Indoctrination

I have been neglecting the blog, even as I have been thinking about it more and more obsessively.

As much as I have an ongoing narrative in my head, this blog business has me thinking all the time "I could blog this..." or, "should I blog this?" (Never mind that I am enough of a word snob to wince a little at "blog" as a noun, let alone as a verb...)

But blog this is, and blog I do.

So it happens that after an amazing weekend at an amazing wedding (in ridiculous and insufficient summary: kid free, we travelled to Vermont for two men we love who bared their souls for the chance to be together, who bought a perfect house in an idyllic vista in a state that 9 months later enabled them to marry... on a weekend with blue skies and high clouds... covered bridges and food and food and drinks and a woman named Betty with countless gifts, and a man named Jay and a B&B with an abundance of porcelain dogs, and candles lit in little white bags, a hoe-down and a cow cake and live music and hiking and a tram and champagne and bonfires and dad-forged rings and friends old and brand new and every single person generous and joy-filled...) I needed something to blog about. I thought it would be that wedding.

But then all the furor around Obama speaking to elementary school kids came into my sight line. And like so much anti-Obama fury, I needed to know what it was about. I needed to understand it. And I really, honestly, could not figure it out. I read, and I read, and I searched and I read and I was dumbfounded.

Apparently, Obama speaking to children, and public schools broadcasting that speech, was threatening. He would indoctrinate. He wants us communists and socialists and he would start by controlling the minds of the smallest among us.

So, with son home not-so-sick from school (as I was nursing a three-day hangover born of carousing, it appears he was nursing a three-day hangover born of grandparental indulgences. But I digress), we watched it.

He is 9. And to him, every word made sense. Pretty standard American values and honor and all that - bootstraps and effort and the future. Stay in school. Wash your hands.

And at night, that same night, Sebastian (the 9YO son) had a pile of work sent home from school. And he needed to do it. And he complained and he griped and he might've slammed a book shut and got sent to his room. And maybe he had to take dinner in his room because we were STILL a little hung-over and Not Having Any of That.

And later, when he wanted to read himself to sleep, I said, "No. One better. Here. Watch the President's speech again."

And he was... well... (really) excited to "get" to do so.

So I handed him the laptop and he stretched out in his top bunk with the cat. Five minutes later he called "Mom, I am going to pause it and get a pencil and a piece of paper if that's OK."

Really.

And it was (of course it was), and he did.

And he took notes. On his own:

Every single one of you has something that you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer.

You cannot drop out of school and drop into a good job.

The future of America depends on you.

If you quit on school, you're quitting on yourself. You're quitting on your country.

There is no excuse for not trying.

You make your own future.

And the stuff he wrote down - that stuff - a lot of it was in the NYT coverage of That Same Speech.

I do the indoctrinating in this house.

And thank you, Mr. President, for driving home all of my most important points.

Lottery

My daughter's soccer game had just ended and she was hanging upside-down on some playground equipment when I checked my phone for email messages.  

When it buzzed that new messages were loaded, I looked, and laughed out loud at a message my friend had posted in reply to my Facebook status "off to the public school pre-k lottery, wish me luck."  The friend had replied "they're lotterying off pre-schoolers?  I'll take two!"  

The message was from Andy, one of my oldest friends, and someone I would have always said would be a natural dad.  Among many other things, Andy is gay.  He and his partner seriously consider adoption, but live in Florida - which presents new levels of stickiness to what is already not a simple proposition.

My daughter heard me laugh, stopped what she was doing, and came over.  She asked why I laughed.  

So I told her.  

Soon talking myself into something of a hole, I ended up explaining all of it - the comment, what it meant, why he would say it, who his partner is, what gay is. All of it. In about 6 minutes, to a six-year-old, while we walked.

I explained that 'gay' ("You may have heard of it, in regards to gay marriage?") is in your wiring - that it's part of who you eventually are, as a grown up - and not anything you control on your own.

While I endeavored to explain gay marriage and adoption, she was baffled at why any of this would be controversial. (Since I addressed that a little, too, in the six minutes, and since we have adopted children in our family.) I was impressed that she was nonplussed, and compassionate in her response over all.

But then she said, "My friend has a friend who is gay. She said her cousin calls him that because he likes girl things."

Wait. No. That isn't what I meant.

I launched a more complicated explanation about how it isn't your job to declare someone else anything, and that while it is a fine thing to be - or rather, to figure out you are - it is bad  to use In That Way, that while someone calling you, Annabeth, a "girl" would be  silly and obvious and not an insult, "gay" isn't like that, and it isn't ours to claim since we don't live in it. That sometimes, it is used meanly to say that a boy isn't being 'boy' enough, and that ultimately that's just an insult to girls - because - so what? Why would being like a girl ever be bad?

Which is a long-winded way to say that, after a number of twists and turns as we walked around a soccer field, I gave Annabeth the short, scaled down version of a Judith Warner essay I learned ran last week.

It has always been bizarre to me that the worst thing you can accuse a boy of being is anything feminine.  It is a completely fabricated cultural construct that, as Judith says much more eloquently in her essay, a boy existing anywhere outside the narrowly defined fraternity boy patriarchy myth is made somehow "less."  

There are still so many scary double-standards in how we view gender, and what our kids face on the playground away from their presumably more enlightened parents.

I want the world to be safe for my kids to be whoever they are.  It's that simple.  For sexual orientation to be an after-thought, and a pre-adolescent non-issue for all children (given the hyper-sexualization of girls, and the gender fault lines evident in a walk through Toys R Us, this is difficult in the best of circumstances.)  They should have the freedom to play, to develop skills in line with interests.  To have quiet crushes without pressure to "go with" someone as early as fourth grade.

Of course I like living in a world where my daughter's soccer game has all the merit of her brothers' lacrosse game, where she can imagine she can be anything at all she wants to be... and I cringe at the idea that my sons might be judged harshly any time one steps outside of a very specifically defined box.  

As Bethy said, "They're just being them - and if you're being you, why would you care?"

Exactly.   

 

Another article on the related topic; homophobia and bullying and tragically, another death.  Tolerance is an urgent message for our children.  This matters.