation. They didn't get to choose their times, but they were at least able to space their children, to have only one kid under three at a time instead of 2 or 3. And they were able to stop at two.
My mom quit work when my brother was born. She'd been at the phone company since she was sixteen, and was by then a supervisor. She liked her work and was good at it. She has some great stories (of course) about being a telephone operator in a college town in the days when operators had to place long-distance calls for you, and fake collect calls ("Collect call from Miss Blue Shoes") could be placed in the hope that Dad would be clever enough to realize you needed something mailed to you in time for Saturday's dance.
In 1961, women quit work when they "started a family." So that's what my mom did. But she always regretted it, at least a little. She liked her work, and felt competent and appreciated there. She liked her independence. And she did not find being home full-time with her children especially fulfilling.
She was just a bit too early; she just missed a coming revolution. By the time I was in middle school in the mid-70s, the mothers of my friends--most of them a decade or so younger than my mom, who'd had me when she was 32--worked. Our neighbors worked. My mom thought it mattered that there was someone home for us when we got back from school, but the other kids in our neighhorhood got by with a mix of babysitters, unsupervised time, and the careless oversight of slightly older children. And they seemed to be doing fine.
To add insult to injury, it seemed to my mother that my brother and I envied them, that we also wanted the freedom of an empty house and no adult supervision. We didn't, it seemed to her, treasure the mother who waited for us at home. We resented her.
(I say "it seemed to her" because I don't remember feeling that way. But I am perfectly preparted to believe that my behavior was consistent with her interpretation.)
By the time I became sexually active, around 1985, I had easy access to a whole array of birth control options (and my mother, bless her, made damn sure I knew what they were and how important it was to use them). Abortion was an option. And by 1986, I'd stopped having procreative sex--I haven't had to deal with the spectre of unwanted pregnancy for 25 years.
I know that, as a lesbian and then as part of a couple who can't reproduce without medical intervention, I'm an outlyer. I could only have babies I planned for. I know that people still have surprise babies. Word Boy 2 was a late-life bonus for my brother and sister-in-law. My sister-in-law's sister has a daughter who is significantly younger than her other children. "We joked," she told me one time, "that we should name her Daisy. As in, Whoops-a-daisy!"
But even these surprise babies are, at least in some measure, chosen babies. At least for the families I know, who have the knowledge and the resources to exercise their options even in today's climate of attacks on abortion rights.
I had the luxury of actively choosing each of my children, something my mother aspired to and couldn't quite manage, something my grandmother couldn't even imagine.
My point is that I don't think my grandma's story, my mom's story, and my story are just sad personal tales of children who weren't wanted and knew it, of women trapped or constrained by childrearing. My grandma was eight years old when women got the right to vote in federal elections. The first time I voted, I voted for a woman for vice president. We're not just our own stories. We're the story of a whole century of women in America.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Friday, June 15, 2012
Some Reflections on Creating Fragrance-Free Space
In recent years, both the Friends General Conference summer gathering, and the FLGBTQC Midwinter Gathering have been working toward becoming fragrance-free spaces. This is a tricky process; creating fragrance- and chemical-free spaces depend on the individual daily decisions of hundreds or thousands of people. Every time someone washes their hands, gels their hair, applies deodorant, washes their clothes, cleans a mirror, shampoos the lobby rug, paints a wall, applies sunscreen, wears their favorite lipstick, lights a candle, launders the sheets in a conference center, pops the cap off a marker to make notes on newsprint or a white board, or does the lunch-time washing-up, they are faced with a choice about using a product that contains fragrance.
(In this post, I'm going to say "fragrance." But I hope we call all remember that this is a short-hand for actual fragrance and other problematic chemicals that can also trigger headaches, asthma, skin rashes and hives, neurological problems, and other symptoms in the approximately 20% of the population--according to one study I read whose citation I will try to find and insert later--who are sensitive to them. I'm also going to say "fragrance" because that is what these two Quaker conferences have been emphasizing in their ongoing work on these issues.)
This got really long, so I have included headings. It has four parts: The Challenges, which provides some background information; The Strategy, which talks about some of what these organizations have done to create fragrance-free gatherings; The Point: Some New Questions, which you may want to scroll down to if you are familiar with FGC and FLGBTQC conferences; and The Epilogue.
THE CHALLENGES
You can imagine the many challenges involved in trying to create what the FGC Gathering is trying to become: a traveling conference of 1500 or so people, all of whom will make the fragrance-free choice each time.
The first challenge is that many people don't know that they are making a choice about fragrance. It is so ubiquitous in the products we use that it comes to seem a natural part of our environment; the proverbial water the fish are swimming in. Why would people who don't have sensitivities think about this on their own? You'd be astonished if they did. So it's necessary to, first, let people know that there's a problem.
This leads directly to the second challenge: a lot of people--perhaps most people hearing about this for the first time, if my experience is any indication--don't believe there's a problem even once they're told about it. I don't, in general, blame people for this. If they've never known anyone who was affected, they probably have no idea how bad it can be. I have sometimes been tempted to tap someone on the shoulder and say, "Excuse me, I need to leave now, but I wanted to let you know before I go that your decision to wear perfume to this event not only excludes me from it but means that I will probably be sick until next Thursday." But hardly anyone has ever received that shoulder tap, from me or anyone else. So they've never enountered a sufferer in the wild.
Even if they believe there's a problem, and that for some people it can be quite bad, they're inclined to assume that these folks are very rare. The first time I brought up the issue of fragrance at the summer gathering, many years ago, the person I spoke to assumed that I was the only one affected, and that the problem of one person was not sufficient to merit asking 1500 people to change their behavior. In other words, the problem might be real, but it's the job of the sufferers to manage it.
One friend told me that she met a woman at the gathering two years ago who was ranting about the FF policy. She thought it was just another pointless PC thing. My friend told her about me, about how hard gatherings had always been for me, and how much my experience had improved since the FF policy had started to get some traction. The woman was surprised and moved. She'd had no idea this actually mattered to anybody.
I also suspect that many of us progressive types suffer from issue fatigue. We've gotten on board with "Column A: The Essential Social Issues." However imperfectly, we've embraced racial justice; gender equality; the gay and lesbian rights movement; physical accessibility for people who use wheelchairs, scooters, canes, and walkers. In addition, each of us has probably also chosen to prioritize some or all of the "optional" social issues in Column B as well: factory farming, a struggling educational system, the dismantling of voter rights, conditions for workers in overseas factories, animal rights, over-reliance on petroleum fuels, global warming, the environment, the existence of bisexuals, the bottled water industry, invasive species, and whatever else I can't think of off the top of my head.
It can be very frustrating when you try to introduce the fragrance issue to the very people you think will be most open to it, and instead they resist. But I do think that resistance often comes from folks feeling like they have enough on their plate and they don't have the energy to take on one more thing.
I also wonder if some of the resistance might come from a desire not to seem even more like whacked-out troublemakers than we already do. I can imagine--and this is entirely my imagination, not anything I have any knowledge of--but I can imagine the person whose job it is to talk to universities or retreat centers about our needs ranting, "I already have to tell their cafeteria staff that they have to learn to cook vegan food, turn off the ice cream machines at Wednesday's lunch, and get us re-usable cups instead of the paper ones they usually have at the beverage station. And I need to tell the facilities people that we need some of the bathrooms re-designated from Male and Female to Gender-Neutral. Now I'm supposed to tell them, what? That we want them to switch out all the bathroom soap for fragrance-free, and that they can't use their usual cleaning products in the bedrooms? Well, I sure look forward to that conversation!"
Even once people decide they'd like to make some personal changes to help with this problem, there are challenges. They might not know where to find FF products for instance--though this has gotten much easier in recent years. I used to be able to use only Clinique makeup, for instance--$15 for a lipstick!--but a few years ago, when I needed to buy makeup for the first time in years for a choir concert, I was able to get cheap FF lipstick, blush, foundation, eyeshadow, and mascara at my corner Rite Aid.
But people who haven't looked before may not know that somewhere in that wall of shaving cream is one brand whose "extra sensitive" product is fragrance-free, or that Common Brand Of Lotion makes a FF moisturizer you just have to read the fine print to find. It can be disorienting and overwhelming.
People might also be concerned that FF products won't work as well as what they're used to. And that might indeed happen. Sometimes that's a trade-off people should just resign themselves to making (are your perfect hair and blinding-white gym socks really that important?), and sometimes it's a trade-off they can't make. I had some things to say about this previously in a post called The Hierarchy of Harm.
THE STRATEGY
The approach that the FGC Gathering took, beginning a few years ago, and which FLGBTQC has also adopted, is to make the transition easier for people. As well as providing information and a list of fragrance-free products on their website, the FGC Gathering has provided bars of FF soap participants can pick up at registration, and a table of product samples. Somebody on the staff walks around campus, goes into the public bathrooms in every building we're going to use, puts a "please don't use this" sign on the soap dispenser, and leaves a supply of FF liquid soap on the counter.
At the most recent FLGBQTC Midwinter, we arrived to find that the Gathering Committee had not only provided FF products in the public bathrooms, but had stocked each private bathroom with a dispenser of FF soap.
I don't know the rationale that was used when the decision to do this things was made. I've always assumed it was to provide education and support. Perhaps also to make switching to fragrance-free easy enough that people would have no excuse not to do it.
So, that's where we're at. The fragrance-free policies have been, in my experience, very successful at both these conferences. It took a few years, especially at FGC Gathering, for the reality to catch up with our intentions, but the last couple of years have been a transformed experience for me. I think it was only four years ago that I sprinted out of the shower half-rinsed, and down the hall to my room half-naked, because, even though I was on a "fragrance free" floor in the dorm, someone had come in and cracked open the World's Most Toxic Body Wash in the stall next to me. But year before last, I only had a single exposure all week, and that one in a public place where I was able to move away. And last year, much the same. Instead of resigning myself to partial participation, to enjoying myself despite the headache and dizziness, to several days of recovery once I get home, I've simply enjoyed myself.
For this, I thank everyone who worked on this policy, who put out the new soap in the public bathrooms, who was willing to try a new deodorant, who bought FF dryer sheets, who was willing to be educated to be compassionate, to be moved instead of entrenched in their ideas, to put themselves to some small trouble and inconvenience for me and my ilk.
THE POINT: SOME NEW QUESTIONS
Which brings us to the point of this blog post: For how long is it productive to provide this level of support to attenders? When, and how, can responsibility be shifted from the organizers to the community--to the individuals who make up the community?
This came up during a conversation I had with some friends at the FLGBTQC Midwinter Gathering in February. Apparently the organizing committee had discussed this, with regard to providing every attender FF soap in their bathrooms.
It was clear to everyone that providing FF soap in the public bathrooms was the responsibllity of the organizing committee. But it wasn't so clear that providing soap for the private bathrooms was. And it's not clear to me that it is either, or that FGC should continue providing bars of soap at check-in.
Providing toiletries for people's personal use strikes me as problematic for several reasons.
First, it is an extra expense, and extra work, for organizers who have a very long to-do list and a very limited budget. Maybe this is a relatively small concern; after all, these committees take on all kinds of additional tasks when the community decides it matteres enough. If being fragrance-free is important to the community, perhaps the organizers are simply acting to reflect that value.
But--second--I think this extra work reflects the organizers' commitment, but may paper over a lack of clarity in the community. We might end up with a majority of attenders using FF soap in the shower, while only a minority are actually committed to creating a FF conference. Is this a problem, if the goal is, by and large, met? I think it is, for a few reasons.
One is that it can create a false sense that a problem has been solved, and close down conversation and educationi prematurely. Maybe. This is me being hypothetical. Do Quakers ever stop talking about anything? OK, this argument strikes me as a bit weak.
But what message does it send on an individual level? For some people, the FF soap at registration may serve as a reminder that their other products should be FF as well. For others, it may suggest that there's nothing more they need to do. If soap is important enough that the conference provides it for everyone, then is shampoo less important? Deodorant? Lotion? Hair gel?
Is providing soap an effective way to reduce environmenal fragrance at conferences? Honestly, I doubt it. If you asked me, I'd say that soap, which people use in the shower and which doesn't necessarily have a strong residual odor once they're dried and dressed, wouldn't be my first priority. Lotion, which is often strongly perfumed and which people feel comfortable putting on in public, repeatedly, throughout the day, is a much bigger problem for me. Likewise sunscreen and lip balm. If I were asked "What grooming products would make the most difference to you if everyone were to switch to the fragrance-free version?" I'm not sure the soap people use in the shower, or to wash their hands in their own bathroom, would make the top 10.
At the Conference Run By Me In The World Which I Am Also Completely In Charge Of, I probably wouldn't provide folks with soap. But I would search their belongings--especially purses and day packs--for little bottles of stinky lotion, and do a tube-for-tube swap. People whose lotion was already fragrance-free would be eligible for door prizes.
(Public restroom liquid handsoap is also a major offender. Once Raider forgot and washed his hands with the soap in a rest area bathroom when we were on a trip, and I almost left him by the road somewhere in Iowa. When I talk about "soap," I'm not talking about the public restroom soap, which I hope and expect organizers will continue to provide an alternative for. This is a big deal.)
Finally, by providing soap for a number of years in a row, we create an expectation in people that soap will be provided. They start to feel entitled to their free soap. This is a problem, in my view, because it means they aren't pushed to take responsibilty for their own choices. They aren't being asked to actively commit to the fragrance-free policy. They aren't being expected to remember from year to year not only that they'll want to bring a fan for their dorm room, but that they'll need to come ready to bathe and groom themselves with products that aren't harmful to their beloved Friends.
By "they" I mean "we"--in a Quaker context, there is such a fine line between organizer and attender that they are often the same person in different years, or even the same person in the same year. There's no great divide, and I don't mean to imply or create an us-vs-them dichotomy here. I can attest to this sense of entitlement because even I, a person who uses only fragrance-free products for personal grooming and has for years, feel entitled to my bar of FGC soap. I use liquid soap at home, and some years I forget to buy bar soap for the trip. That's OK, I think; I'll take Raider's bar soap. But his bar soap is round and doesn't fit in the rectangular travel soap box. Faced with the impossibility of fitting a round soap into a square box, I shrug and say, "Oh, well. I'll just pick up a bar of soap at registration."
At what point do we expect people to have internalized this community expectation around accessibility, to take full responsibility for doing their part? I want each person to understand that this is their job. And they may not understand that as long as someone else keeps doing it.
THE EPILOGUE
I wrote this for my friend Racy (not her real name. Part of an anagram of her real name. A good part). When we had a short conversation about this issue and she asked if I would write about it, I wasn't sure I had strong feelings either way. Yet I seem to have written myself into some strong feelings. I'm not entirely sure I agree with myself. It's possible that if someone else had promised to wear a black t-shirt if I would write a piece about how important it is for FGC and FLGBTQC to keep providing soap to people, I'd be working myself into a froth about that.
(Ha! Soap...froth. I didn't even do that on purpose. But it makes me sad I never worked "soapbox" in somewhere.)
I don't have time to proof. The children are hungry, I have no idea what I'm going to feed them, the kitchen is a mess, and the laundry needs folding so that we can pack for a short trip we're leaving on in the morning. Very early in the morning. You do me a kindness if you drop me a note about any typos you spot.
(In this post, I'm going to say "fragrance." But I hope we call all remember that this is a short-hand for actual fragrance and other problematic chemicals that can also trigger headaches, asthma, skin rashes and hives, neurological problems, and other symptoms in the approximately 20% of the population--according to one study I read whose citation I will try to find and insert later--who are sensitive to them. I'm also going to say "fragrance" because that is what these two Quaker conferences have been emphasizing in their ongoing work on these issues.)
This got really long, so I have included headings. It has four parts: The Challenges, which provides some background information; The Strategy, which talks about some of what these organizations have done to create fragrance-free gatherings; The Point: Some New Questions, which you may want to scroll down to if you are familiar with FGC and FLGBTQC conferences; and The Epilogue.
THE CHALLENGES
You can imagine the many challenges involved in trying to create what the FGC Gathering is trying to become: a traveling conference of 1500 or so people, all of whom will make the fragrance-free choice each time.
The first challenge is that many people don't know that they are making a choice about fragrance. It is so ubiquitous in the products we use that it comes to seem a natural part of our environment; the proverbial water the fish are swimming in. Why would people who don't have sensitivities think about this on their own? You'd be astonished if they did. So it's necessary to, first, let people know that there's a problem.
This leads directly to the second challenge: a lot of people--perhaps most people hearing about this for the first time, if my experience is any indication--don't believe there's a problem even once they're told about it. I don't, in general, blame people for this. If they've never known anyone who was affected, they probably have no idea how bad it can be. I have sometimes been tempted to tap someone on the shoulder and say, "Excuse me, I need to leave now, but I wanted to let you know before I go that your decision to wear perfume to this event not only excludes me from it but means that I will probably be sick until next Thursday." But hardly anyone has ever received that shoulder tap, from me or anyone else. So they've never enountered a sufferer in the wild.
Even if they believe there's a problem, and that for some people it can be quite bad, they're inclined to assume that these folks are very rare. The first time I brought up the issue of fragrance at the summer gathering, many years ago, the person I spoke to assumed that I was the only one affected, and that the problem of one person was not sufficient to merit asking 1500 people to change their behavior. In other words, the problem might be real, but it's the job of the sufferers to manage it.
One friend told me that she met a woman at the gathering two years ago who was ranting about the FF policy. She thought it was just another pointless PC thing. My friend told her about me, about how hard gatherings had always been for me, and how much my experience had improved since the FF policy had started to get some traction. The woman was surprised and moved. She'd had no idea this actually mattered to anybody.
I also suspect that many of us progressive types suffer from issue fatigue. We've gotten on board with "Column A: The Essential Social Issues." However imperfectly, we've embraced racial justice; gender equality; the gay and lesbian rights movement; physical accessibility for people who use wheelchairs, scooters, canes, and walkers. In addition, each of us has probably also chosen to prioritize some or all of the "optional" social issues in Column B as well: factory farming, a struggling educational system, the dismantling of voter rights, conditions for workers in overseas factories, animal rights, over-reliance on petroleum fuels, global warming, the environment, the existence of bisexuals, the bottled water industry, invasive species, and whatever else I can't think of off the top of my head.
It can be very frustrating when you try to introduce the fragrance issue to the very people you think will be most open to it, and instead they resist. But I do think that resistance often comes from folks feeling like they have enough on their plate and they don't have the energy to take on one more thing.
I also wonder if some of the resistance might come from a desire not to seem even more like whacked-out troublemakers than we already do. I can imagine--and this is entirely my imagination, not anything I have any knowledge of--but I can imagine the person whose job it is to talk to universities or retreat centers about our needs ranting, "I already have to tell their cafeteria staff that they have to learn to cook vegan food, turn off the ice cream machines at Wednesday's lunch, and get us re-usable cups instead of the paper ones they usually have at the beverage station. And I need to tell the facilities people that we need some of the bathrooms re-designated from Male and Female to Gender-Neutral. Now I'm supposed to tell them, what? That we want them to switch out all the bathroom soap for fragrance-free, and that they can't use their usual cleaning products in the bedrooms? Well, I sure look forward to that conversation!"
Even once people decide they'd like to make some personal changes to help with this problem, there are challenges. They might not know where to find FF products for instance--though this has gotten much easier in recent years. I used to be able to use only Clinique makeup, for instance--$15 for a lipstick!--but a few years ago, when I needed to buy makeup for the first time in years for a choir concert, I was able to get cheap FF lipstick, blush, foundation, eyeshadow, and mascara at my corner Rite Aid.
But people who haven't looked before may not know that somewhere in that wall of shaving cream is one brand whose "extra sensitive" product is fragrance-free, or that Common Brand Of Lotion makes a FF moisturizer you just have to read the fine print to find. It can be disorienting and overwhelming.
People might also be concerned that FF products won't work as well as what they're used to. And that might indeed happen. Sometimes that's a trade-off people should just resign themselves to making (are your perfect hair and blinding-white gym socks really that important?), and sometimes it's a trade-off they can't make. I had some things to say about this previously in a post called The Hierarchy of Harm.
THE STRATEGY
The approach that the FGC Gathering took, beginning a few years ago, and which FLGBTQC has also adopted, is to make the transition easier for people. As well as providing information and a list of fragrance-free products on their website, the FGC Gathering has provided bars of FF soap participants can pick up at registration, and a table of product samples. Somebody on the staff walks around campus, goes into the public bathrooms in every building we're going to use, puts a "please don't use this" sign on the soap dispenser, and leaves a supply of FF liquid soap on the counter.
At the most recent FLGBQTC Midwinter, we arrived to find that the Gathering Committee had not only provided FF products in the public bathrooms, but had stocked each private bathroom with a dispenser of FF soap.
I don't know the rationale that was used when the decision to do this things was made. I've always assumed it was to provide education and support. Perhaps also to make switching to fragrance-free easy enough that people would have no excuse not to do it.
So, that's where we're at. The fragrance-free policies have been, in my experience, very successful at both these conferences. It took a few years, especially at FGC Gathering, for the reality to catch up with our intentions, but the last couple of years have been a transformed experience for me. I think it was only four years ago that I sprinted out of the shower half-rinsed, and down the hall to my room half-naked, because, even though I was on a "fragrance free" floor in the dorm, someone had come in and cracked open the World's Most Toxic Body Wash in the stall next to me. But year before last, I only had a single exposure all week, and that one in a public place where I was able to move away. And last year, much the same. Instead of resigning myself to partial participation, to enjoying myself despite the headache and dizziness, to several days of recovery once I get home, I've simply enjoyed myself.
For this, I thank everyone who worked on this policy, who put out the new soap in the public bathrooms, who was willing to try a new deodorant, who bought FF dryer sheets, who was willing to be educated to be compassionate, to be moved instead of entrenched in their ideas, to put themselves to some small trouble and inconvenience for me and my ilk.
THE POINT: SOME NEW QUESTIONS
Which brings us to the point of this blog post: For how long is it productive to provide this level of support to attenders? When, and how, can responsibility be shifted from the organizers to the community--to the individuals who make up the community?
This came up during a conversation I had with some friends at the FLGBTQC Midwinter Gathering in February. Apparently the organizing committee had discussed this, with regard to providing every attender FF soap in their bathrooms.
It was clear to everyone that providing FF soap in the public bathrooms was the responsibllity of the organizing committee. But it wasn't so clear that providing soap for the private bathrooms was. And it's not clear to me that it is either, or that FGC should continue providing bars of soap at check-in.
Providing toiletries for people's personal use strikes me as problematic for several reasons.
First, it is an extra expense, and extra work, for organizers who have a very long to-do list and a very limited budget. Maybe this is a relatively small concern; after all, these committees take on all kinds of additional tasks when the community decides it matteres enough. If being fragrance-free is important to the community, perhaps the organizers are simply acting to reflect that value.
But--second--I think this extra work reflects the organizers' commitment, but may paper over a lack of clarity in the community. We might end up with a majority of attenders using FF soap in the shower, while only a minority are actually committed to creating a FF conference. Is this a problem, if the goal is, by and large, met? I think it is, for a few reasons.
One is that it can create a false sense that a problem has been solved, and close down conversation and educationi prematurely. Maybe. This is me being hypothetical. Do Quakers ever stop talking about anything? OK, this argument strikes me as a bit weak.
But what message does it send on an individual level? For some people, the FF soap at registration may serve as a reminder that their other products should be FF as well. For others, it may suggest that there's nothing more they need to do. If soap is important enough that the conference provides it for everyone, then is shampoo less important? Deodorant? Lotion? Hair gel?
Is providing soap an effective way to reduce environmenal fragrance at conferences? Honestly, I doubt it. If you asked me, I'd say that soap, which people use in the shower and which doesn't necessarily have a strong residual odor once they're dried and dressed, wouldn't be my first priority. Lotion, which is often strongly perfumed and which people feel comfortable putting on in public, repeatedly, throughout the day, is a much bigger problem for me. Likewise sunscreen and lip balm. If I were asked "What grooming products would make the most difference to you if everyone were to switch to the fragrance-free version?" I'm not sure the soap people use in the shower, or to wash their hands in their own bathroom, would make the top 10.
At the Conference Run By Me In The World Which I Am Also Completely In Charge Of, I probably wouldn't provide folks with soap. But I would search their belongings--especially purses and day packs--for little bottles of stinky lotion, and do a tube-for-tube swap. People whose lotion was already fragrance-free would be eligible for door prizes.
(Public restroom liquid handsoap is also a major offender. Once Raider forgot and washed his hands with the soap in a rest area bathroom when we were on a trip, and I almost left him by the road somewhere in Iowa. When I talk about "soap," I'm not talking about the public restroom soap, which I hope and expect organizers will continue to provide an alternative for. This is a big deal.)
Finally, by providing soap for a number of years in a row, we create an expectation in people that soap will be provided. They start to feel entitled to their free soap. This is a problem, in my view, because it means they aren't pushed to take responsibilty for their own choices. They aren't being asked to actively commit to the fragrance-free policy. They aren't being expected to remember from year to year not only that they'll want to bring a fan for their dorm room, but that they'll need to come ready to bathe and groom themselves with products that aren't harmful to their beloved Friends.
By "they" I mean "we"--in a Quaker context, there is such a fine line between organizer and attender that they are often the same person in different years, or even the same person in the same year. There's no great divide, and I don't mean to imply or create an us-vs-them dichotomy here. I can attest to this sense of entitlement because even I, a person who uses only fragrance-free products for personal grooming and has for years, feel entitled to my bar of FGC soap. I use liquid soap at home, and some years I forget to buy bar soap for the trip. That's OK, I think; I'll take Raider's bar soap. But his bar soap is round and doesn't fit in the rectangular travel soap box. Faced with the impossibility of fitting a round soap into a square box, I shrug and say, "Oh, well. I'll just pick up a bar of soap at registration."
At what point do we expect people to have internalized this community expectation around accessibility, to take full responsibility for doing their part? I want each person to understand that this is their job. And they may not understand that as long as someone else keeps doing it.
THE EPILOGUE
I wrote this for my friend Racy (not her real name. Part of an anagram of her real name. A good part). When we had a short conversation about this issue and she asked if I would write about it, I wasn't sure I had strong feelings either way. Yet I seem to have written myself into some strong feelings. I'm not entirely sure I agree with myself. It's possible that if someone else had promised to wear a black t-shirt if I would write a piece about how important it is for FGC and FLGBTQC to keep providing soap to people, I'd be working myself into a froth about that.
(Ha! Soap...froth. I didn't even do that on purpose. But it makes me sad I never worked "soapbox" in somewhere.)
I don't have time to proof. The children are hungry, I have no idea what I'm going to feed them, the kitchen is a mess, and the laundry needs folding so that we can pack for a short trip we're leaving on in the morning. Very early in the morning. You do me a kindness if you drop me a note about any typos you spot.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Some Conversations with My Kids
Warning: Self-Satisfied Mommy Blogging.
1.
The kids and I are walking from the ballfield to our car along a narrow edge of grass beside the parking lot. The Lego Savant's hand bumps mine every time it swings back as I walk.
Me: Are you doing that on purpose?
Lego Savant: Doing what? [He grins mischievously.]
Me: We should have named you Alec. For Smart Alec.
Word Boy: What should you have named me?
Me: Um...
Lego Savant: Brain Boy. Um... The Knower, because you know so much.
Me: The Thinker.
The Tiny Tornado: I am The Thinker, too. Because I am always thinking of things. I always have ideas.
Word Boy: I don't really know so much, it's more like I am always asking questions.
Lego Savant: The Questioner. Curiosity Man!
2.
Word Boy reads in his bunk bed until I get the Tiny Tornado settled, and then I go in to tuck him in. He says, "I like my bunk bed. I like my room." He looks around the room, and then says, "Hey, are the blades on the ceiling fan tilted on purpose, or did something happen to them?"
Me: It's on purpose so they push the air better.
Him: Are all fans like that?
Me: Yeah, pretty much. And propellers.
Him: Huh, I didn't know that. I guess I thought they would just be straight. How did they make them that way? Do they twist?
I inspect the fan: No, the blades themselves are straight, but the things that hold them on are made so that they hold them at an angle.
Him: Ah.
He collects his five special stuffed friends and gathers them into his arms while I climb onto a stool and turn the tangled ball of covers back into a sheet and a blanket. He lies down, all five friends in his arms. I cover him up. He rolls on his side, tugs the blanket up under his chin, and closes his eyes. He gets the same supremely contented look that he has gotten every day of his life when he feels cozy and safe. And then he is asleep.
3.
We are at the park, me and my three kids and a 4-year-old friend ("The Boy With the Beautiful Smile," maybe. Accurate, but too long. I'll have to keep thinking). The Lego Savant is pushing the other three on the tire swing. He gets them really going, then sits beside me on the bench to watch them spin. They are hanging their heads backwards and laughing and laughing.
The Lego Savant: I love making little kids happy.
4. One night, at a Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia, the Lego Savant keeps finding water chestnuts on his plate even though they aren't part of his dish. The Tiny Tornado is sneaking them on there, it turns out, because he knows how much the Lego Savant likes them.
5. That's it. Mostly I just wanted to try out this new blogging software for the iPad.
6. Smug, self-satisfied mommy blogging? Don't say you weren't warned.
1.
The kids and I are walking from the ballfield to our car along a narrow edge of grass beside the parking lot. The Lego Savant's hand bumps mine every time it swings back as I walk.
Me: Are you doing that on purpose?
Lego Savant: Doing what? [He grins mischievously.]
Me: We should have named you Alec. For Smart Alec.
Word Boy: What should you have named me?
Me: Um...
Lego Savant: Brain Boy. Um... The Knower, because you know so much.
Me: The Thinker.
The Tiny Tornado: I am The Thinker, too. Because I am always thinking of things. I always have ideas.
Word Boy: I don't really know so much, it's more like I am always asking questions.
Lego Savant: The Questioner. Curiosity Man!
2.
Word Boy reads in his bunk bed until I get the Tiny Tornado settled, and then I go in to tuck him in. He says, "I like my bunk bed. I like my room." He looks around the room, and then says, "Hey, are the blades on the ceiling fan tilted on purpose, or did something happen to them?"
Me: It's on purpose so they push the air better.
Him: Are all fans like that?
Me: Yeah, pretty much. And propellers.
Him: Huh, I didn't know that. I guess I thought they would just be straight. How did they make them that way? Do they twist?
I inspect the fan: No, the blades themselves are straight, but the things that hold them on are made so that they hold them at an angle.
Him: Ah.
He collects his five special stuffed friends and gathers them into his arms while I climb onto a stool and turn the tangled ball of covers back into a sheet and a blanket. He lies down, all five friends in his arms. I cover him up. He rolls on his side, tugs the blanket up under his chin, and closes his eyes. He gets the same supremely contented look that he has gotten every day of his life when he feels cozy and safe. And then he is asleep.
We are at the park, me and my three kids and a 4-year-old friend ("The Boy With the Beautiful Smile," maybe. Accurate, but too long. I'll have to keep thinking). The Lego Savant is pushing the other three on the tire swing. He gets them really going, then sits beside me on the bench to watch them spin. They are hanging their heads backwards and laughing and laughing.
The Lego Savant: I love making little kids happy.
5. That's it. Mostly I just wanted to try out this new blogging software for the iPad.
6. Smug, self-satisfied mommy blogging? Don't say you weren't warned.
Real-World Fitness Milestones
I suspect that some people are tired of hearing about this, but you probably remember that I was very sick with debilitating fatigue for about two years. Even when I began to recover, I felt that I had lost so much of my baseline fitness and wellness that I would never be the same again--I thought I was permanently diminished.
About a year ago, doing a lot of walking at the FGC Summer Gathering, I realized that I had improved enough that I had a baseline of fitness to work with--that I could walk enough to do it regularly, with the goal of being able to do it more, go farther, go faster.
So I joined the Y and I started working out, lifting weights and walking on the treadmill.
I loved my workouts, and I could see, in the gym, how I was improving. My weights crept up little by little, the time I spent on the treadmill increased, my walking pace got faster, I adjusted the incline so that the imaginary hills I was climbing got just a little bit steeper.
But what I really loved was the moments in real life when I realized how much stronger and more fit I was:
The day I caught myself trotting up a flight of stairs, instead of sighing at the bottom, holding onto the handrail, and going up a slow and determined one step at a time.
The day I took some kids to the Renaissance Festival and we criss-crossed the grounds over and over in a very inefficient pattern, and I didn't even think about it, and at the end of the day realized I had never had to sit down to rest.
The day I got all the way up to the third floor at Tiny Tornado's preschool and realized I'd forgotten the snack for the class in my car. I ran down to the parking lot, got the snack, zipped back up to the third floor, and was on my way back to the car again before I realized that I had done that without thinking, when only a few months earlier it would have seemed insurmountable.
The day Raider and I were moving a dresser, and as we picked it up, he said, "Should we take the drawers out first?" I said, "No, it's not very heavy," and he laughed and said, "It's not very heavy for you."
And right now: I have done heavy yard work on four of the last five days. Yesterday I was out there for five hours, moving mulch, climbing up and down the ladder, running the power washer.
I was a little stiff last night.
A little stiff.
That's all.
This morning I feel fine. I expect that I'll head out there today to try to get the last of the mulch where it's supposed to go, and then I plan to power-wash the driveway. (Because I love that power-washer. After I finish the driveway, I'll be standing out there, looking around, thinking, "What else can I blast with a powerful spray of pressurized water?")
Soon enough I'll get used to this and stop having to talk about it all the time. But I may still talk about it more than often than is quite proper, because our cultural narrative says you're not supposed to be able to be fat, fit, healthy, and strong at the same time, and I am. So even when this stops being a ressurection story, a new-lease-on-life story, I think it is still worth telling.
My hero and role model, Ragen Chastain, would say that no one is obligated to meet anyone else's notions of health, or beauty. But, with her, I think it is important to remind people, as often as possible, that it is possible to be fat, fit, and healthy all at the same time; that, as she says, the only thing a person's size tells you is how big they are, not what they eat, how much they eat, whether they have diabetes (or will get diabetes), and not how far they walk in a day.
The summer gathering is coming up again, the first week of July. Perhaps that anniversary would be a good time to retire the "I felt so bad, but now I feel so good" story. It's old news now.
But I will still have a story to tell.
About a year ago, doing a lot of walking at the FGC Summer Gathering, I realized that I had improved enough that I had a baseline of fitness to work with--that I could walk enough to do it regularly, with the goal of being able to do it more, go farther, go faster.
So I joined the Y and I started working out, lifting weights and walking on the treadmill.
I loved my workouts, and I could see, in the gym, how I was improving. My weights crept up little by little, the time I spent on the treadmill increased, my walking pace got faster, I adjusted the incline so that the imaginary hills I was climbing got just a little bit steeper.
But what I really loved was the moments in real life when I realized how much stronger and more fit I was:
The day I caught myself trotting up a flight of stairs, instead of sighing at the bottom, holding onto the handrail, and going up a slow and determined one step at a time.
The day I took some kids to the Renaissance Festival and we criss-crossed the grounds over and over in a very inefficient pattern, and I didn't even think about it, and at the end of the day realized I had never had to sit down to rest.
The day I got all the way up to the third floor at Tiny Tornado's preschool and realized I'd forgotten the snack for the class in my car. I ran down to the parking lot, got the snack, zipped back up to the third floor, and was on my way back to the car again before I realized that I had done that without thinking, when only a few months earlier it would have seemed insurmountable.
The day Raider and I were moving a dresser, and as we picked it up, he said, "Should we take the drawers out first?" I said, "No, it's not very heavy," and he laughed and said, "It's not very heavy for you."
And right now: I have done heavy yard work on four of the last five days. Yesterday I was out there for five hours, moving mulch, climbing up and down the ladder, running the power washer.
I was a little stiff last night.
A little stiff.
That's all.
This morning I feel fine. I expect that I'll head out there today to try to get the last of the mulch where it's supposed to go, and then I plan to power-wash the driveway. (Because I love that power-washer. After I finish the driveway, I'll be standing out there, looking around, thinking, "What else can I blast with a powerful spray of pressurized water?")
Soon enough I'll get used to this and stop having to talk about it all the time. But I may still talk about it more than often than is quite proper, because our cultural narrative says you're not supposed to be able to be fat, fit, healthy, and strong at the same time, and I am. So even when this stops being a ressurection story, a new-lease-on-life story, I think it is still worth telling.
My hero and role model, Ragen Chastain, would say that no one is obligated to meet anyone else's notions of health, or beauty. But, with her, I think it is important to remind people, as often as possible, that it is possible to be fat, fit, and healthy all at the same time; that, as she says, the only thing a person's size tells you is how big they are, not what they eat, how much they eat, whether they have diabetes (or will get diabetes), and not how far they walk in a day.
The summer gathering is coming up again, the first week of July. Perhaps that anniversary would be a good time to retire the "I felt so bad, but now I feel so good" story. It's old news now.
But I will still have a story to tell.
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Power Washer, Mi Amore
Finally got going with my dad's power washer today. Some thoughts:
I love power-washing so much that I am going to start listing my hobbies and interests like this: "Education, homeschooling, amigurumi, reading, writing, biking, kayaking, power-washing, Sacred Harp."
I used to wonder why anyone would ever wash a house. I mean, by definition a house is outside, right? Where the dirt is? We don't go around washing tree trunks, do we? I mean, seriously, is the queen expecting to come eat her crumpets off my exterior walls?
Today, I learned that for a house with vinyl siding, a good power-washing is pretty much the equivalent of a fresh coat of paint. The house is glowing! I figure it's probably worth $6,000 more than it was this morning, just from being so fresh-faced.
Also, I defy any woman--anyone, really--to get a good two-handed grip on a power washer and start playing it over the siding without immediately feeling like Ellen Ripley with a flamethrower.
That little fantasy was enough to keep me happily power-washing for most of the morning.
I liked the power washer so much that when I had finished doing the garage, I moved right on to the kayaks. Here the kids helped, even the Tiny Tornado, who squeezed the trigger while I helped hold the hose. Everyone loves the power washer.
The kayaks look like new, even the crappy uncomfortable double kayak that we only keep around "in case friends want to go with us sometime," and which we haven't paddled in 7 or 8 years, and which actually had moss growing on it.
It was fun being out in this perfect sunny not-too-hot day working with my dad and the kids. At one point, my dad was finishing up the new breezeway screens, I was power-washing, and the kids were moving mulch all by themselves. They got quite a bit done, too.
My dad and I could never get it together, temperamentally, to work together when I was a kid. Not that he didn't try; he was as happy to show me how to hammer a nail and change the oil in a car as he was to show my brother. But my perfectionism and insecurity made it very hard for me when I didn't get things right away, and it took me another 30-some-odd years to really get that just because my dad sounds gruff and is frowning doesn't mean he's actually mad or thinks I'm incompetent.
So it was pretty neat to be out there today, bustling around in each other's vicinity, getting stuff done. Our yard and house are looking good, though don't you find that one project begets another? Having power-washed, I now wonder if we shouldn't try to find the time and energy to paint the garage doors and shutters this summer.
I can't wait to use the breezeway. It hasn't been useable for its intended purpose since we moved in and our big old dogs went right out through the screens when they wanted to get to the back yard. I'm getting chairs and a table, and I'm going to invite people to brunch. I'm getting a chaise longue so comfy I can take a nap in it. Or a hammock! A hammock would be good.
I love power-washing so much that I am going to start listing my hobbies and interests like this: "Education, homeschooling, amigurumi, reading, writing, biking, kayaking, power-washing, Sacred Harp."
I used to wonder why anyone would ever wash a house. I mean, by definition a house is outside, right? Where the dirt is? We don't go around washing tree trunks, do we? I mean, seriously, is the queen expecting to come eat her crumpets off my exterior walls?
Today, I learned that for a house with vinyl siding, a good power-washing is pretty much the equivalent of a fresh coat of paint. The house is glowing! I figure it's probably worth $6,000 more than it was this morning, just from being so fresh-faced.
Also, I defy any woman--anyone, really--to get a good two-handed grip on a power washer and start playing it over the siding without immediately feeling like Ellen Ripley with a flamethrower.
That little fantasy was enough to keep me happily power-washing for most of the morning.
I liked the power washer so much that when I had finished doing the garage, I moved right on to the kayaks. Here the kids helped, even the Tiny Tornado, who squeezed the trigger while I helped hold the hose. Everyone loves the power washer.
The kayaks look like new, even the crappy uncomfortable double kayak that we only keep around "in case friends want to go with us sometime," and which we haven't paddled in 7 or 8 years, and which actually had moss growing on it.
It was fun being out in this perfect sunny not-too-hot day working with my dad and the kids. At one point, my dad was finishing up the new breezeway screens, I was power-washing, and the kids were moving mulch all by themselves. They got quite a bit done, too.
My dad and I could never get it together, temperamentally, to work together when I was a kid. Not that he didn't try; he was as happy to show me how to hammer a nail and change the oil in a car as he was to show my brother. But my perfectionism and insecurity made it very hard for me when I didn't get things right away, and it took me another 30-some-odd years to really get that just because my dad sounds gruff and is frowning doesn't mean he's actually mad or thinks I'm incompetent.
So it was pretty neat to be out there today, bustling around in each other's vicinity, getting stuff done. Our yard and house are looking good, though don't you find that one project begets another? Having power-washed, I now wonder if we shouldn't try to find the time and energy to paint the garage doors and shutters this summer.
I can't wait to use the breezeway. It hasn't been useable for its intended purpose since we moved in and our big old dogs went right out through the screens when they wanted to get to the back yard. I'm getting chairs and a table, and I'm going to invite people to brunch. I'm getting a chaise longue so comfy I can take a nap in it. Or a hammock! A hammock would be good.
Monday, June 11, 2012
It's Like a Game We're Playing
The Tiny Tornado is obviously still working through the end of preschool. The other day we had this conversation:
TT, whiny: Mom, do I have to go to preschool tomorrow?
Me: No, honey. You're all done with preschool.
TT, bursting into tears: You mean I'll never see Miss Kathleen again?
At home, despite my recent humorous take on the challenges, we're actually doing pretty well. He spends big chunks of his day playing video games, riding bikes, or sword-fighting with his big brothers. He does errands with me. He has taken up an old hobby, luring the dogs into his bedroom with treats and then dressing them up in t-shirts and shorts. He roots around in the recycling bin for supplies to make houses for his stuffed animals. He sets up obstacle courses in the living room. Overall, he does a pretty good job of keeping busy and actually out of trouble.
My biggest challenge with him is one I still have with Word Boy: the endless chatter, the endless questions. I'm thinking about setting a limit on how many times per day each kid can say, "Mom...?" We'll see how that goes.
The other challenge is this whole boy thing. He stands firm in his gender identify for the moment. "I'm still a boy," were his first words to Raider when he woke up the other morning, and he asked me, "Am I still a boy if I go in there?" when I made as if to take him into the women's room with me. (I assured him that many boys go into the women's room with their moms until they are 5 or even 6.)
For the most part, I am carrying this lightly, as he seems to be. That's made easier because it doesn't quite feel real to me. It feels like a game we're playing. Maybe that's partly because, except for the pronouns, nothing has changed. The Tiny Tornado didn't need new underwear, a new haircut, new clothes, or new toys to be a boy. Just a new pronoun.
It also doesn't feel real because, really, what are the odds? Our lives are full of female-to-male transgendered people. Sure, some of them we've met because, at some point, we started hanging out in that community. But a number of people in our lives have transitioned since we met them--including three people who were still living as women when I dated them, and one close friend of Raider's. Most of these folks are still important parts of our lives.
And then we go adopt some random baby, and he turns out to be gender-nonconforming? *rolls eyes* You wouldn't believe it if I put it in my novel.
The other day, Raider and I got to go out to lunch together while all three kids were at a movie with a friend. We talked about this, of course. I said, "I can't help wondering if in some subtle way we made this happen."
Raider laughed. "You've met the Tiny Tornado, of course?"
I'm not a big fan of "things were meant to be." I love being the Tiny Tornado's mom and can't imagine life without him--but I assume I'd feel the same way about the baby girl whose mom decided to parent her a few months before we brought TT home, or whatever baby we might have adopted had the Tiny Tornado's placement with us fallen through.
But I have often thought that the TT is lucky to have us. He's a challenging kid (though, really, what kids aren't? Maybe your kids. Not mine. Not most of the kids I know, even the "easiest" ones). And we've done a good job of rolling with those challenges. We've always been good at appreciating our kids' qualities even when those very qualities were what made the days hard sometimes--and that's certainly true of the Tiny Tornado, whose drive and self-assurance and competence are a wonder to behold, even as you're excusing yourself to scream into a pillow, "Why the hell can't he ever just do what I ask him to do one time, just one time, without arguing! Argh!"
"Isn't he a wonder?" we say to each other. "Now can you watch him for awhile so I can take a xanax and a nap?"
People often say to me, "I admire the Tiny Tornado so much. But I'm glad you're his mom and not me." I always find "better you than me" statements a little judgmental, but at the same time, I am also glad I'm his mom and not someone else. Because I'm doing a good job with him. And I can imagine that many people might not.
My point was going to be, though, that on top of all that, he's genderqueer. In all the randomness of adoption--the agency we chose; K's decision to place her baby for adoption; her decision to let the agency choose the baby's placement just when we were the family who'd been waiting the longest, rather than choosing herself from all the waiting families--in all of that, this little female-bodied boy ended up with us.
Without false modesty, I am going to suggest that we are probably one of the ten American families who are best prepared to deal with a gender-nonconforming child. And here he is, right now, putting sunglasses on the dogs.
What are the odds?
Like I said, I don't cotton to "it was meant to be." I don't know a thing about what is "meant" and what is just the serendipitous one-in-ten-million chance.
To be honest, I'm not entirely happy about it. About the boy thing, I mean. I've pretty well gotten over my disappointment at not being able to buy funky, colorful girl clothes, and my disappointment at not being able to use all that work and study I put into learning to care for and braid nappy hair. But the boy thing, I'm still working on that.
I used to roll my eyes when I heard gay men and lesbians say, "I wouldn't want my kids to be gay." Because being gay was the best! I loved being a lesbian! I loved lesbians! I loved being part of that community. I loved gay men, the quiet steady ones and the flamboyant ones who showed up at Pride dressed like Vegas showgirls. I could hardly imagine a better outcome for my hypothetical children than being gay.
My thesis advisor at Goddard, Nora Mitchell, whote a poem called "Faggots" that always spoke to me. Here it is:
FAGGOTS
My lover says sometimes
that I look like a faggot, meaning
like a man
who looks like a woman.
On the dark streets a woman veers away from me
and walks faster. Hands jammed
in my pockets and fast-moving,
I am also trying to stay safe
in my city at night. Like a child
I want to protest, I'm a girl --
over and over -- to this woman,
to my father's two friends in the hardware store.
They said they'd have to see me throw
before they'd believe me, but I knew
that I threw just like a boy.
Coming up behind me, my lover teases,
you swish, as if I had to
pretend to walk like a woman,
or it were something I could mimic, like a man.
Like her I love the way faggots move;
I love the humor in their eyes,
their wrists, their chins,
as if their bodies kept faith
with the fire of laughter and repeated
some old joke the world could never get.
Queens are men
who leave their names behind
with all their reasons as delicate
as the works in the heart
of a watch. Robert
becomes Robin, or someone more
extravagent, more vulnerable still.
I love transmen and female-to-male transgender people. I think it's clear I have a way of finding them, sometimes even before they've found themselves.
But when I let myself think ahead, when I forget that we're not worrying about what happens in five or ten years or wondering if our insurance will cover hormone blockers, or whether there's a decent developmental endocrinologist in Michigan with at least some experience with gender-nonconforming children--well, I hope he's not a boy.
Because if he is, well, that comes with a whole lot of challenges. Everyone I know who has transitioned is happy with that choice. But there is often a residue of questions, of regret: from going through puberty as the wrong sex, from never having a perfectly ordinary male body. At TransHealth, I went to a workshop in which a doctor and a psychologist talked about current best practices for trans kids, which usually includes a gender-appropriate puberty. One of them referred to the damage done by past bad practices. After the workshop, a friend cried on my shoulder for a bit. He didn't say why. But I think it was regret for what might have been possible for him had he been a child today.
Gender-appropriate puberty carries a cost, though: almost always, the loss of fertility; not being allowed to participate in either girls' or boys' sports; wondering if your friends would still love you if they knew.
Then, too, harboring, under your clothes, body parts that don't match people's perceptions of your gender is dangerous. Trans people are at high risk of violence. Already, even before the Tiny Tornado chose male pronouns, I worried about what might happen if someone assumed "she" was a boy and then learned differently. Not that I expected physical violence, but expressions of discomfort, of disgust, of judgment? That, I worried about.
I want the Tiny Tornado to be who he is. Of course I do. With all my heart. And if he grows up to join that large and loving community of trans people I love so much, well, I know he will be welcomed and loved there, as indeed he already is and always has been.
I think I just want, like all parents, for my kids' lives to be easy. The Tiny Tornado is perfectly happy, deeply engaged with everything and everyone he loves, in love with his own luscious self, full of piss and vinegar. He has no idea he's on a hard road.
But I do.
TT, whiny: Mom, do I have to go to preschool tomorrow?
Me: No, honey. You're all done with preschool.
TT, bursting into tears: You mean I'll never see Miss Kathleen again?
At home, despite my recent humorous take on the challenges, we're actually doing pretty well. He spends big chunks of his day playing video games, riding bikes, or sword-fighting with his big brothers. He does errands with me. He has taken up an old hobby, luring the dogs into his bedroom with treats and then dressing them up in t-shirts and shorts. He roots around in the recycling bin for supplies to make houses for his stuffed animals. He sets up obstacle courses in the living room. Overall, he does a pretty good job of keeping busy and actually out of trouble.
My biggest challenge with him is one I still have with Word Boy: the endless chatter, the endless questions. I'm thinking about setting a limit on how many times per day each kid can say, "Mom...?" We'll see how that goes.
The other challenge is this whole boy thing. He stands firm in his gender identify for the moment. "I'm still a boy," were his first words to Raider when he woke up the other morning, and he asked me, "Am I still a boy if I go in there?" when I made as if to take him into the women's room with me. (I assured him that many boys go into the women's room with their moms until they are 5 or even 6.)
For the most part, I am carrying this lightly, as he seems to be. That's made easier because it doesn't quite feel real to me. It feels like a game we're playing. Maybe that's partly because, except for the pronouns, nothing has changed. The Tiny Tornado didn't need new underwear, a new haircut, new clothes, or new toys to be a boy. Just a new pronoun.
It also doesn't feel real because, really, what are the odds? Our lives are full of female-to-male transgendered people. Sure, some of them we've met because, at some point, we started hanging out in that community. But a number of people in our lives have transitioned since we met them--including three people who were still living as women when I dated them, and one close friend of Raider's. Most of these folks are still important parts of our lives.
And then we go adopt some random baby, and he turns out to be gender-nonconforming? *rolls eyes* You wouldn't believe it if I put it in my novel.
The other day, Raider and I got to go out to lunch together while all three kids were at a movie with a friend. We talked about this, of course. I said, "I can't help wondering if in some subtle way we made this happen."
Raider laughed. "You've met the Tiny Tornado, of course?"
I'm not a big fan of "things were meant to be." I love being the Tiny Tornado's mom and can't imagine life without him--but I assume I'd feel the same way about the baby girl whose mom decided to parent her a few months before we brought TT home, or whatever baby we might have adopted had the Tiny Tornado's placement with us fallen through.
But I have often thought that the TT is lucky to have us. He's a challenging kid (though, really, what kids aren't? Maybe your kids. Not mine. Not most of the kids I know, even the "easiest" ones). And we've done a good job of rolling with those challenges. We've always been good at appreciating our kids' qualities even when those very qualities were what made the days hard sometimes--and that's certainly true of the Tiny Tornado, whose drive and self-assurance and competence are a wonder to behold, even as you're excusing yourself to scream into a pillow, "Why the hell can't he ever just do what I ask him to do one time, just one time, without arguing! Argh!"
"Isn't he a wonder?" we say to each other. "Now can you watch him for awhile so I can take a xanax and a nap?"
People often say to me, "I admire the Tiny Tornado so much. But I'm glad you're his mom and not me." I always find "better you than me" statements a little judgmental, but at the same time, I am also glad I'm his mom and not someone else. Because I'm doing a good job with him. And I can imagine that many people might not.
My point was going to be, though, that on top of all that, he's genderqueer. In all the randomness of adoption--the agency we chose; K's decision to place her baby for adoption; her decision to let the agency choose the baby's placement just when we were the family who'd been waiting the longest, rather than choosing herself from all the waiting families--in all of that, this little female-bodied boy ended up with us.
Without false modesty, I am going to suggest that we are probably one of the ten American families who are best prepared to deal with a gender-nonconforming child. And here he is, right now, putting sunglasses on the dogs.
What are the odds?
Like I said, I don't cotton to "it was meant to be." I don't know a thing about what is "meant" and what is just the serendipitous one-in-ten-million chance.
To be honest, I'm not entirely happy about it. About the boy thing, I mean. I've pretty well gotten over my disappointment at not being able to buy funky, colorful girl clothes, and my disappointment at not being able to use all that work and study I put into learning to care for and braid nappy hair. But the boy thing, I'm still working on that.
I used to roll my eyes when I heard gay men and lesbians say, "I wouldn't want my kids to be gay." Because being gay was the best! I loved being a lesbian! I loved lesbians! I loved being part of that community. I loved gay men, the quiet steady ones and the flamboyant ones who showed up at Pride dressed like Vegas showgirls. I could hardly imagine a better outcome for my hypothetical children than being gay.
My thesis advisor at Goddard, Nora Mitchell, whote a poem called "Faggots" that always spoke to me. Here it is:
FAGGOTS
My lover says sometimes
that I look like a faggot, meaning
like a man
who looks like a woman.
On the dark streets a woman veers away from me
and walks faster. Hands jammed
in my pockets and fast-moving,
I am also trying to stay safe
in my city at night. Like a child
I want to protest, I'm a girl --
over and over -- to this woman,
to my father's two friends in the hardware store.
They said they'd have to see me throw
before they'd believe me, but I knew
that I threw just like a boy.
Coming up behind me, my lover teases,
you swish, as if I had to
pretend to walk like a woman,
or it were something I could mimic, like a man.
Like her I love the way faggots move;
I love the humor in their eyes,
their wrists, their chins,
as if their bodies kept faith
with the fire of laughter and repeated
some old joke the world could never get.
Queens are men
who leave their names behind
with all their reasons as delicate
as the works in the heart
of a watch. Robert
becomes Robin, or someone more
extravagent, more vulnerable still.
I love transmen and female-to-male transgender people. I think it's clear I have a way of finding them, sometimes even before they've found themselves.
But when I let myself think ahead, when I forget that we're not worrying about what happens in five or ten years or wondering if our insurance will cover hormone blockers, or whether there's a decent developmental endocrinologist in Michigan with at least some experience with gender-nonconforming children--well, I hope he's not a boy.
Because if he is, well, that comes with a whole lot of challenges. Everyone I know who has transitioned is happy with that choice. But there is often a residue of questions, of regret: from going through puberty as the wrong sex, from never having a perfectly ordinary male body. At TransHealth, I went to a workshop in which a doctor and a psychologist talked about current best practices for trans kids, which usually includes a gender-appropriate puberty. One of them referred to the damage done by past bad practices. After the workshop, a friend cried on my shoulder for a bit. He didn't say why. But I think it was regret for what might have been possible for him had he been a child today.
Gender-appropriate puberty carries a cost, though: almost always, the loss of fertility; not being allowed to participate in either girls' or boys' sports; wondering if your friends would still love you if they knew.
Then, too, harboring, under your clothes, body parts that don't match people's perceptions of your gender is dangerous. Trans people are at high risk of violence. Already, even before the Tiny Tornado chose male pronouns, I worried about what might happen if someone assumed "she" was a boy and then learned differently. Not that I expected physical violence, but expressions of discomfort, of disgust, of judgment? That, I worried about.
I want the Tiny Tornado to be who he is. Of course I do. With all my heart. And if he grows up to join that large and loving community of trans people I love so much, well, I know he will be welcomed and loved there, as indeed he already is and always has been.
I think I just want, like all parents, for my kids' lives to be easy. The Tiny Tornado is perfectly happy, deeply engaged with everything and everyone he loves, in love with his own luscious self, full of piss and vinegar. He has no idea he's on a hard road.
But I do.
Saturday, June 9, 2012
A Book So Bad That Once You Start Enumerating Its Flaws, It's Hard to Stop.
Earlier today at GoodReads, I posted a review of Mira Grant's novel Feed. That first link leads to my 2-star review, but here it is in its entirety so you don't have to click:
I really like the world-building in this book. The setting is 25 years after the zombie apocalypse. Zombie-ism is caused by a virus that everyone is infected with, but only activates under certain circumstances: death is one, or being bitten by a zombie, but sometimes someone can convert to the active form for no clear reason. This is a great set-up, as it leads to a culture in which people undergo blood tests to check their viral load constantly--at every perimeter, at the door of every building--because, even though great swathes of the country have been reclaimed from the dead (while others have been given up on), the threat is in the safe zone with everyone, all the time.
I also loved that the virus also infects animals, though only animals over a certain weight convert. In the course of the book, we get zombie horses and zombie deer, which are a great touch and an added source of disquiet and menace.
On the other hand, Grant doesn't think about the implications of her own set-up: though the zombie apocalypse killed a huge proportion of the world's population, the US remains a ridiculously rich nation, with technology (like recording equipment so small it can be worn as an earring) that far surpasses what we have now. Every home has to be fitted with expensive test equipment, and vehicles with armor or other enhancements; Grant never comments on what happens to people who can't afford that (though the story of the communities that are struggling to survive without the fancy airlocks and so on would be an interesting one) or indicates at all what drives this lush economy. Also, you will be glad to know that Starbucks, Apple, Coke and other favorite companies survive the end of the world as we know it.
Sadly, Grant creates this fantastic world only to populate it with tedious, one-dimensional characters whose personalities are all described, not shown. in some cases, the actions of the characters directly contradict what we are told about them. The main character, for instance, is a newsblogger, and she tells us over and over that she is all about the Truth with a Capital T, that she leaves the opinionating to her brother/colleague/creepy crypto-lover. But then every excerpt from her writing that is included in the book is pure opinion.
The presidential candidate whose campaign they are embedded with is a big hunk of 100% pure awesome, while his opponent practically rubs his hands together and cackles with evil glee. No character undergoes any change (except to become a zombie, which doesn't quite count).
The plot, which primarily follows the presidential campaign, is tedious in the extreme. And so is the writing, which describes every single blood test in detail no matter how many times we've heard it before. It also stops telling the story to drop huge chunks of exposition in willy-nilly, and re-uses the same phrases and tropes over and over and over and over (you could have a drinking game for every time the narrator refers to the sting of the testing needle, to her risk-taking brother's habit of "poking zombies with a stick," or to her own completely unsubstantiated commitment to the Truth). Another goodreads reviewer said no other book made him appreciate the work of good editors more than this one. Amen.
I've also seen reviewers compare this to fan fiction. I tell you: I have read better-written, more compelling fan fiction.
* * *
And now, a confession: I wrote that review when I was barely 400 pages into the book's 560 total. And I am still reading it. Why? Though I suspect I know how it ends, I'm just curious enough to keep skimming along just to find out if I'm right.
This gives me plenty of opportunities to observe other flaws in the book. For instance, I can elaborate on one source of the tedium, which is that Grant doesn't know how to telescope mundane activities. For instance, suppose your characters are going into a restaurant, but the actual going in doesn't matter--nothing happens, they don't run into an old friend on her way out, nobody smashes a finger in the door, nobody glances at the newspaper rack and sees an alarming headline that is integral to the plot. They just go in. You might write something like this:
"The four of us headed into the restaurant and ordered eggs and a large pot of coffee."
Your reader can fill in the walking through the door, saying "four please" to the hostess, sitting at the booth, and so on.
Mira Grant writes all that. Her characters approach the door, reach for the handle, grab the handle and pull, hold the door until the next person reaches it, look around as the door closes behind them to see that this is an ordinary little diner, are greeted by the hostess, who is thrilled to see them because [digression into how the zombie apocalypse made public gathering places so risky that most people won't go into them anymore so little diners like this hardly get any business], are directed to a booth, sit down in the booth, pick up the menus and study them, decide on poached eggs (Shaun) and over-easy eggs (George), tell the server their order, and so on...
Grant can slice time into the smallest possible pieces. Into layers so thin that you can see light through them. And all of it with a minute attention to details that do not matter at all.
You want proof, and not just my made-up parody? OK. Three characters get into a car on page 325:
Really? We need to hear the footsteps? We need it spelled out that Steve had to open the door to get in? "Steve slammed the door and took his place in the driver's seat" would have been more than sufficient, Ms. Grant. I assure you.
On pages 194-195, it takes the main character 8 paragraphs to take some pain pills out of a bottle and wash them down with some water. "When I finished swallowing," is not a phrase you ever need to use. You do not need to have your discursive time* so expanded that people have to stand around waiting for someone to finish swallowing a sip of water.
The biggest boner in the book so far is another example of a character being described one way but acting completely differently. At our house, we think of this as the Will Riker Is A Great Diplomat phenomenon, because in Star Trek: The Next Generation people are always saying that Riker is, yes, a "great diplomat," but whenever Riker is facing some aliens on the viewscreen he's always looking angry and saying, "What the hell is going on here?"
There is a character in Feed who, for 350 pages, is described as a technological whiz. She can, among other things, create security for the news team's computers that is unbreakable, while at the same time breaking through any firewalls they want a peek behind.
And then, on page 365, she has to give the main character the password to her private files and notes.
And it is a significant date in her life. Just that. Not even encoded or anagrammed or mixed up with numbers standing in for letters or anything. Just February-4-2029.
My eight-year-old has stronger passwords than that. The cryptology expert should have rattled off a password more like the one from the first season of Veronica Mars:
Veronica: I need to change the password on my email account. Someone managed to figure out the old one.
Computer guy: That's why your password should always include numbers as well as letters. Everyone thinks its fun to use the name of your dog or boyfriend, but that actually makes it easy to crack. What was your old password?
Veronica: GJ7B!X.
Epilogue, next day: I have now finished the book. My hope that all the tedious details were leading up to something was in vain. I hoped that we were hearing over and over again about people standing in airlocks waiting for the blood-test indicator to turn green because one of these times, it was going to turn red instead. Nope. It was like a play with a hundred guns on the mantelpiece in Act 1--and all of them still there when the curtain rang down three hours later.
Also, while we hear all about doors opening and closing, and Georgia squinting in the sunlight because of her sensitive eyes, and long redundant conversations about politics, the central mystery of the story is solved completely off-screen. We hear that they're working extra-hard, and then suddenly there's a packet of documents that proves everything. It's as if a detective novel were entirely about what the detective wore, where she ate lunch, and her thoughts on education policy, and then in the second-to-last chapter she suddenly says, "Oh, by the way, I've been finding clues and following leads, and the killer is Mr. Smith. Mr Smith, are you the killer?"
Mr. Smith: Yes, yes I am. I did it and I'm glad I did it and I'd do it again. [Shoots self in head.]
==============================
*Discursive time, or story time, is how long it takes for something to be shown or told; as opposed to narrative time, which is time as experienced within the story. A slow-motion shot of something falling down, for instance, has a long story time but a short narrative time, whereas a film cut or chapter break that moves characters instantly from the living room where they're drinking coffee together to the airport where they're saying good-bye has short story time but long narrative time.
I really like the world-building in this book. The setting is 25 years after the zombie apocalypse. Zombie-ism is caused by a virus that everyone is infected with, but only activates under certain circumstances: death is one, or being bitten by a zombie, but sometimes someone can convert to the active form for no clear reason. This is a great set-up, as it leads to a culture in which people undergo blood tests to check their viral load constantly--at every perimeter, at the door of every building--because, even though great swathes of the country have been reclaimed from the dead (while others have been given up on), the threat is in the safe zone with everyone, all the time.
I also loved that the virus also infects animals, though only animals over a certain weight convert. In the course of the book, we get zombie horses and zombie deer, which are a great touch and an added source of disquiet and menace.
On the other hand, Grant doesn't think about the implications of her own set-up: though the zombie apocalypse killed a huge proportion of the world's population, the US remains a ridiculously rich nation, with technology (like recording equipment so small it can be worn as an earring) that far surpasses what we have now. Every home has to be fitted with expensive test equipment, and vehicles with armor or other enhancements; Grant never comments on what happens to people who can't afford that (though the story of the communities that are struggling to survive without the fancy airlocks and so on would be an interesting one) or indicates at all what drives this lush economy. Also, you will be glad to know that Starbucks, Apple, Coke and other favorite companies survive the end of the world as we know it.
Sadly, Grant creates this fantastic world only to populate it with tedious, one-dimensional characters whose personalities are all described, not shown. in some cases, the actions of the characters directly contradict what we are told about them. The main character, for instance, is a newsblogger, and she tells us over and over that she is all about the Truth with a Capital T, that she leaves the opinionating to her brother/colleague/creepy crypto-lover. But then every excerpt from her writing that is included in the book is pure opinion.
The presidential candidate whose campaign they are embedded with is a big hunk of 100% pure awesome, while his opponent practically rubs his hands together and cackles with evil glee. No character undergoes any change (except to become a zombie, which doesn't quite count).
The plot, which primarily follows the presidential campaign, is tedious in the extreme. And so is the writing, which describes every single blood test in detail no matter how many times we've heard it before. It also stops telling the story to drop huge chunks of exposition in willy-nilly, and re-uses the same phrases and tropes over and over and over and over (you could have a drinking game for every time the narrator refers to the sting of the testing needle, to her risk-taking brother's habit of "poking zombies with a stick," or to her own completely unsubstantiated commitment to the Truth). Another goodreads reviewer said no other book made him appreciate the work of good editors more than this one. Amen.
I've also seen reviewers compare this to fan fiction. I tell you: I have read better-written, more compelling fan fiction.
* * *
And now, a confession: I wrote that review when I was barely 400 pages into the book's 560 total. And I am still reading it. Why? Though I suspect I know how it ends, I'm just curious enough to keep skimming along just to find out if I'm right.
This gives me plenty of opportunities to observe other flaws in the book. For instance, I can elaborate on one source of the tedium, which is that Grant doesn't know how to telescope mundane activities. For instance, suppose your characters are going into a restaurant, but the actual going in doesn't matter--nothing happens, they don't run into an old friend on her way out, nobody smashes a finger in the door, nobody glances at the newspaper rack and sees an alarming headline that is integral to the plot. They just go in. You might write something like this:
"The four of us headed into the restaurant and ordered eggs and a large pot of coffee."
Your reader can fill in the walking through the door, saying "four please" to the hostess, sitting at the booth, and so on.
Mira Grant writes all that. Her characters approach the door, reach for the handle, grab the handle and pull, hold the door until the next person reaches it, look around as the door closes behind them to see that this is an ordinary little diner, are greeted by the hostess, who is thrilled to see them because [digression into how the zombie apocalypse made public gathering places so risky that most people won't go into them anymore so little diners like this hardly get any business], are directed to a booth, sit down in the booth, pick up the menus and study them, decide on poached eggs (Shaun) and over-easy eggs (George), tell the server their order, and so on...
Grant can slice time into the smallest possible pieces. Into layers so thin that you can see light through them. And all of it with a minute attention to details that do not matter at all.
You want proof, and not just my made-up parody? OK. Three characters get into a car on page 325:
"One day you're going to call me that, and I'm going to punch your head clean off," said Steve, and slammed the door. Shaun laughed. The sound of Steve's footsteps moved around the car, where the driver's-side door opened and closed again.
Really? We need to hear the footsteps? We need it spelled out that Steve had to open the door to get in? "Steve slammed the door and took his place in the driver's seat" would have been more than sufficient, Ms. Grant. I assure you.
On pages 194-195, it takes the main character 8 paragraphs to take some pain pills out of a bottle and wash them down with some water. "When I finished swallowing," is not a phrase you ever need to use. You do not need to have your discursive time* so expanded that people have to stand around waiting for someone to finish swallowing a sip of water.
The biggest boner in the book so far is another example of a character being described one way but acting completely differently. At our house, we think of this as the Will Riker Is A Great Diplomat phenomenon, because in Star Trek: The Next Generation people are always saying that Riker is, yes, a "great diplomat," but whenever Riker is facing some aliens on the viewscreen he's always looking angry and saying, "What the hell is going on here?"
There is a character in Feed who, for 350 pages, is described as a technological whiz. She can, among other things, create security for the news team's computers that is unbreakable, while at the same time breaking through any firewalls they want a peek behind.
And then, on page 365, she has to give the main character the password to her private files and notes.
And it is a significant date in her life. Just that. Not even encoded or anagrammed or mixed up with numbers standing in for letters or anything. Just February-4-2029.
My eight-year-old has stronger passwords than that. The cryptology expert should have rattled off a password more like the one from the first season of Veronica Mars:
Veronica: I need to change the password on my email account. Someone managed to figure out the old one.
Computer guy: That's why your password should always include numbers as well as letters. Everyone thinks its fun to use the name of your dog or boyfriend, but that actually makes it easy to crack. What was your old password?
Veronica: GJ7B!X.
Epilogue, next day: I have now finished the book. My hope that all the tedious details were leading up to something was in vain. I hoped that we were hearing over and over again about people standing in airlocks waiting for the blood-test indicator to turn green because one of these times, it was going to turn red instead. Nope. It was like a play with a hundred guns on the mantelpiece in Act 1--and all of them still there when the curtain rang down three hours later.
Also, while we hear all about doors opening and closing, and Georgia squinting in the sunlight because of her sensitive eyes, and long redundant conversations about politics, the central mystery of the story is solved completely off-screen. We hear that they're working extra-hard, and then suddenly there's a packet of documents that proves everything. It's as if a detective novel were entirely about what the detective wore, where she ate lunch, and her thoughts on education policy, and then in the second-to-last chapter she suddenly says, "Oh, by the way, I've been finding clues and following leads, and the killer is Mr. Smith. Mr Smith, are you the killer?"
Mr. Smith: Yes, yes I am. I did it and I'm glad I did it and I'd do it again. [Shoots self in head.]
==============================
*Discursive time, or story time, is how long it takes for something to be shown or told; as opposed to narrative time, which is time as experienced within the story. A slow-motion shot of something falling down, for instance, has a long story time but a short narrative time, whereas a film cut or chapter break that moves characters instantly from the living room where they're drinking coffee together to the airport where they're saying good-bye has short story time but long narrative time.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Calling a Spade a Spade: Not as Easy as You Think
I ran to the store this morning to get a few things, and picked up a spade while I was there, because Raider and I seem to have lost ours somehow. I was amused that the spades were not labelled "spade" but "digging shovel." "Oh, how our language is impoverished," I said to myself. "Why could they not say 'spade'? Did they think people wouldn't understand it? Or couldn't look at it and see what it was for, with its sharp pointy blade? 'Digging shovel,' for all love. Next time I buy a big bowl it will probably be labelled 'mixing vessel.' Hmph."
At the checkout, I loaded my groceries on the belt, and then said to the clerk, "Also, I have a spade in the cart I need to pay for."
He said: That's not a spade.
Me: It certainly is.
Him: That's a shovel.
Me: A spade is a kind of shovel, certainly.
Him [checking label]: It says "digging shovel."
Me: Yes, a spade is a digging shovel.
Him: That's not a spade, unless you're twelve feet tall.
Me: What would you describe as a spade?
Him: You know, like a little shovel for your hand with a pointy end.
Me: Do you mean a trowel?
Him: What is a trowel?
Me: A trowel is a hand tool with a long blade, with a pointy end. It has a bend in the blade that runs the long way. The blade is shaped almost like a boat. [I demonstrate with my hands.]
Him: I've never heard of that.
Me: Oh, then what are you thinking of when you say spade?
Him: It's got a flat blade with a point...you know, like what bricklayers use to smooth their cement.
Me: That is also a trowel.
Him: But then what do you call the other thing?
Me: A garden trowel is what I would call it, if I had to make a distinction.
Him: Then what's a spade? Because that's a shovel you've got there.
Me: It is a kind of shovel that is called a spade. When I was a kid, if somebody yelled, "Susan, bring me the spade from the garage!" this is what they would expect me to bring them.
Him: I've never heard a shovel like that called a spade before.
Me: And yet it is a spade.
Him: I think you're wrong.
Me: I'm not.
At the checkout, I loaded my groceries on the belt, and then said to the clerk, "Also, I have a spade in the cart I need to pay for."
He said: That's not a spade.
Me: It certainly is.
Him: That's a shovel.
Me: A spade is a kind of shovel, certainly.
Him [checking label]: It says "digging shovel."
Me: Yes, a spade is a digging shovel.
Him: That's not a spade, unless you're twelve feet tall.
Me: What would you describe as a spade?
Him: You know, like a little shovel for your hand with a pointy end.
Me: Do you mean a trowel?
Him: What is a trowel?
Me: A trowel is a hand tool with a long blade, with a pointy end. It has a bend in the blade that runs the long way. The blade is shaped almost like a boat. [I demonstrate with my hands.]
Him: I've never heard of that.
Me: Oh, then what are you thinking of when you say spade?
Him: It's got a flat blade with a point...you know, like what bricklayers use to smooth their cement.
Me: That is also a trowel.
Him: But then what do you call the other thing?
Me: A garden trowel is what I would call it, if I had to make a distinction.
Him: Then what's a spade? Because that's a shovel you've got there.
Me: It is a kind of shovel that is called a spade. When I was a kid, if somebody yelled, "Susan, bring me the spade from the garage!" this is what they would expect me to bring them.
Him: I've never heard a shovel like that called a spade before.
Me: And yet it is a spade.
Him: I think you're wrong.
Me: I'm not.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Another Satisfied Customer
When I was in my early 20s, and my mom was in her mid-50s, she went to school at our local community college. She hadn't been in school since graduating from high school at the age of 16, but she did well and enjoyed it. She told me one time, though, that when she sat down in class she would take out a clean piece of paper for taking notes, and she would write across the top of it "KYMSUCUJ."
This meant: Keep Your Mouth Shut Until Called Upon, Joanne. It was supposed to keep her from blurting out inappropriate jokes in class.
From this single anecdote, you will readily infer that I am much like my mother. I look like her, I have her sense of humor, I have her tendency to blurt things out, her inclination to the slightly off-color, and her habit of sharing too much information. She is a collector and teller of family stories, as well. Truly, I am an apple that did not fall far from the tree in this case.
My dad, though? At first glance, we are nothing alike. He doesn't think about the past much; or, if he does, he doesn't talk about it. He doesn't talk about much, in general. He's taciturn and cranky. His default facial expression is a forbidding scowl. Once, on a family vacation, my mom, my brother, and I were waiting outside some touristy welcome center while he went in to pick up a map or something. He came out the door, carrying the map and wearing his characteristic frown. My mom said, "Another satisfied customer!" and we all cracked up. This became a running joke which only he failed to see the humor in.
In the last couple of years, though, I've noticed some of the ways he influenced me. That he was not just something to react against in my childhood and young adult years.
My two oldest kids are left-handed, color-blind boys. In this, they are the image of their grandfather. Word Boy's big square head? Grandpa. The Lego Savant's ability to build anything, and his interest in mechanisms? Grandpa.
Their rigidness and inflexibility? Grandpa, too. Since he always had power over me, I saw him as ridiculously controlling. My dad believes there is one right way to do everything, and that way is his way. (I've probably told you the story from when I was a teenage girl with long, thick hair, and my dad got mad at me for using too much shampoo. He showed me how much shampoo he used--a tiny dot in the palm of his hand--and informed me that this was how much I should also use. This from a man who was already bald when he got married at the age of 24.)
I watch my kids, though, and wonder how much of my dad's tendency to be controlling was about his own emotional comfort. When I watch Word Boy struggle with perfectionism, or fall to pieces when presented with a question that has no single right answer, I see my dad. When the Lego Savant tries to micro-manage the whole family so that his environment can be comfortable for him, I see my dad. When I think about my own inflexibility--which I didn't fully recognize until I became a mom and had less control over my time and environment than I'd ever had before--I see myself in my dad, and my dad in me. I recently read a blog post (which I can't find now but will link to if it turns up) in which the writer said, "I have to write 'be spontaneous' in my calendar, or I'll forget to do it," and that is a pretty good description of me, as well. I used to think my dad was very controlling of his loved ones because we were his loved ones, and that he was trying to take care of us and keep us safe by guiding us very carefully, with attention to every minute detail.
I still think that.
But now I wonder if he wasn't also managing some form of the anxiety that seems to run in our family. Or suffering from a mild version of anxiety's stepsibling, obsessive-compulsive disorder (my first actual psychiatric diagnosis was "Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Obsessive-Compulsive Tendences." Now I wonder if they shouldn't just print that right on the birth certificates of new babies born into my family).
I'm like my dad in other ways, too, if you look behind the superficial. My dad keeps busy building things, fixing things, planning to build things. He spent most evenings and weekends throughout my childhood in his very well-equipped garage, doing god only knows what with power tools. My brother is like this, too--they live next door to each other and have quite the impressive pole barn workspace, with heat and a little fridge and microwave. My brother has build a dune buggy (from scratch!) and a race car (from a regular car) out there.
I used to think my dad and I were not alike: he works with his hands, whereas I am a word person. While he's rebuilding an engine, I'm reading something or writing something or taking a class on something. If my home needs a minor repair, I can live with that quite comfortably for a good long time--indeed, I recently noticed something small that needed fixing ( I can't remember what now) and realized that it had been broken for six months and it had never occurred to me to fix it.
My dad, on the other hand, read exactly one book the whole time I was growing up (though he and my mom have been hooked on audiobooks they listen to together for some years now).
So, just how are we alike in all this?
We both like to be busy. We both are always planning and doing projects. We are both quick to volunteer our expertise--you need a new driveway poured? He's there. You need a press release written for your non-profit organization? I'm happy to do that for you.
My dad, despite his habitual scowl, has a wonderful capacity for maintaining relationships, as well. All the years I was growing up, we only went on three vacations-for-vacation's-sake. But we traveled a lot. We spent many weekends at my grandma and grandpa's house in the woods up north; we drove as often as twice a year to Virginia, where we visited my dad's best friend Kevin and his family. We probably logged thousands of miles around Michigan visiting my dad's counsins and aunts and uncles and old friends from high school or college. We were always off to see somebody.
Even now, when my parents take their annual RV trek to the warmth of the southwest, they give much of their time to meeting up with relatives and friends in Arizona and southern California.
My dad and Kevin have been close friends since they were in the Army together in the 50s, and they have probably seen each other 2-3 times a year almost every year for all that time. My dad's other best friend, John, was his office mate when they were both hired as entry-level engineers at GM in the early 60s. Sometimes when Kevin makes one of his rare visits to Michigan, John and Kevin and my dad sit around the dining room table drinking beer, and John and Kevin have drunken pseudo-arguments about which one is really my dad's best friend. At least, they used to when I was young.
Like my dad, I love old friends--I keep saying that one of the benefits of middle age that nobody tells you about in advance is that you start to have friends you've known for 20, 30, 35 years. Like my dad, I rarely travel just to go see a place. Though I am not close to my extended family, I'm very close to an extended chosen family and I travel multiple times a year to be with these people. When I worry that I might lose a friend, because someone moves away, for instance, I think of my dad and the role model he is for not letting mere geography control his relationships.
(And I have many pleasant mental images of my dad laughing with his friends. He can relax the scowl when he's around them--or around his grandkids.)
I suppose I've been a cliche all my life--hard at work differentiating from my parents as a young adult, finding more common ground as a no-longer-young adult. But I would say that this is also one of the satisfactions of middle age for me.
My dad spent the day at my house today, working on fixing up my breezeway. He's putting in all-new screens, a new floor, and new doors. I worked on my front yard, weeding and moving some things around and getting ready for a big delivery of mulch. Partway through the day, I posted this as a status update on Facebook:
I have just peeked my head into the breezeway to admire my dad's work. We chat a bit.
Me: Well, I'm going to get back to work in the front yard.
Dad: Why don't you get those kids out here to help you?
I laugh.
Dad: Why are you all "ha ha"? They're old enough.
Me: I know. And they will help. They like helping in the yard. I'm laughing because I'm 46 years old and you're still bossing me around.
Dad: Well, that's the way I am.
Me: I know. That's why I laughed instead of getting mad.
We both laugh and then we go about our business.
This meant: Keep Your Mouth Shut Until Called Upon, Joanne. It was supposed to keep her from blurting out inappropriate jokes in class.
From this single anecdote, you will readily infer that I am much like my mother. I look like her, I have her sense of humor, I have her tendency to blurt things out, her inclination to the slightly off-color, and her habit of sharing too much information. She is a collector and teller of family stories, as well. Truly, I am an apple that did not fall far from the tree in this case.
My dad, though? At first glance, we are nothing alike. He doesn't think about the past much; or, if he does, he doesn't talk about it. He doesn't talk about much, in general. He's taciturn and cranky. His default facial expression is a forbidding scowl. Once, on a family vacation, my mom, my brother, and I were waiting outside some touristy welcome center while he went in to pick up a map or something. He came out the door, carrying the map and wearing his characteristic frown. My mom said, "Another satisfied customer!" and we all cracked up. This became a running joke which only he failed to see the humor in.
In the last couple of years, though, I've noticed some of the ways he influenced me. That he was not just something to react against in my childhood and young adult years.
My two oldest kids are left-handed, color-blind boys. In this, they are the image of their grandfather. Word Boy's big square head? Grandpa. The Lego Savant's ability to build anything, and his interest in mechanisms? Grandpa.
Their rigidness and inflexibility? Grandpa, too. Since he always had power over me, I saw him as ridiculously controlling. My dad believes there is one right way to do everything, and that way is his way. (I've probably told you the story from when I was a teenage girl with long, thick hair, and my dad got mad at me for using too much shampoo. He showed me how much shampoo he used--a tiny dot in the palm of his hand--and informed me that this was how much I should also use. This from a man who was already bald when he got married at the age of 24.)
I watch my kids, though, and wonder how much of my dad's tendency to be controlling was about his own emotional comfort. When I watch Word Boy struggle with perfectionism, or fall to pieces when presented with a question that has no single right answer, I see my dad. When the Lego Savant tries to micro-manage the whole family so that his environment can be comfortable for him, I see my dad. When I think about my own inflexibility--which I didn't fully recognize until I became a mom and had less control over my time and environment than I'd ever had before--I see myself in my dad, and my dad in me. I recently read a blog post (which I can't find now but will link to if it turns up) in which the writer said, "I have to write 'be spontaneous' in my calendar, or I'll forget to do it," and that is a pretty good description of me, as well. I used to think my dad was very controlling of his loved ones because we were his loved ones, and that he was trying to take care of us and keep us safe by guiding us very carefully, with attention to every minute detail.
I still think that.
But now I wonder if he wasn't also managing some form of the anxiety that seems to run in our family. Or suffering from a mild version of anxiety's stepsibling, obsessive-compulsive disorder (my first actual psychiatric diagnosis was "Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Obsessive-Compulsive Tendences." Now I wonder if they shouldn't just print that right on the birth certificates of new babies born into my family).
I'm like my dad in other ways, too, if you look behind the superficial. My dad keeps busy building things, fixing things, planning to build things. He spent most evenings and weekends throughout my childhood in his very well-equipped garage, doing god only knows what with power tools. My brother is like this, too--they live next door to each other and have quite the impressive pole barn workspace, with heat and a little fridge and microwave. My brother has build a dune buggy (from scratch!) and a race car (from a regular car) out there.
I used to think my dad and I were not alike: he works with his hands, whereas I am a word person. While he's rebuilding an engine, I'm reading something or writing something or taking a class on something. If my home needs a minor repair, I can live with that quite comfortably for a good long time--indeed, I recently noticed something small that needed fixing ( I can't remember what now) and realized that it had been broken for six months and it had never occurred to me to fix it.
My dad, on the other hand, read exactly one book the whole time I was growing up (though he and my mom have been hooked on audiobooks they listen to together for some years now).
So, just how are we alike in all this?
We both like to be busy. We both are always planning and doing projects. We are both quick to volunteer our expertise--you need a new driveway poured? He's there. You need a press release written for your non-profit organization? I'm happy to do that for you.
My dad, despite his habitual scowl, has a wonderful capacity for maintaining relationships, as well. All the years I was growing up, we only went on three vacations-for-vacation's-sake. But we traveled a lot. We spent many weekends at my grandma and grandpa's house in the woods up north; we drove as often as twice a year to Virginia, where we visited my dad's best friend Kevin and his family. We probably logged thousands of miles around Michigan visiting my dad's counsins and aunts and uncles and old friends from high school or college. We were always off to see somebody.
Even now, when my parents take their annual RV trek to the warmth of the southwest, they give much of their time to meeting up with relatives and friends in Arizona and southern California.
My dad and Kevin have been close friends since they were in the Army together in the 50s, and they have probably seen each other 2-3 times a year almost every year for all that time. My dad's other best friend, John, was his office mate when they were both hired as entry-level engineers at GM in the early 60s. Sometimes when Kevin makes one of his rare visits to Michigan, John and Kevin and my dad sit around the dining room table drinking beer, and John and Kevin have drunken pseudo-arguments about which one is really my dad's best friend. At least, they used to when I was young.
Like my dad, I love old friends--I keep saying that one of the benefits of middle age that nobody tells you about in advance is that you start to have friends you've known for 20, 30, 35 years. Like my dad, I rarely travel just to go see a place. Though I am not close to my extended family, I'm very close to an extended chosen family and I travel multiple times a year to be with these people. When I worry that I might lose a friend, because someone moves away, for instance, I think of my dad and the role model he is for not letting mere geography control his relationships.
(And I have many pleasant mental images of my dad laughing with his friends. He can relax the scowl when he's around them--or around his grandkids.)
I suppose I've been a cliche all my life--hard at work differentiating from my parents as a young adult, finding more common ground as a no-longer-young adult. But I would say that this is also one of the satisfactions of middle age for me.
My dad spent the day at my house today, working on fixing up my breezeway. He's putting in all-new screens, a new floor, and new doors. I worked on my front yard, weeding and moving some things around and getting ready for a big delivery of mulch. Partway through the day, I posted this as a status update on Facebook:
I have just peeked my head into the breezeway to admire my dad's work. We chat a bit.
Me: Well, I'm going to get back to work in the front yard.
Dad: Why don't you get those kids out here to help you?
I laugh.
Dad: Why are you all "ha ha"? They're old enough.
Me: I know. And they will help. They like helping in the yard. I'm laughing because I'm 46 years old and you're still bossing me around.
Dad: Well, that's the way I am.
Me: I know. That's why I laughed instead of getting mad.
We both laugh and then we go about our business.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Speak at Your Own Peril: "It's Just a Phase"
Yesterday we had lunch at a Burmese restaurant. I will be ever-grateful to our friend ODG for taking us there. Our family is in Philadelphia for the TransHealth conference, and are just a few blocks from Chinatown. The Tiny Tornado loves Chinese food, so we've been strolling down there every day, and having the kind of wonderful meals where we are all passing plates around saying, "Try this! Have a bite of this!" The Burmese food was a great new experience. Similar to other Asian foods, but with a different kind of flavor and spiciness. I had a chicken dish that made me understand why people go on and on about the flavors in food--I'd put a bite in my mouth, and it tasted lemony but not sweet, with an undertone of smokiness. Then, as the lemon flavor faded, a spicy heat would rise up to take its place. I couldn't eat it quickly, because this layering and progression of flavors was so worth experiencing that I had to wait it out each time. Wowza.
Anyway, I was complaining at lunch about people saying that the Tiny Tornado's interest in boy things and boy clothes is "just a phase." Sometimes they use those exact words, and sometimes they simply imply them. Someone told me yesterday that she knew authoritatively that children do not have a fixed gender identity until age 6 (tell that to the 11-year-old girl I met yesterday who transitioned male-to-female before starting kindergarten). Another said that she thought all kids would be wildly gender creative and exploratory if they were free to do so, which begs the question of why my two older kids, certainly as free to do so as my youngest, were only mildly gender-transgressive as young kids. And someone also told me yesterday (I get this one a lot, but only from people who haven't actually met the Tiny Tornado and encountered the force of his will) that the TT is "trying to be like her older brothers," or "emulating her dad." Which, again, begs the question of all the girls with older brothers they love and admire who nonetheless do not dress like them and demand that everyone call them "he."
But, yes, someone also said to me yesterday, in so many words, "it's probably just a phase."
I was complaining about this at lunch, and the Lego Savant said, "Really? Someone said that to you here? You'd think all the people at a place like this would know better." Sometimes the Lego Savant surprises us. He seems to sail through life blissfully unaware that a surprising proportion of his adult friends and loved ones are gay, lesbian, transgendered, transsexual, or queer in various other ways, or that these things are seen as deviant in some places and by some people. Every now and then, though, he comes out with something that makes us realize that he has been paying attention all along, understands a great deal, and has some insight to share.
Anyway: those of you who are my Facebook friends may already know that on Thursday morning when we arrived at the conference, the Tiny Tornado was asked which pronouns he preferred so that it could be indicated on his nametag. You can probably guess from that sentence that he chose the boy pronouns.
I could do a whole digression here about how he has never seemed to care too much about pronouns before, but now I wonder if it just hadn't really occurred to him because nobody had offered him the option before. Because suddenly he cares very much about the pronouns, even getting angry at the Lego Savant yesterday when LS slipped and called him "she." (An apology, a hug, and an explanation that we're all doing our best but will slip sometimes seemed to resolve that.)
But: today I am talking about the expression "it's just a phase." Because, as I said at lunch, the next person who says this to me is going to get a fork in the Adam's Apple. (Metaphorical fork. Metaphorical Adam's Apple. I am a Quaker, after all.)
Because, listen: this phrase is not only dismissive of my child's self-understanding and how important it is to him right now, but it implies that anything we do in our lives for only a while, any exploration we undertake is somehow unimportant if it doesn't lead to permanent change.
Raider ViaDude (my new anagrammatic pseudonym for my sweetie) went to a presentation yesterday afternoon where the speaker said that the few studies that have been done show that about 25-40% of kids who are transgendered before puberty actually fully transition. Some reach puberty and discover they're actually gay, for instance, or otherwise have some different understanding of themselves than "I must be a girl" or "I must be a boy." [Insert digression here on the very interesting distinction made in the parent support group the other day between "expression" and "identity." I'll save it for another post.]
So there's really a pretty good chance that the Tiny Tornado will not permanently identify as male, or choose to transition. But that doesn't mean that what's going on now is "just" anything. Clearly it is a very important exploration for him, something he feels strongly about and is enjoying (you should have seen him glow when I helped him find some shorts he could wear as swim trunks, instead of his tankini, to the trans families pool party last night).
When I think about my own life, there are some things that were "phases" but were nonetheless very formative for me. One that comes immediately to mind whenever I think about something like this is my flirtation with punk rock when I was 18 and 19. I was never really a punk rocker, more of a hanger-on wannabe, but being exposed to that subculture and that music did good things for me.
Recently, I spent a year or so seriously considering attending seminary, culminating in a visit during a prospective student weekend. But within a few weeks of that visit, which I enjoyed, it had become clear to me that I was not going to attend seminary, and I have not had a tinge of regret or any residual urges about it.
Was that "just" a phase? Or was that me spending some time asking an important question about my life, which was eventually clearly answered in the negative?
So, you know, when people say that the Tiny Torndao is "just" going through a phase with his gender explorations, it irks me. It irks me because even if tomorrow, or next month, or in a year he says, "You know what, mom, I'm really a girl and I feel very sure about that," that doesn't mean that this time of wanting to be seen as a boy, treated as a boy, talked to and talked about as a boy, is "just" anything. It's the life he's living now. It's him asking a really important question.
We don't need to wait ten years to find out whether he's "really" trans to know that his life right now, at 4 years old, matters. There is no "just" at all about a little person living a great big life.
Anyway, I was complaining at lunch about people saying that the Tiny Tornado's interest in boy things and boy clothes is "just a phase." Sometimes they use those exact words, and sometimes they simply imply them. Someone told me yesterday that she knew authoritatively that children do not have a fixed gender identity until age 6 (tell that to the 11-year-old girl I met yesterday who transitioned male-to-female before starting kindergarten). Another said that she thought all kids would be wildly gender creative and exploratory if they were free to do so, which begs the question of why my two older kids, certainly as free to do so as my youngest, were only mildly gender-transgressive as young kids. And someone also told me yesterday (I get this one a lot, but only from people who haven't actually met the Tiny Tornado and encountered the force of his will) that the TT is "trying to be like her older brothers," or "emulating her dad." Which, again, begs the question of all the girls with older brothers they love and admire who nonetheless do not dress like them and demand that everyone call them "he."
But, yes, someone also said to me yesterday, in so many words, "it's probably just a phase."
I was complaining about this at lunch, and the Lego Savant said, "Really? Someone said that to you here? You'd think all the people at a place like this would know better." Sometimes the Lego Savant surprises us. He seems to sail through life blissfully unaware that a surprising proportion of his adult friends and loved ones are gay, lesbian, transgendered, transsexual, or queer in various other ways, or that these things are seen as deviant in some places and by some people. Every now and then, though, he comes out with something that makes us realize that he has been paying attention all along, understands a great deal, and has some insight to share.
Anyway: those of you who are my Facebook friends may already know that on Thursday morning when we arrived at the conference, the Tiny Tornado was asked which pronouns he preferred so that it could be indicated on his nametag. You can probably guess from that sentence that he chose the boy pronouns.
I could do a whole digression here about how he has never seemed to care too much about pronouns before, but now I wonder if it just hadn't really occurred to him because nobody had offered him the option before. Because suddenly he cares very much about the pronouns, even getting angry at the Lego Savant yesterday when LS slipped and called him "she." (An apology, a hug, and an explanation that we're all doing our best but will slip sometimes seemed to resolve that.)
But: today I am talking about the expression "it's just a phase." Because, as I said at lunch, the next person who says this to me is going to get a fork in the Adam's Apple. (Metaphorical fork. Metaphorical Adam's Apple. I am a Quaker, after all.)
Because, listen: this phrase is not only dismissive of my child's self-understanding and how important it is to him right now, but it implies that anything we do in our lives for only a while, any exploration we undertake is somehow unimportant if it doesn't lead to permanent change.
Raider ViaDude (my new anagrammatic pseudonym for my sweetie) went to a presentation yesterday afternoon where the speaker said that the few studies that have been done show that about 25-40% of kids who are transgendered before puberty actually fully transition. Some reach puberty and discover they're actually gay, for instance, or otherwise have some different understanding of themselves than "I must be a girl" or "I must be a boy." [Insert digression here on the very interesting distinction made in the parent support group the other day between "expression" and "identity." I'll save it for another post.]
So there's really a pretty good chance that the Tiny Tornado will not permanently identify as male, or choose to transition. But that doesn't mean that what's going on now is "just" anything. Clearly it is a very important exploration for him, something he feels strongly about and is enjoying (you should have seen him glow when I helped him find some shorts he could wear as swim trunks, instead of his tankini, to the trans families pool party last night).
When I think about my own life, there are some things that were "phases" but were nonetheless very formative for me. One that comes immediately to mind whenever I think about something like this is my flirtation with punk rock when I was 18 and 19. I was never really a punk rocker, more of a hanger-on wannabe, but being exposed to that subculture and that music did good things for me.
Recently, I spent a year or so seriously considering attending seminary, culminating in a visit during a prospective student weekend. But within a few weeks of that visit, which I enjoyed, it had become clear to me that I was not going to attend seminary, and I have not had a tinge of regret or any residual urges about it.
Was that "just" a phase? Or was that me spending some time asking an important question about my life, which was eventually clearly answered in the negative?
So, you know, when people say that the Tiny Torndao is "just" going through a phase with his gender explorations, it irks me. It irks me because even if tomorrow, or next month, or in a year he says, "You know what, mom, I'm really a girl and I feel very sure about that," that doesn't mean that this time of wanting to be seen as a boy, treated as a boy, talked to and talked about as a boy, is "just" anything. It's the life he's living now. It's him asking a really important question.
We don't need to wait ten years to find out whether he's "really" trans to know that his life right now, at 4 years old, matters. There is no "just" at all about a little person living a great big life.