Won't Someone Think of the Children?

In October, CNN published this pretty good article about a family made up of three adults and their nine-year old daughter. Of course, the responses across the internet ranged from supportive to appalled, and many on toward the "appalled" side of the spectrum purported to be about the writers' concerns over a child being raised in such a family. Some folks assumed that the situation was de facto unhealthy; others saw it as unstable, and wondered what it would do to the girl when her family broke up and the third partner, who is not one of her biological or legal parents, disappeared from her life.

Whenever an unconventional relationship comes up, onlookers always express concern about the children. Whether it's the mixed-race child of a biracial couple, or the black child adopted into a predominantly white family, single women or men becoming parents by choice, lesbians and gay men parenting, or non-monogamous people practicing non-monogamy while raising kids, the same questions come up: Is this good for the child? Won't it be harmful to them? What about the social stigma they'll face? Is this family--whether of gay men or of three people in a partnership or a couple that dates outside the relationship--too inherently unstable to raise children?

This concern is so common that I have even had a polyamorous friend tell me he thought it was wrong for parents to practice polyarmory while raising their children.

I, of course, have several thoughts about this.

Gosh, I Never Thought of That Before

I can't tell you how many people have told me that the Tiny Tornado might change his mind about his gender expression. People somehow believe that the first thought that pops into their heads when they hear about him is something that hasn't occurred to us in all the years we've been living in the situation.

The "what about the kids" questions about polyamory feels similar. Whether people pay due attention to the needs of their kids is independent of whether they're monogamous. Surely you can think of plenty of examples of monogamously married people who think only of their own wants and needs and not of their children's; I was raised by such people, and I'm pretty sure my brother is another such parent. Whether people take good care of their kids' physical and emotional needs is about whether they take good care of their kids' physical and emotional needs, not about whether they do that as a single parent, part of a married couple, as part of a trio, as someone who's been celibate for decades or someone who has a new sexual partner every time the moon is full.

This is why I'm such a fan of the good-faith question. Because I'm perfectly happy to answer those. "How have you dealt with being a parent and being polyamorous," for instance, is a good-faith question, and I can tell you a story to help answer it. "Don't you worry about your kids?" is not a good faith question, because it tells me that you think the answer is "No, I don't. I think only of my own gratification." But that's not how it is.

Last year, I dated a person I'll call Lovely Girlfriend. It was a long-distance relationship that started at a Quaker gathering, and the first time I visited her, we were sitting in her kitchen drinking tea and she said to me, "So, I'd like to talk about breaking up."

"So soon?" I said. "I didn't think we were there yet."

She wasn't dumping me. But she wanted to talk to me about how to be with each other so that if we stopped dating (and we did, about a year later), we could do it well. We both have kids; we like each other's kids, and our kids are friends. At Gatherings, we've done a lot of shared kid-activities and reciprocal child care. We have a lot of friends in common, and a relatively small, tight-knit community of people is an important part of both our lives. Lovely Girlfriend wanted to talk about how we would be with each other so that, whether dating turned out to be a long-term thing or not, we could still care for each other's kids, and we could continue to share our community.

It boiled down to being decent, and honest. And I think we were. Next time we see Lovely Girlfriend and her kids, the children might or might not sense that the relationship between us is different than it was. But her younger kid will still hug me hello (I hope), I'll still be happy to take the whole passel somewhere fun while Lovely Girlfriend fulfills a work commitment, she'll still sit with my younger kids in the cafeteria while I have a committee meeting, and the two of us will still be glad of the moments we can steal to be together in the busyness of a gathering. She'll still be one of my kids' grown-up friends, and mine, too.

Things aren't always that smooth, because people aren't always decent and honest, especially if strong emotions get involved. But that leads me directly to my next point:

My Kids Have Lost Precious Grownups. But It Hasn't Been Anybody I Was Dating

I think people who worry about relationship instability in polyamorous relationships imagine that we're doing something like telling the kids, "Hey, kids, here's Lovely Girlfriend. She's your new Other Mommy. Give Other Mommy a great big kiss!" And then a year later, Other Mommy is gone and the children are bereft.

We haven't done it that way, though. Lovely Girlfriend and I, for instance, were friends before we started dating, and we didn't announce the change to the kids, though they did notice we were visiting each other a lot more. Once when I hung up the phone, Word Boy said, "Was that Lovely Girlfriend?" and I said, "No, it was my doctor. Why?" He said, "Because usually you only answer if it's Lovely Girlfriend." So, you know, they do notice things. But they don't get real-time updates every time a relationship shifts a bit in one direction or another.

I always want to tell people, too, that being monogamous doesn't necessarily protect your kids from these kinds of losses. It hasn't protected mine. Raider used to have a friend, one of his best friends since college, who was very involved with us and our kids for years. She was so close that the kids called her "Aunt Cowrie," and my photo albums are full of pictures of her giving Baby Lego Savant bottles, playing with him, reading books to him, helping him plant flowers. She was the one who saw Word Boy's first steps, hanging out in our living room with him while I cooked dinner, and the turtle-shaped sandbox we recently got rid of was a gift from her.

And then she disappeared. She told Raider that she disapproved of our parenting so strongly that she couldn't bear to stay around and watch us ruin the children. And, just like that, one of the most important people in my kids' lives was gone.

But we still had Farina, one of my best friends, and her family. Now that was a close, stable relationship--a few years ago, Raider commented that our families had become to intertwined he didn't think we could get rid of each other if we tried. We lived about an hour apart, but visited back and forth regularly. For most of a school year, I kept their oldest son two days a week while they were experimenting with homeschooling, but that was OK because he was one of the Lego Savant's best friends. Farina repaired my front door and put new screens in the breezeway windows. I lent her money to buy her first rowing shell, and she lent me money when we were having trouble paying our mortgage during the custody fight with TT's birthfather. We took vacations together. Farina's wife became a good friend in her own right.

And then some problems Farina had with PTSD and depression got worse, and she began to lie to me, and to be verbally abusive. When I tried to talk to her about the situation, she became more entrenched, describing herself as my victim and redoubling her attacks on my character. I ended the relationship, and one more time the kids--and I--lost someone important.

You all probably know, as well, that last Christmas my dad, the kids' only surviving grandparent, disowned me for letting the Tiny Tornado live as a boy. I don't expect to see him again.

My point is, my kids have already suffered the kinds of losses that people worry about when polyamory comes up. But not because I was dating someone. We could have avoided these losses by not having best friends and a dad, but that hardly seems reasonable. (And I don't go around asking people with friends and parents whether they've really thought about the risks.)

Let Me Sum Up

My point, and it seems like such an obvious one that I can't believe I've taken so many words to make it, is that, in some ways, there is nothing special about the relationships you have when you're polyamorous, and the path they take is as varied as the paths taken by monogamous marriages, close friendships, relationships with biological family, dating relationships you have when you're single. As parents, we're making decisions all the time about who is part of our children's lives: whether to take them back to Miserable Small Town for another crappy tension-filled Penn family Thanksgiving, for instance (thank you, Dad, for solving that one for me); whether to introduce them to a certain friend; whether to trust them with that coach or that teacher. We make decisions ourselves about who to trust with our own hearts. Sometimes we get it right; sometimes we get it wrong. Sometimes we get it right and it still goes wrong. Sometimes somebody you thought would be there forever, isn't, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I still trust people. I trust Raider to the ends of the earth. I think we'll be together forever, but I believe that even if we're not, he will always be a great dad and a decent person. I have a girlfriend now that my kids adore, and I trust her with them. I trust her with their hearts. She might break mine, but she'll always take care of theirs.

But what I trust most is myself. I trust me to take good care of my children. I trust me to stand by them. I trust me to get into good relationships, and to get out of bad ones without drama. I trust me to explain things to my kids, as clearly and compassionately as I can, and I trust me to stand by them as they work out any confusion or sadness they feel. I trust me to do these things because I have done these things. I trust them to be smart, loving, emotionally whole, and resiliant, because they have always been these things.

There will always be losses. That is the cost of loving. I hope my kids come to feel, as I do, that the loving is worth it.

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The Five That Didn't Go Viral, and the One That Did

Last August, the Quaker magazine Friends Journal published an article I wrote about the Tiny Tornado. it went viral, getting over 20,000 "likes" on Facebook, and about 145,000 pageviews. This was, of course, very exciting.

Glad I Got a Screenshot Before the Counter Reset Itself

And yet, it causes one to reflect on the vicissitudes of the internet, and what does and doesn't go viral. Because that is not the best thing I've ever written, not even on the subject of the Tiny Tornado. It's not the funniest, or the most insightful, or the best-written, or the most thought-provoking. I have written several things in the past that I thought might catch the eye of a larger audience, that didn't. I will share them with you now.

The Five That Didn't Go Viral, But Might Have

Back when I had only one baby, I wrote this hilarious bit for some friends, imagining that diaper-changing was an Olympic sport. Share the link with your friends and they might spit coffee onto their keyboards, which is always fun.

Well, the quality of the sport just isn't what it used to be. In my day, every serious competitor at the national level had at least four children in at most six years; now it's all mothers-of-one. In 1978, I had to perform a near-perfect Simultaneous Bowel Movements of 8-Month-Old and Two-Year-Old in Car With Light-Colored Upholstery While Running Late to Pick Up Four-Year-Old From Preschool to win my second gold, but the multiple-child events have been completely phased out in recent years.

On the subject of gender transition, I wrote this piece on what we call "the mail forwarding stage," that time when you're on-board with the new name and pronouns but your brain hasn't quite caught up. I've never seen anybody else write a piece on this phenomenon. A dozen more people should read it, at least.

The most hilarious part of the mail-forwarding stage is that your brain starts checking to see if other names and pronouns need to be forwarded as well. You call non-trans friends by the wrong pronoun from time to time as the system over-corrects. When one close friend was transitioning a decade or so ago, I was once stopped dead because I suddenly couldn't remember whether one of my closest friends--a non-trans woman, as I know perfectly well--should be referred to as "he" or "she." Tiny little postal workers in my brain were dashing around chaotically, running back and forth between stations, flipping through piles of memos, trying to find the paperwork. I was frozen and stammering for a moment until they got it sorted out.

Last year some time, I wrote this really terrific essay about how my body image changed after I came out as a lesbian. With photographic proof!

The young woman on the glider drinking a Dr. Pepper is an amazing physical specimen. She can ride her bike 60 miles in a day, set up camp, and then hop back on to go exploring, riding another 10 or 20 miles before bed. Her bulging thighs and calves are like granite. But she believes herself to be basically an unfit and sedentary person, because she is so often harassed for the time she spends sitting around reading, and because she does not play any sports or do anything "athletic." She does her best to hide when the camera comes out, because even though she is in the middle of pedaling her bike over 700 miles across the state of Michigan and then up the western shore to the UP, she is ashamed of her body.

This piece is about sex and how much I like it. It's wonderfully written and edgy in just the right way to get internet attention. Yet there it sits non-virally.

I had some bad sex, sure. I also had some very good sex. And I had some terrific sex with people it wasn't worth being in a relationship with.

And this is an absolutely splendid bit of Pride & Prejudice fan fiction. OK, I don't really think there are tens of thousands of people out there dying to read this. But the 300 to whom it is of interest? Should be all over it, gushing at me and offereing to sew me a new pelisse.

"Lord, Lizzie," said Lydia Wickham to her one day as the sisters walked out together, "I would not be married to your husband for ten Pemberleys. He is always out of sorts."

 

 

 

 

To All The Girls I've Loved Before

I came across this poem by Jack Gilbert this morning, and it seemed to speak to something like what I talked about in yesterday's post.

Cherishing What Isn't

Ah, you three women whom I have loved in this

long live, along with the few others.

And the four I may have loved, or stopped short

of loving. I wander through these woods

making songs of you. Some of regret, some

of longing, and a terrible one of death.

I carry the privacy of your bodies

and hearts in me. The shameful ardor

and the shameless intimacy, the secret kinds

of happiness and the walled-up childhoods.

I carol loudly of you among trees emptied

of winter and rejoice quietly in summer.

A score of women if you count love both large

and small, real ones that were brief

and those that lasted. Gentle love and some

almost like an animal with its prey.

What is left is what's alive in me. The failing

of your beauty and its remaining.

You are like countries in which my love

took place. Like a bell in the trees

that makes your music in each wind that moves.

A music composed of what you have forgotten.

That will end with my ending.

I love this poem, not least for its echoes of Whitman ("I sing the songs of the glory of you," said Whitman), right up until the line "You are like countries in which my love took place," at which point Gilbert just blithely removes the personhood of 20 or so women. He's a lover; they're locations in which his love plays out. So, love is something a man does in a woman, the way he might be a tourist or a scholar or an archeologist in foreign country. What metaphors didn't make it into the final draft, I wonder? Were they blank pages on which he wrote his life? Prepared canvasses eager to receive his warm, moist paint? Bleah.

 

I'm not too fond of "What is left is what's alive in me," either, because unless I'm mistaken, when a relationship ends in something other than death, two people walk away from it, each of them carrying their piece of it. In Gilbert's vision, the women he's loved have forgotten; only he remembers, so the music that is these women's music ("a bell in the trees that makes your music") is something only he hears and only he carries and it will last only as long as he lives.

 

Bit of an egoist there, Jacky-boy. As if there aren't some 19-ish women out there, for some of whom you were a love, and for some of whom you were someone they "may have loved, or stopped short of loving," some of whom think of you with longing, or with regret, others of whom certainly think of you with indifference, or not at all. Perhaps there is at least one who sings to herself a song of your terrible death. When you died last November, surely some of these women saw the obituary and said, "Jack Gilbert...he was my lover once. I remember him." Surely not everything you claim as yours belonged only to you. I expect you know that by now.

 

 

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A Crusade. But Without the Oppression and Death

I hate when I have something to write and keep starting dead-end drafts. So screw that. I'm on the internet now. I can do a listicle.

Things I like about polyamory:

1. My girlfriends' girlfriends, boyfriends, and significant others.

Sometimes when you're dating someone, they come with a sweetheart as a kind of bonus. If the person you're dating is awesome, odds are that their sweetheart will be at least that awesome if not moreso. And you can get a kind of privileged access to the sweetheart by virtue of dating their girlfriend. I know that everyone you get involved with, whether monogamously or not, might come with friends, family members, children, and pets that get to be part of your life, too, but there's a special kind of intimacy that comes from being lovers with the same person. There's even a jargon-y name for it, metamours. I like being metamours with cool people. I like having someone else who knows exacly what I mean when I say that my girlfriend is amazing in a certain way, or annoying in a certain other way. I have had the experience of sitting next to a metamour, seeing our mutual sweetie across the room, saying, "Isn't she lovely?" and sighing contentedly in shared understanding.
I remember the first time, more than 20 years ago, that I sat down to a meal with a girlfriend, her long-term partner, and her partner's other partner. I was nervous but I liked it. I liked the cross-currents of love and affection. I liked the teasing looks my girlfriend's partner was sending my way, and I liked listening to the mattter-of-fact way the three of them worked out their schedule for the coming week.

I like the feeling of a web of affection and desire. It's that simple.

2. I like my girlfriends, past and present, and my partner, and don't want to be without them.
Love and sexual desire are notoriously bad at following rules or bending themselves to practicality. Interracial couples have always loved one another whether it was legal or not. Princesses love stableboys, and so do princes from time to time.

I have loved many people in my life, some briefly and tragically, some briefly and brilliantly, some--well, one so far--forever. I have broken many rules to have these loves. I broke the rule about not being in same-sex relationships, and I broke the popular 1990s lesbian rule about not loving trans men. Eventually I broke my own rule that I was a lesbian, and settled down with Raider. I have broken many times the rules about age differences in sexual relationships.

And every time, I'm glad I didn't let a rule stop me. "But she's a girl!" would have kept me from my first real love. "She's 25 years older than you!" would have kept me from a relationship I learned a great deal from and remember very fondly. "He's a man" would have kept me from Raider.
I'm a big fan of standards, and maybe I'll talk about what that means another time. But rules? Not so much. A rule is Robert Frost's wall, about which he says:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.

Frost says, "I could say elves...but it's not elves exactly." I say it's love, particularly love in the form of sexual desire, that wants the walls down. And I will make the claim that is not been a lack of morality or an unhealthy promiscuity or a recklessness toward my own feelings or my partners' that has led me to squeeze through the narrow gaps in so many walls in search of the light I can see shining through from the other side.

It has been love, which in all its forms is ultimately the same form. And this is one of the ways I have been called to be in service to love in my life.

What I don't like about polyamory:

This is the world's shortest list. There is only one item on it. I don't like having to mold my behavior to standards that make no sense to me. I've never been good at it. I have no notion of "too much information." I am comfortable disclosing almost anything, and comfortable hearing almost anything. I have never been good at being in the closet, and once I came out never spent much time there. As a lesbian in my 20s, I accepted both the restrictions and the freedoms that being out brought with it.
But I can't be fully out right now. I can't talk in specifics. I can tell you I'm poly, but I can't tell you about anyone I might be seeing who isn't Raider, at least not on my blog or on Facebook. And there are good reasons for this. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I hate that I know people who've lost friendships because they came out as poly; I lost friendships when I came out a lesbian, and one of the costs of being in the closet is not knowing who would stand by you if they knew. I hate that someone with a vindictive ex could lose child custody over this, or that parents could withdraw from their adult children, or that employment could be jeopardized, or church or Meeting membership, or a community lost. I dislike being discreet, I'm bad at it even when I try, and I fear harming someone else by a failure to be as discreet as I should be.

Still, many times in my life I have been the one to blurt out something "inappropriate," and it has been my experience over and over again that when somebody like me opens her big mouth and says something wildly inappropriate, there is nearly always someone listening who needed to hear it. I've had a woman tell me that a story I read helped her be brave enough to admit to some of her own sexual desires, with great results. I've had many people say "I thought I was the only one." When word got out in the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival worker camp, back in the 90s, that I had a lover who was a trans man, there was controversy--I had one crewmate who couldn't resist bringing me the negative gossip she'd overheard, of which there was apparently plenty. But I was also sought out by multiple women who identified as lesbians but had a partner who wanted to transition; or were beginning a relationship with a trans man; or had had a relationship with a cis-gendered man that they'd felt they had to keep secret for fear of being judged or ostracized in their lesbian community.
They wanted to talk to me because they knew they could tell me about these things. When I tell you how many people I've slept with or how recently I experienced sexual gratification or what I like to do in bed, I'm not just being Su Who Has Never Been Able to Keep Her Mouth Shut. At least, I'm not only being that. I am fighting a crusade against shame.

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The Anniversary

November 8 was my mom's birthday, and I was really taken by surprise when I had a bit of a meltdown over it. My mom died a year ago today, and my year hasn't been anything like what other people told me it would be. My relationship with my mom was such that her death brought a mix of grief, anger, and relief, and after a couple of weeks of grieving, I didn't feel it much.

There was only one time all year--in a Whole Foods in Philadelphia--when I saw something that reminded me of her and felt sad for a minute. And only once, about two months ago, did I have the impulse to talk to her about something. And then I had to laugh at myself because whenever I gave into that impulse while she was alive, it ended badly for me.

I'm surprised, therefore, and a little pissed off, to be having anniversary-of-death related feelings today. But there you have it. Apparently the emotional brain has an internal clock that keeps track of these things. I've been in a very low mood the last few days, and I suppose this is part of it. I suppose, too, that it will pass.

When my parents were alive--oh, there's a Freudian slip. My dad is still alive, but he disowned me at Christmastime last year and I haven't seen him since. Anyway, when my parents were part of our lives, I didn't talk to my kids about the bad stuff in my relationship with them. I wanted my kids to have their own relationship with my parents, whatever that might be. But since they've been gone, I've had opportunities to talk to the older kids about how complicated things were.

One day recently, Word Boy was with me someplace, and I got chatting with an old guy, as I often do. The old guy was going on and on about the pleasures of grandparenthood, and I said, in a making-conversation-way, "Yes, my parents loved being grandparents. My dad says the best part of being a parent is the grandchildren." This is true.

But Word Boy doesn't miss much, and he asked me about it later: if grandma and grandpa like being grandparents so much, how come we hardly ever saw them? And I had to say that my parents did really love being grandparents--to my brother's kids. Why they weren't interested in mine, I don't know. But they weren't. They used to take care of my brother's older two kids all the time, and when he and his wife had a late-life baby a few years ago, my dad even learned to change diapers so they could babysit him, because my mom's arthritis no longer allowed her to do it.

But when I called once, when I was pregnant with Word Boy, to ask if they might watch the Lego Savant for a few hours so Raider and I could go to lunch and a matinee, my mom let me know that they were not, and would not be, available to babysit my kids. I honestly don't know why. I can't even claim that they always liked my brother better because as far as I could tell growing up, they didn't like either one of us. So I couldn't explain it to Word Boy. I could only tell him about it.

Whenever I write about this, somebody e-mails me or comments on Facebook to say, "Su, isn't it time you got over this?" But I would argue that I am over it. I'm living a functional life, I'm in a functional relationship (technically, two functional relationships), I take good care of my kids, I'm loved by my friends and valued in my community.

My parents did a pretty good job of fucking up my childhood, but I unfucked my life all on own.* I don't think it means I'm "not over it" if I still sometimes think about it, or have feelings. And I don't think it means I'm not over it if I refuse to pretend to conform to some narrative where I show my spiritual depth by declaring my mother forgiven. My mother had so many opportunities in her life to change the way she did things: when I asked, in so many words, for things to change during my teenage years; when I reached out to her in my 20s; when my cousin went into rehab and my aunt took a long, hard look at the ways she'd reproduced their upbringing as she was raising her kids; heck, any time during the last 20 years of living next door to my brother and watching him hurt his kids the same way he and I were hurt.** It was her choice, every time, to cling to what she knew instead of working for something better.

It doesn't matter whether I forgive her or not. She made her choices, right up to the end, and she's gone now. I do miss her, but I miss even more the hope I could never let go of that someday I'd have a mother I could trust to be kind to me. I didn't realize until she died how much I was still hoping for that. There's no point in hoping anymore, but I don't suppose I'll ever stop wishing for it.

Footnotes:

* "All on my own" if by "all on my own" you mean with the help of a middle-school librarian, two lesbian high school math teachers, my grandfather's cousin Marion, my great-aunts Hazel and Doris, my friends Carol and Amy, my first woman lover, three particularly helpful therapists, Raider and Toots, and friends too numerous to name.

** I used to be so angry at my brother for his part in what was painful about my childhood that I didn't want to see him get better. I wanted to be better than him. I spent so much of my childhood being tormented and humiliated by him that I wanted to spend the rest of my life looking down on him. Of course, I wasn't thinking about his children. I'd give just about anything for my niece and nephews to have the world's greatest dad, even if it meant admitting my brother was better than me.

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Homeschooling Word Boy

It has been a tough couple of weeks for me parenting Word Boy, because of his anxiety. I've handled it really well, but this morning I broke down crying talking to Raider about how I just couldn't face homeschooling. Yesterday was a very challenging day that left both me and Word Boy (and possibly also his therapist) exhausted, and he's doing better today but it's a pretty thin veneer. His perfectionism leads him to have anxiety attacks when he makes a mistake in math or doesn't understand something immediately, and it has been a challenge to me to be disciplined enough to make him do math anyway. A friend who studies behaviorism says that parents are very motivated by negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is the removal of an unpleasant stimulus--in other words, when a parent will do anything to avoid dealing with a tantrum, that's negative reinforcement. It's not easy for me to sit down to math with Word Boy when the likelihood is high that I'll have to spend half an hour dealing with an anxiety attack in order to get through what should be 10 minutes worth of math. He's behind grade level in math primarily because I have been negatively reinforced not to do math with him.

I've been doing a good job dealing with his anxiety-fueled behaviors during the last couple of weeks, which have feature not only yesterday's epic two-hour meltdown at the therapist's office but a four-day anxiety attack the other weekend. But I'm worn out. And the idea of trying to do homeschooling with him today when his equilibrium is so fragile just felt like too much.

And, honestly, I don't know why I bother "homeschooling" this kid. He and I decided to go the library, and on the way there, he asked about an errand I ran earlier, to renew the tags on our cars. I ended up explaining vehicle registration as well as automobile and homeowners insurance. He asked about the flood we had in our basement some years ago, which led to a conversation about sump pumps and the water table. From there, he gave me an impressive run-down of the causes and stages of a tsunami, which, like so many things, I have no idea where he picked up.

By this time, we were at the library, where, in a characteristic absent-minded professor slapstick, we had quite a bit of trouble figuring out how to open the unlocked door.

Once we were in, we browsed his favorite section, Juvenile Non-Fiction. He found a book on the Arctic and Antarctic; I found him a book on predictions people in the past have made about the future, which interestingly enough is something he had asked me about recently, so he was pretty thrilled. He found a Calvin & Hobbes collection he hadn't read. I found a book on Ideas that Changed the World that I decided to bring home just in case anybody wanted to look through it, and a book on teeth I bet Word Boy will like eventually. I found a book called Real-Size Animal Babies to show the Tiny Tornado, and then I slipped around to fiction and grabbed some Beverly Cleary for bedtime reading, because TT is all about the chapter books these days.

At this point, Word Boy, who is excessively conscientious, began to be concerned that we were checking out too many books. "Do you know how many things I'm allowed to check out on my card?" I asked him. "Fifty. And you could get your own card, and also check out fifty things. And the Lego Savant could get his own card, and then we could check out..."

"A hundred and fifty things," Word Boy said. "That would be a lot to carry."

He seemed reassured, but said again as we walked toward the circulation desk, "I don't know, it just seems like an awful lot of books." I spotted the librarian, who was just finishing up a conversation, so I hauled him over to her. "Librarian," I said, "This is Word Boy. Word Boy, this is the Librarian."

"Hello, Word Boy," said the Librarian. "It's nice to meet you."

I said, "Word Boy is concerned that we are checking out too many books."

The Librarian looked at him and said, "I don't think there's any such thing."

We ran our stack through the self check-out and hauled it to the car (Word Boy: "I have an idea for a new workout...it involves putting a strap around all of your books and then carrying them around.").In the car on the way home, he started reading about Antarctica, reading aloud little tidbits that interested him. "Did you know that the largest animal that lives on land year-round in Antarctica is a tiny insect? Did you know that there is evidence that Antarctica had a subtropical climate 70 million years ago, suggesting that the land that is now Antarctica used to be located near the equator?"

I kept saying, "I didn't know that. Wow, really? That is interesting." Finally, I said, "Ha, I guess it's your day to homeschool me."

Word Boy said, "Mom, I'm just reading stuff out of a book to you!"

I said, "How do you think I do it most days?"

He's reading in the big recliner now, having dealt with the perennial post-library problem of which book to read first.

I actually bought him a curriculum this year, because with me being in school it was very hard for me to keep up with homeschool planning last year, and things really fell apart somewhere around March. I was willing to pay someone to do my planning for me. It's been a mixed thing. I bought him a fifth-grade curriculum, and much of it is focused around grammar, spelling, and vocabulary lessons he doesn't need, so we don't waste our time on that. He finds the assigned books very interesting, but they're short and he goes through them quickly. This week, to try to address that, I assigned him a book that was supposed to be two weeks' worth of reading. He finished it Monday morning. Over breakfast. And then went on to read the next book, which was supposed to be for the next two weeks. And then read half of a biography of Alexander that is part of his big brother's curriculum and that happened to be in the stack on the table. I wanted to be able to hand the reins over to a curriculum. But this curriculum is not running the show the way I hoped it would. Word Boy's insatiable curiosity and drive for knowledge is. He's a fast horse galloping ahead at full speed; I'm doing my best to keep up; and our curriculum thinks maybe he's ready to learn a genteel trot.

 

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Not Actually a Boy, and Here Are the Reasons Why

When I said the other day that I was going to try to do a post every day in August, I was hoping to pull my daily readership back into the low (very low) triple digits, which is where it lives when I'm posting regularly. And then my article at Friends Journal about the Tiny Tornado's gender history went viral. I don't know how many total hits it's gotten, but nearly over 14,000 people have "liked" it on Facebook, and it's been reblogged and linked to all over the place, including at It Bets Better, which must have given it a big boost.

The article has driven traffic to this blog as well. I got nearly 4000 hits on Friday, though today we're down to a mere 1500 (so far). I figure today's decline marks the end of my fifteen minutes, and I'm trying to accept it with good grace. By tomorrow I'll be a has-been, and by Tuesday, I hope to be poised for a comeback.

The response has been overwhelmingly good, but of course we've had the usual assortment of judgment and ignorance, and one or two actual trolls. A favorite activity for commentators is explaining why the Tiny Tornado could not possibly be a boy. We have heard all of these theories before, and we're going to hear them again. Here's what I think of them as of today.

1. Sexism

This is a common theory. It goes like this: The Tiny Tornado, observing the sexism that is rampant in our culture and recognizing the limited options available for women, decides to be a boy to protect himself and to give himself more opportunities.

Why I love it: A child who is two or three is not imagined to know enough about his internal landscape to express a preference about his own gender expression, but is nonetheless somehow able to analyze and interpret the cultural landscape in a sophisticated way and make a rational decision to maximize his privilege within it.

2. He is emulating his older brothers.

Another popular contender. In this one, the Tiny Tornado is so enamored of his older brothers that he abandons his innate and biological sex and gender in order to be more like them.

Why I love it: The Tiny Tornado, an independent, assertive, confident, fashion-conscious, extroverted athlete who doesn't sit still even when watching TV, is almost nothing like his older brothers. If he were emulating his older brothers, he'd consider extended periods of "alone time" to be essential to his functioning; he'd sit still for hours on end, building with Lego, reading, or playing Minecraft on-line with friends. If he wanted to be like Word Boy, he'd be more interested in dissecting animals than in training them, and if he wanted to be like the Lego Savant, he'd have a passion for history. His older brothers are wonderful kids and well worth emulating. But the Tiny Tornado is a force unto himself.

3. He's never seen a girl playing hockey or wearing an oxford shirt.

In other words, he simply lacks role models for the kind of tomboy he really is.

Why I love it: The theorist imagines that ze knows what the Tiny Tornado has and has not seen, and also that something as minor as a girl playing hockey (which he owns a book about) or wearing an oxford shirt (which he has seen many times on the older girls down the street who dress very well) could shape a person's entire identity. It would be like diverting the mighty Mississippi with a popsicle stick.

3. He doesn't know that being a lesbian is an option.

To be fair, this is actually part of the gender pathway for many gender-variant kids. It is not uncommon, I am told by people who know a lot more than I do about these things, for a kid to approach puberty, begin to feel sexual attractions, become aware of lesbians and gay men through the media, and realize that they can resolve their sense of not-fitting by coming out rather than by transitioning.

Why it doesn't work for the Tiny Tornado: many if not most of our closest friends are in same-sex relationships, including TT's much-loved Uncle Toots, who is practically a third parent to him. In addition, the two women next door, who are the best neighbors in the world and also TT's mentors in the world of dog training, are an affectionate couple who love each other very much and are not exactly conventional in the femininity department.

4. He wore a Spiderman t-shirt the summer he was two, and wanted short hair.

Nobody actually thinks that wearing a Spiderman t-shirt and cutting his hair makes TT a boy. But they think I think it.

Why I love this: Because these people simply don't know us. I identified as a lesbian for much of my adult life, and have a whole string of butch lovers in my past (and maybe not only in my past). If there is one thing I know about women, it's that they can have short hair and shop in the menswear department. In fact, I'd say that one of the things I love about women is that they can have short hair and shop in the menswear department.

Also: although I currently have luxuriant curly hair, this is me in the summer of 2009, holding my newborn nephew. Why did I have that haircut? Because I wanted to. Am I a girl? Yes.

Su Penn, who identifies as a girl, rocks her buzz cut.

5. His parents are unable to imagine anything beyond the gender binary.

I'm being playful in this post, so I won't rant about how people seem to believe that transgender kids somehow have an obligation to be "ungendered" or "bigendered" that their non-trans counterparts don't share. I will say that I do my best to imagine what is beyond the gender binary because people I love live there. And maybe the Tiny Tornado isn't fully aware of the option to be both/and or neither/nor or "other," but he has encountered the possibility. Our kids met a both/and adult who was helping in the children's program at TransHealth, and meeting zer challenged all three of them in ways that we are still having conversations about.

6. His parents are pushing him, deliberately or subconsciously, into a male identity for self-aggrandizement or to further their own political agenda.

Yeah, OK, this one is totally true.

Ha, no. Just kidding. If anything, our love of GLBTQ people (including our own selves) and our sense that we would find it somewhat satisfying if one or more of our kids grew up to be G, L, B, T, and/or Q led us to hold back, to not take steps like suggesting male pronouns or a name change until the Tiny Tornado brought them up or was offered them by other adults, because we didn't want to push him. We were always supportive, I think, but we really forced him to be very clear with us. If you want to know more about just how slow I really was to let go of the bright, sassy girl I was sure he was going to grow into, you might want to read the story of the daisy dress in this post from last August.

I sometimes still feel a little sad when I see a black girl of 6 or 7 or 8, with her hair done up nice in braids and beads, wearing something bold like a purple skirt with red tights, and bossing somebody around. I thought he was going to be that girl. I love boys. I love being the mother of boys. I was going to love my daughter, though, just as much. I wanted that girl, no denying it, and letting her go grieved me, even as I celebrated the emerging little boy.

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How Do You Know He Won't Change His Mind?

I have a tremendous backlog of writing notes--at the moment, I have notes in three different notebooks, which is simply unacceptable to me. I'm going to try to write a post every day during the month of August; I did it in May of 2012 and enjoyed it very much. I hope to be able to retire two notebooks. So here we go, in Notebook #1, all the way back to June, when I was at the TransHealth conference and had the opportunity to attend a talk by Dr. Johanna Olson, who works with transgender youth at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.

Whenever I am involved in a conversation about young gender variant kids, somebody asks, "But how do you know he won't change his mind?" I've been asked this about the Tiny Tornado, and I've heard it asked at conferences and in on-line forums. The asker is generally concerned that such a young child is being allowed to make what seems like such a momentous decision. In addition, they imagine complications if a child chooses to live as their chosen gender for some number of years, and then remits.

I think these people would be interested to know that people who work extensively with trans and gender variant kids wonder about this, too: how can you tell, at age 6 or 7 or 8, which kids will revert and which kids will maintain their gender identity into adulthood? How do you choose an effective and appropriate treatment plan when you can't know a child's future gender with absolute certainty? Most kids, according to Dr. Jo, do grow through their gender variant behavior, and though many grow up to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual, only a minority of gender variant kids are trans. How do you know which are which?

Well, according to Dr. Jo, trans kids tend to have a constellation of characteristics that gender variant kids will not share. They will tend to have most of the following characteristics:

• There is an early onset of gender variant behavior; age 2 or 3 is common (and in parent support groups, many of us had stories of kids asserting their gender preferences before age 2).
• The child experiences body dysphoria, which is to say, their body seems wrong to them. The Tiny Tornado, for instance, was never willing to call his genitals anything but a penis, and he still has anxiety about the possibility of someday growing breasts.
• The child has a consistent self-articulation around gender; their assertion of their chosen gender is, to quote Dr. Jo's PowerPoint slide, "tenaciously clung to, unremitting, pervasive, insistent, clear, and acute."
• The child engages in cross-gender play extensively or exclusively. A child identified as male will play only with dolls and his big sister's kitchen set; a child identified as female seeks out trucks and building toys.
• The child cross-dresses, either in daily life if allowed, or in pretend play.
• The child chooses playmates who share their preferred gender.
• The child either does or does not tend to engage in rough-and-tumble play.

I can hear you saying, "But some of those things fit me, and I'm not trans!" Me, too. I went through a stage in late elementary school when I preferred to wear my older brother's hand-me-downs over wearing my own girl clothes, and I was pleased if I was mistaken for a boy. This lasted a year or so. This list is explicitly making a distinction between a kid like me, who engages in gender variant behavior for some period of time, or in some circumstances, and a child whose gender identity is lasting and engages multiple areas of their life.

You may also be uncomfortable with the stereotypical elements of those last four items on the list. So is Dr. Jo. Nobody wants gender identity to depend on stereotypical behaviors. We all want kids to feel that they can engage in any kind of play, and with any playmates they choose, regardless of their gender. But anyone who has been a parent knows that it's not as easy as you think to create a generation of freewheelers, and, for now at least, it seems to be true that consistently crossing lines on gender stereotypical behavior is meaningful if it occurs in a context where other items on that list are also present.

Given the difficulty of predicting a child's future preference, Dr. Olson said that the tendency is to intervene cautiously, avoiding engaging in irreversible treatments prematurely. Social transition, which is what the Tiny Tornado has done by living full-time as a boy, is both the most effective treatment for young kids, and completely reversible. I had a friend once express her concern that we were making such an "irreversible" decision at such a young age--TT was not quite five. My response was that all we'd done was buy him boys' underwear and start calling him "he," and that these things could be reversed with a trip to Meijer and the letter "s."

Puberty suppression is also a completely reversible treatment. The use of hormone blockers delays puberty; it doesn't cause a child to enter puberty as the "other" sex. Discontinuing puberty blockers without engaging in cross-sex hormone replacement therapy simply allows the child to enter puberty as their biological sex later than they would otherwise have done.

Even the use of HRT is partially reversible, depending on how long a person has been using hormones and at what doses. Only sex-reassignment surgery (also called sex-confirmation surgery) is irreversible in all cases. So you can see that practitioners, children, and families have lots of time to develop an understanding and make good choices.

I have pages and pages of notes from Dr. Jo's presentation, but I think I've hit the highlights, and given myself something to point people to when they ask me this classic question. We can't know for sure he won't change his mind, but we can make a pretty good guess based on what we know about him, and about other trans kids.

I'm going to close with a semi-random collection of bits and pieces that didn't make it into the body of the post.

• By age 6 or 7, kids generally have internal gender constancy.
• Dr. Jo says, "You can't make a kid trans." This is also an answer to a question--or is it an accusation?--I've heard from time to time. So there.
• Gender Dysphoria is not, in and of itself, a psychiatric diagnosis. Well-adjusted trans kids do not necessarily need psychotherapy.
• It is hard to know how many kids are remitters--revert to their assigned gender--in part because, in most research, those who can't be followed up on are classified as remitters. Dr. Jo commented, for instance, that one Dutch clinic reports all clients they lose track of as remitters, because they assume that any trans youth who does not remit is still in treatment with them. For this and other reasons, she suspects that the reversion rate is overstated in the available research.
• Among adult trans people, about 1% express regret. Dr Jo says that this is often due to the difficulty of reconciling a new life when older, and she hopes that as this first cohort of effectively-treated trans youth grow up the rate will be lower.
• Social transition is a pretty strong predictor of persistence; kids who undergo social transition are about five times more likely to maintain their gender identity into adulthood.

 

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Our Visit to the Lurie Children's Hospital Gender Clinic

At TransHealth in June, I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Jo Olson speak. She is director of the Transgender Youth program at Children's Hospital Los Angeles, which until very recently was one of only two programs in the US dedicated to treatings trans youth; the other is in Boston. Recently, the Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago has begun to work on creating a gender clinic as well; not officially open yet, the clinic already has around 75 patients, from age 4 to early 20s. Chicago is only four hours from us, so I was excited to learn about the Lurie clinic, and assumed the Tiny Tornado would be a patient there someday.

But when? I went to Dr. Olson's presentation with a burning question: at what point should we make contact with a gender clinic? The Tiny Tornado is years away from puberty, and has no behavioral or psychological problems. Should we get started early, or wait until it's time to consider puberty blockers?

Dr. Olson talked about many other topics of interest to me, and I learned a great deal. In fact, I have another blog post to write about all the notes I took in her presentation. But as I listened and took notes and found little nooks and crannies in my brain to store all the new information, I was still thinking: When do we take the Tiny Tornado to a gender clinic?

Dr. Olson's presentation ran over, and she had said nothing about this. I raised my hand, but others with questions were called on first. The answers to their questions were long and complicated. I raised my hand more forcefully, but I was in the very back of a large and crowded room and went unnoticed. Dr. Olson began to mention more often how much the session was running over. The people leading the next session in the room began to mill about near the door, looking cranky. Dr. Olson was about to wrap things up, and she hadn't answered my question. "I am not letting her out of here without answering me," I said to myself. "I will tackle her in the hallway outside if I have to."

I didn't have to. In the middle of the very last question she took, she digressed to say that she often doesn't see kids until they're in crisis in one way or another. "If I had my way," she said, "I'd have these kids in my clinic at 4, 5, 6, 7, get to know them, have a baseline, have the chance to avert some of the crises."

I had my answer. And as soon as we got home to Michigan, I called Lurie and made an appointment to visit the children's gender clinic.

Raider, the Tiny Tornado, and I drove to Chicago yesterday for our appointment. The clinic has two pediatricians and a psychologist on staff, and will be adding another doctor in the fall. We talked mostly with Dr. Gales, but we also met the clinic director, Dr. Garofalo; the staff psychologist, Dr. Chen;and the friendly, efficient, and quick-witted administrative person who helped me set up the appointment, Jen Leininger.

Everyone was very welcoming, and they seemed delighted to meet the Tiny Tornado. We ran through a short version of the Tiny Tornado's gender history with Dr. Gales, and it was such a relief and pleasure to be with someone to whom nothing had to be explained. I realized partway into my recitation that I am always, when talking to people about this, braced for conflict, or for the rude question I've answered a hundred times before, or prepared with an overabundance of evidence to make my case. With Dr. Gales, we just had to hit the highlights, and he listened openly and nodded in a "Yep, that's about what we'd expect," kind of way.

We had one fun moment when we were talking about TT's first haircut--the mohawk he got just before he turned three--and I delivered my usual rant about "But I learned how to do the hair! The oiling, the combing, the parting, the braiding--all for nought." Dr. Gales, who is black, said, "Well, if my partner and I end up with a girl, I'll call you. I've been terrified about the hair thing. I know nothing!" I was like, "Oh, heck yeah, I can hook you up. I have resources."

Dr. Gales talked to TT for quite awhile. He reassured TT, who worries about his body betraying him and growing breasts when he gets older, that he has nothing to worry about, that his body is not going to change for a long time, and there are things the doctors can do to make sure it changes in the ways he wants. He told TT, "It's your job right now to enjoy turning six, have fun in kindergarten, keep growing. I don't want you to worry about this at all."

We've been telling TT for some time that there are doctors who can help him grow up as a boy, if that's what he continues to want. Now those doctors have names and faces. TT hasn't wanted to talk about the appointment with us, but he smiled broadly and nodded when asked during the appointment if he was glad to be meeting them. Though Dr. Garofalo commented that he doesn't think they'll necessarily be TT's doctors long-term--this is an "exploding field," he said. By the time TT is 11 and likely to be encountering puberty, there may well be someone closer than Chicago working with transgendered kids ("though doing it well," Dr Garofalo said, and shook his head).

Dr Gales also told TT that he's a "trailblazer." TT is part of a cohort of young children--there are several others, as young as four, who are patients at Lurie as well, and others elsewhere in the country--who are the first ever to have access to quality care for gender dysphoria at such a young age. Dr. Gales told TT that, as they help him, they will also be learning from him, and what they learn will help them do even better with the kids who come along later. This kind of went over TT's head but it meant a lot to me. The Tiny Tornado has been a lot of people's "first," including the staff at his school, and most of our friends and family. Although people have been overwhelmingly supportive and positive, he will continue to be in the position of educating people by his very presence, and by the conversations that we need to have in order to make sure he's treated appropriately and has the support he needs. This isn't always easy and, although we've encountered very little, there is always the possibility of judgment or hostility.

In addition, I've struggled with my conscience over my decision to share TT's story on my blog, on Facebook, and, soon, in Friends Journal. But you know, writing about my life is what I do. It's my talent, my gift, my ministry, and, about some things, my obligation (it's also my pleasure). If TT really is among the first kids to have care from a young age, then he might not have the luxury of perfect privacy. Partly just because I'm his mom, and this is what I do. If he wanted a more private type of mom he should have arranged with God to be adopted by a different family. But partly because he is a very resiliant, self-assured, powerful child and, it seems to me that we might have a job to do, one that would be impossible for a different kind of kid and a different kind of mom. Certainly Raider has commented that one thing we bring to, say, the parent support groups at TransHealth is our totally calm assumption that the Tiny Tornado is OK as he is, and that things are likely to work out fine.

This was one of the interesting things about our talk with Dr. Gales: we did not require the usual degree of parent education or reassurance. "I do affirm everything you're doing," he said, and that was nice. The next time anybody gives me trouble about it, I have a board-certified pediatrician with expertise in this area to back me up.

I mentioned seeing Dr. Olson at TransHealth, and Dr. Gales said that not only do they know her well, but there are so few doctors doing full-time work with trans youth that they have a conference call every week. The group of them are seeking NIH funding to do some research into treatments and best practices, and it's possible that TT will be part of a research study at some point. Like Dr. Garofalo, Dr. Gales commented on how fast the field is growing, suggesting that, by the time TT reaches puberty, there may be more treatment options than just hormone blockers. That will be interesting to see.

As well as being a trailblazer, we get to be followers as well. Dr. Gales mentioned that they have a female-to-male teenager in the clinic who is dealing with his school around participation sports--the hormones he is taking are technically banned substances. This has been something I've thought about many times, with TT being as athletic as he is. What if he wants to participate in team sports when he's older? It's good to know we're not going to be the first family facing that issue, and I am holding the young man we heard about in the Light.

In some ways, not much happened in the meeting. We chatted, we smiled, the Tiny Tornado fist-bumped everybody on the way out. But we accomplished our goal: we made the connection. We made the possibilty of medical assistance more concrete for TT. We established a relationship so that, if problems come up, we're not scrambling to find help. I feel surprisingly buoyed up, and less alone, although I would not have said before yesterday that I felt alone on this journey.

We'll go back next summer. At some point, we'll start going every six months. Eventually, there will be decisions to be made. It's good to know that there are people out there dedicating their careers to figuring out how to help us, and other families like us, make them.

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My letter to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Education Committee

A lot of my friends and loved ones are part of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and many of them are struggling with PYM's recently formulated policy requiring that attenders at PYM youth events be housed and use the bathroom with their "biological gender." PYM's policy can be read here. The policy about activities with "intimate aspects, such as sleeping room assignments, using bathrooms and changing clothes" is not in keeping with the spirit of inclusiveness the Education Standing Committee is explicitly striving for. A number of my friends are also considering responding in writing to the policy, and many will also be part of the conversation about this policy at PYM's upcoming annual sessions. Some of my friends are finding this policy very painful, and some are quite angry about it. It has been helpful to us to share our thoughts and what we've written, so I am posting the letter I sent to the committee earlier this evening. I did not feel angered or hurt by the policy, perhaps because I am confident that as trans Friends and their loved ones and allies share their Light, the policy will not stand as it is written for long.

 

To the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Education Standing Committee:

Dear Friends,

I recently read your policy on welcoming trans youth. I was struck by the clear desire to welcome and support trans youth, and by the committee's humility in recognizing that they are in need of further Light. In that spirit, I am responding to your invitation to write although I am not a part of PYM; I am a Quaker who lives in Michigan. However, I am also the parent of a 6-year-old who was assigned female at birth but socially transitioned to living full-time as a boy at age 4, and I wanted to introduce you to him as an example of the kind of trans youth you might someday find joining you at PYM youth events.

Our son has been at every FGC Summer Gathering since he was born, for the last two years attending as a boy. Although there are people who remember him from before his transition, most people who encounter him at FGC are not aware that he was assigned female. My oldest son, who is 12, has friends at the Gathering whom he has known since toddlerhood. When our six-year-old reaches that age, so will he, and most of his friends will know him only as a boy. Imagine the confusion and discomfort that would be caused if, in that setting, he were expected to room with girls and use the bathroom with them. It would be painful for him, and disorienting to adults and children alike who know him as a boy. It would be little different than asking my oldest son, assigned male at birth and affirmed male in his gender identification, to room with a girl when he reaches high school age, and use the girls' bathroom.

The thing that trans youth of all ages need most from us is affirmation of their chosen gender, and any act that undermines their sense of themselves can be painful and damaging. Many people without experience of trans youth have concerns about bathroom use, but I have had the opportunity to meet a number of other parents of trans kids of all ages, and have heard of very few problems when schools and camps have allowed young people to make their own decisions about which bathrooms they are most comfortable using. For instance, I know a ten-year-old girl, assigned male at birth, who changes in the girls' locker room of her public school, and has done so over a long period of time without incident. This kind of support is tremendously important to trans and gender-nonconforming kids, and it carries very little risk.

I'd like to offer you three resources as well. TransHealth is a free conference that takes place every May or June at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The conference has been invaluable for our family; it is where I have had opportunities to meet other families, as well as to hear from doctors and therapists who work extensively with trans youth. You mentioned that some adults would be educating themselves about trans issues; I encourage Friends to review next year's conference program when it becomes available and attend any sessions that seem useful (and perhaps one or two that seem challenging).

It might also be useful for you to know that the right to use facilities consistent with a person's affirmed gender is afforded civil rights protection in some places. You can find a comprehensive list here. Colorado's Division of Civil Rights recently ruled that the state's anti-discrimination laws, which prohibit discrimination against transgendered people, apply to a first-grader whose school had not been allowing her to use the girls' bathroom. The decision included the opinion that asking the girl to "disregard her identity while performing one of the most essential human functions constitutes severe and pervasive treatment, and creates an environment that is objectively and subjectively hostile, intimidating or offensive" (quoted in a New York Times article about the case.).

Finally, an article about my son's gender development will appear in the August issue of Friends Journal. Trans and gender nonconforming kids follow all kinds of paths; this is just the story of his so far, but you may find it interesting.

I will be holding you in the Light as you continue your work.

Su Penn

 

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Sex, Birth, and Singing Alto in the Sacred Harp

My partner Raider is an extraordinary lover. When we were first together, he would take me to bed with no thought but my pleasure. He spent weeks and months exploring my body and listening to what it told him. In quiet persuasive whispers he got me to give up all the secret wishes I'd been harboring, and then he made them come true. He was like a guide leading me into my dark secret places, and sex with him was like psychoanalysis, spiritual revelation, deep epiphany. Every time. I could tell you about the orgasms I had with him, and how they started deep in my body, centered in my womb, and spread out from there, pulling all my muscles into one great clenched fist, and then letting go. I've always thought I was so good at giving birth because he helped me find the muscles in my deep core, got me acquainted with the iron earth. But after awhile, I didn't always want to have sex with Raider. Nobody wants to have a life-changing experience every time they go to bed; who can stand to be that in touch with her deepest parts, bodily and spiritually, day after day? Sometimes you need a break. So we had to learn to have sex that was merely very good, that was satisfying but didn't leave me drenched and mind-blown, that didn't have me staggering through the next few days, dazed and happy but unable to balance my checkbook or safely drive a car.

This is exactly why, although singing alto in the Sacred Harp is one of the things I love best, I don't do it at every opportunity. There's a local singing twice a month, but I only go occasionally. There's a larger one two hours away; I make it once or twice a year. I love the Sacred Harp, but I don't trust it. It's too powerful. Singing the Sacred Harp reminds me of the time I was bodysurfing in big waves in Hawaii and got tumbled about when I missed my timing; I made it to the beach safe and sound, but when I stood up in the shallows, the water had taken my swimsuit off.

Mary Rose O'Reilley says in The Barn at the End of the World that the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto are rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. The trebles, by contrast, "sing a descant line composed of ecstasy, light, purity, jet contrails, and self-surrender." O'Reilley isn't wrong, except about the malice, perhaps--she seems to have encountered a meaner and more self-interested brand of alto than I have. The altos tend to take the grounding line, the steady drone that keeps a song on the earth. We tend to sing the notes that give the harmonies their rough edge, and we do it sometimes by staying still while the other three parts move around us. Sometimes the altos are holding a steady, solid note and the music shifts around us and I hear a buzzsaw digging into lumber, I see the invisible whirling blade that, one time, took off the end of my father's thumb, I taste the sudden spurt of blood.

Singing alto in the sacred harp isn't for the dainty or squeamish. It's loud and raw. It helps to have had some really good sex, or to have given birth a time or two without anesthesia, to know where the womb is with its hidden muscles, the strongest in the body, some say, but locked away and not for you to command. Singing Sacred Harp has something in common with sex and birthing: all three are done better if you can set aside self-consciousness, modesty, and concerns for propriety, if you're willing to lay it all out there.

It helps, too, to have grieved a time or two. You can see that right in the music, that it was created and sung by people for whom death was always present. The Sacred Harp birthday song goes like this:

Youth, like the spring, will soon be gone, by fleeting time or conquering death.
Your morning sun may set at noon, and leave you ever in the dark.
Your sparkling eyes and blooming cheeks must wither like the blasted rose.
The coffin, earth, and winding sheet will soon your active limbs enclose,
Will soon your active limbs enclose. (Morning Sun, 436)

We sing it as a joke, but the people who originated this music weren't making fun of death. They were living side-by-side with it.

That's one of the dangerous things about the Sacred Harp, to my mind: the way you take on someone else's religion for a few hours or a couple of days at a time, belting it full-out like you're a believer, too. I always feel, when I sing, like I'm pushing at an invisible membrane between me and some woman not that different from me, who sang this music a hundred and fifty years ago, who struggled with her husband to make a go of a farm with poor soil, who had buried a baby, say, as well as two kids at once the year cholera came through. A woman who carried all of the hard work of her days, all of her losses and disappointments, to church with her, whose church was her only consolation.

Sacred Harp was a teaching tradition, originally, and we still call a short sing a lesson, an all-day sing a school, and a group of singers a class. It's not just the music we're being schooled in, though; it's the lives and faith of the original singers, the times they lived in, the God they worshipped.

Mary Rose O'Reilley writes, "The trebles have by now burst the bounds of earth. They will all call in sick on Monday." She writes, "The singing over, we drop like birds who have been buffeted to the edge of the oxygen zone. We have barely escaped with our lives." And that's the thing, that's the answer to why I don't show up twice a month at my local singing and drive two hours every month to the singing in Kalamazoo, why I go to only some of the conventions, and often for only one day. It's not just to save my voice, though that gets raw enough after awhile. It's to save my life, the life I'm living now and love, the one I could lose if that membrane ever ruptures and I'm not just getting a view of another life, another faith, but dropped into the middle of it. I don't want to find myself face-to-face with the God of that gray woman; I like the God I have, so much friendlier, more loving, less capricious. The God I have lets me keep the things I love best.

I walk away from a Sacred Harp singing sweaty, hoarse, wrung-out, and with a sense of having narrowly escaped being turned into something else, someone else. It's a good thing there's not an altar call in the afternoon, in place of the Memorial Lesson, or after four hours of singing to God with my whole heart, I'd be on my knees in the center of the square, accepting Jesus as my personal savior.

Convicted as a sinner, to Jesus I come,
Informed by the gospel for such there is room.
O'erwhelmed with sorrows for sin I will cry,
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. (The Rock That is Higher Than I, 496)

It's like a kind of Russian roulette, every time I sing. I never know when the hammer will come down and boom! I'l be on the other side of a change I can't easily come back from. I carry my songbook into the square and settle myself in the second row of altos. Today, I have decided, I'll take my chances.

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Six Months in the Public Schools

So, the Tiny Tornado has been a public school student for six months now, and that seems like a good time to take stock. My older two, who are almost 12 and almost 9, have been homeschooled straight through, so I am now qualified to talk at least a bit from both the perspective of a homeschooling mom and a public school mom.

The first thing to say is that the Tiny Tornado is in an excellent school with an excellent teacher. I like and respect the principal so much that I am sorry that he won't be able to continue at the same school next year. The school has plenty of resources, and good music and gym teachers. The building is clean and in good repair. Teachers change their bulletin board and hallway displays regularly, and the effect is one of a busy school where students are engaged in a variety of activities.

I've only been disappointed in two of the staff. I volunteered at a book fair, and got to spend some time with the librarian. At least on the day I was there, she was cranky with the kids who came through the library; she seemed to expect the worst of them; and she spent some time talking with a teacher about her class in very negative terms while the students, sitting quietly on the floor waiting to be released to explore the book fair, could hear them. OK: I have been disappointed in three of the staff, since I should count that teacher as well. As a parent, I think that it's important for kids to overhear us sharing the good things we notice, and expressing our high expectations. I think it's also important that they not overhear us venting our frustrations. For instance, when Raider comes home from work I might tell him, "The Lego Savant was a big help today! He took out the recycling without being asked, and organized the other kids to pick up the living room floor." If the Lego Savant is sitting nearby reading a book, it's just fine with me if he overhears this.

But if we've had a challenging day, and I've maybe disciplined the kids--say I took away the TV for the afternoon because they were fighting over it all morning--I think it's important for the kids to know that, once the discipline has happened, or once we've worked out a disagreement, it's behind us. I turned the TV off for the afternoon: they don't need to keep being punished for it. I might need to rant to Raider about the rough day I had, but I'm not going to do it where the kids can hear me. At least, I shouldn't do it where the kids can hear me.

The teacher's conversation with the librarian was like that. She'd had a rough morning with her class, and rather than letting it go, chose to have a loud conversation about it with the librarian where the kids could hear her do it. I think this sends a terrible message to kids. It says that whatever disciplinary action was taken for their behavior was not enough, that the incident isn't really put behind them. It suggests that the teacher sees them in negative terms, that she expects bad behavior from them. I also think it's wrong to poison the well: a student who is struggling in class may find a change of environment to be a new chance to shine, and a new adult as an opportunity to form a positive connection. For how many "bad" kids has a librarian, a gym teacher, an art teacher, a coach, been the one adult who saw them differently? For how many kids has the library or the art room been a refuge? Children should not be preceded into a new environment by the suggestion that they are troublemakers.

I was quite distressed by this teacher's behavior, and I hope it was a lapse brought on by stress and not a habit. But I was also bothered by the librarian's willingness to engage; she might have said, for instance, "Tell me about it later! Let's get these kids ready for the book fair!" But from watching the librarian interact with kids for the next two hours, I would not expect her to have that kind of sensitivity. She was suspicious of their motivation and behavior; she questioned the buying choices they made as she was helping them check out (if you don't want the girls buying the Justin Bieber photo books, don't put them out. If you put them out, let them buy them in peace! Say, "I hope you enjoy it!" Not, "I'd have hoped you could make a better choice. Is that how your mother wants you spending your money?").

The other weak staffer is the art teacher. At the beginning of the school year, I was actually quite excited by the projects I saw on the wall, and that the Tiny Tornado brought home. The kids painted great big sheets of paper in interesting patterns, then used them for the background for themed art that incorporated painting and collage. They were bright and arresting, and if they were a bit cookie-cutter (everybody make a house! everybody make an elephant!) the medium was at least interesting, and provided a chance to explore different textures and techniques.

And then the next set of projects went up. And they were big splashy colorful painting-and-collage projects. And then the next one. And the next one. As far as I can tell, all the art that the children have produced so far this school year has been in this same style. Maybe I simply don't understand what the expectations are for elementary school art, but I'd have liked to see some variation. And for the Tiny Tornado's sake, more opportunities to work in three dimensions.

One day in the hallway, I was admiring some really impressive clay sculptures in a display case. The art teacher passed by, and I said, "Are these all student work? They're very good." He said that they were indeed student work, from past years. I was pleased. I was happy to think of the Tiny Tornado working with a teacher who was capable of getting that quality and variety of work from students, and who would give them the opportunity to do it.

My bubble was burst when the art teacher said, "They did those with the previous art teacher."

Who is she, I wonder, and where is she teaching now?

As far as the Tiny Tornado's own classroom goes, there can be no complaints about the teacher. TT's class is "Begindergarten." This is a special class for kids who are old enough for Kindergarten but whose parents didn't think they were ready for it. So: 20 kids. 17 of them boys. Most of them perfectly nice, reasonably well-behaved kids like the Tiny Tornado, who just need a little time to mature. A handful of them: handfuls.

The teacher is a young woman in her second year of teaching. She is full of enthusiasm and good cheer. She handles her kids' behavioral challenges appropriately and affectionately. She and the school practice catching kids in good behavior. I have seen her, in the middle of a loud and chaotic process of transitioning from one activity to another, see through all the movement and noise in the room to catch a kid who can almost literally never sit still in his one fleeting moment of perfect behavior, and call him out on it to the whole class ("I see Aidan sitting quietly, ready to get started! Good job, Aidan!").

The classroom is extremely well-organized, and her days seem very well-planned with activities the kids enjoy. My only concern about Miss N is that, as a former teacher myself, I worry that she is going to burn herself out. Sometimes I joke that I'm glad TT got her early in her career, before she learns to temper her enthusiasm and manage her energy. But, sincerely, I hope that she makes a productive transition to being a slightly-less perfect teacher who can stay in it for the long haul.

That said, I think that an excellent classroom in an excellent school is a perfect case study for what is wrong with public education, as well as what is right about it.

Even in the Begindergarten, this school district places a strong emphasis on academics from an early age. There is almost no activity--not even during class parties on holidays--that doesn't focus somehow on phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, or math skills. They've done some really cool projects. For instance, recently the kids each drew a winter scene, framed it in brown construction paper like a window frame, and then the teacher added a picture she took of them from the back, as if they were looking out the window. These came out very charming.

They also came out mostly all alike. All the projects are cookie-cutter projects; there's no room for variation. If the kids are gluing together pre-cut pieces to make snowmen, the snowmen will have two eyes, a carrot nose, and buttons just like the model the teacher showed them. If a child wants his snowman to have three eyes, he will be told to do it like he was shown. The activities they do have a surface purpose: to practice the letter M, to count as high as 12, to make a little snowman. But the underlying purpose is also always to produce work that matches the model, to do it the way they have been told to do it.

The kids seem to enjoy the work they do; when I'm there helping with centers, they're having fun. And they are definitely experiencing multiple approaches to learning things: they might do a measurement project, a count-the-little-bears project, or a make-a-book project, each focused on a similar numeracy skill. But as they do each project, they are expected to do it exactly as they are told to do it. There is very little time in the classroom for children to make choices about how they will spend their time or what they will do. All the kids seem perfectly happy whenever I'm volunteering in the classroom (except poor B, who is temperamentally never happy: if they're doing centers, he wants to be doing morning meeting. If his group is at the math center first, he wants to be at the puzzle center. When he gets to the puzzle center, he doesn't want the puzzles that are available, he wants the firefighter one another kid has already started. And so on. I'm actually impressed with how Miss N and her classroom aide are supporting B in the classroom, and I hope he grows into a sunnier disposition, poor kid). But I can't help but wonder about the long-term effect of thirty-five hours a week, of "Do exactly what you're told. Produce exactly what you're told to produce."

The Tiny Tornado has learned a lot. This cannot be denied. He knows all his letters, is making big progress in matching letters and sounds (and can now identify consonant sounds at the end of words as well as the beginning!), can write all his letters, can count past 20 (though it's hilarious when he gets to 20-10 and 20-11), can recognize numbers into the teens. He is ahead of where both his brothers were at the same age, because we didn't do much systematic instruction when the Older Two were 5.

I am neutral on whether this is a good or bad thing. Both of the Older Two are perfectly numerate and literate now, which suggests that it is not necessary to spend hours and hours in direct instruction when kids are young. On the other hand, the TT was developing an interest in letters and numbers before he started Begindergarten, and has enjoyed learning them this year. It hasn't been stressful or negative, and his progress spares me the years of anxiety I suffered about whether the Lego Savant, now a voracious reader who devours multiple novels a week, would ever learn to read. As far as I can tell, TT's classmates seem to be enjoying themselves as well.

One area of flexibility in the classroom is that the kids are welcome to be where they're at: at a journal-writing center, for instance, some kids will dictate, some kids will write with spelling help, and some kids will write using their own mix of correct and invented spelling, and this is OK. This ameliorates much of the concern I might have had about the relentless emphasis on academics for what is essentially a class of pre-kindergartners. But I wonder what it will be like next year, when they move on to kindergarten or first grade. Last year, at the kindergarten information night, I was very uncomfortable with the academic expectations for kindergarten, though I suspect I'll be less concerned now that TT will have had a year of what is essentially Kindergarten Readiness. Still, I plan to visit a nearby district I've heard good things about, and consider whether I might be able to send him there under Schools of Choice.

I have heard a lot of criticism of the district from the parents of kids in middle and high school, from young adults who recently graduated from the district, and from the one or two kids I've met while they were attending the high school, about the effect that academic pressure has on the students. The district is affluent--at least 3 of TT's classmates are the children of doctors, for instance, and other parents are research scientists at the university. I hear that there is quite a bit of class-based tension at the middle and high school levels, and that it can be an uncomfortable setting for students whose families don't vacation at ski resorts or buy late-model cars for sixteenth birthdays.

Our decision to send TT to school was made pragmatically for the family: I needed childcare, and he needed stimulation. I am happy and relieved that it has worked out so well. Although I miss the wonderful open-ended art projects he used to bring home from his Reggio Emilia-inspired preschool, I am pleased with his academic progress (and so is he). Having some first-hand experience of the public school reinforces my belief that it would have been terrible for the Lego Savant (all those people around! all the time! never a moment to yourself! never a moment to think quietly!), and OK for Word Boy, who is more adaptable and inclined towards traditional academics. Though I think it has been good for Word Boy, who thinks too much of other people's preferences, not to be reinforced in his tendencies. I could do a whole nother post on that. Maybe I will sometime.

I've never imagined that the Tiny Tornado would stay in school long-term, and I continue to hope that's true, though it's not clear how my plans to become a Speech Language Pathologist will affect our homeschooling in another few years. I continue to be concerned about how factors like the pressure to conform, and the relentless beat of academics, will take their toll as the years pass by. The Tiny Tornado wants to homeschool for first grade, or possibly even this next year for Kindergarten. For my part, I very strongly do not want him to continue in this district past elementary school. We'll have to see what time brings.

 

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