electric boogaloo

We are sort of mellow about gender roles. There’s that wonderful Woody Guthrie song that goes

Why can’t a grandpa be a grandma? Tell me why oh why?
Same reason your daddy is not your mama
Goodbye goodbye goodbye

That’s about as deep as it gets around here. The boys know that boys have different anatomy and ladies are generally the only ones who can have babies, but other than that we haven’t really ever clarified what boys are supposed to do or like or want or be. It helps too that our kids aren’t in school right now and we have no television and generally insulate ourselves from the outside world, partly because we’re antisocial jerks (me) and partly because we’re just lame (Kevin).

So it’s turned out to be sort of an interesting social experiment. In the absence of any overt pressure to be “all boy”, what does a boy act like?

Observations/results so far:
You end up with a boy who is a dancing swan showing off his ballet moves one minute, and blowing things up the next. Nicolaus loves things that are glittery and jewel-encrusted, has already picked out some lovely sandals at Target that he hopes I’ll buy him for summer, and plays with babies and animals and really can’t decide which is prettier: unicorns or peguseses.

But then he’ll spend an entire day playing this thing where see? There’s two brothers. And one of their parents was an Indian and the other was a white settler, and so one of the brothers is Indian and one is a white settler and so together! They fight evildoers on both sides! Holy shit, you guys. What they do to the bad people they capture? The Lone Ranger would not approve.

For starters, they shrink the bad guy down to the size of a plastic toy generic gi joe-type guy. It’s their only army man toy, and it has no arms because of an inexplicable design choice where the guy is supposed to have interchangeable arms. What the fuck? My mother in law bought it, and even she does not know why. It came with all these little parts and several arms, which are all now missing. So all we have is an armless dude. Which was perfect though because it turns out that Nicolaus has a magical RING, which looks suspiciously like something that a pre-teen girl might buy at Claire’s, that REMOVES YOUR ARMS. The arm removal takes place after the ring shrinks you down so you can’t beat anybody up. It’s all very intense.

Sometimes he wears gigantic butterfly wings out in public. When people whisper “Hee hee look at the butterfly,” he is wholly offended. A butterfly! Do I look like a sissy?? And he defiantly declares, “I am not a butterfly. I am a FAIRY.”

He’s king of the fairies in fact, on account of this crown and also thanks to being several hundred times larger than most fairies.

Which was excellent when we went to the playground with my nephew last week. The butterfly wings caused much confusion because, like many people do, all the kids wrongly thought he was a butterfly. So my nephew took up the cause, and marched around telling everyone, “My cousin is a GIANT FAIRY.”

And Nicolaus nodded and was very pleased. I’m writing this down because whether both of them turn out gay or straight or what, that’s going to be awesome to tell him about when he’s older.

But his favorite book at the library is The History of Weapons. It’s a picture book that shows in great detail all of the weapons from ancient Greece and India and China and so on and the best way to get him to be good at the post office is to bring that book and a bunch of strips of paper and tell him to sit down and mark all his favorite pages. He’ll tell you which knives are for cutting and which are for stabbing and which are for… well, anyway. Boy stuff.

The experiment continues with Graham. His favorite color is bright magenta, also known as pink. He steals my flowery headbands and wears them. And as much as he loves cars and robots and building and wrecking, the other day my mom took him to the Walmart toy section to buy him a dump truck, and instead he came home with a baby doll wearing a lavendar hat with little hearts. It moves and coos and says Mama. He named her Campy Ard, and he and Nicolaus have been taking excellent care of her. Admittedly, they care for her between periods of neglect that would warrant a call to CPS, but it’s not because they’re boys. It’s because they’re little kids. That’s why everyone’s against 5 and 2 year olds having children. They make sweet but crappy parents.

Last night Nicolaus showed Graham how to change Campy’s diapers. Nicolaus adores babies, and is as sweet and attentive as any little girl would be.

But then again, last night I heard him say, “Graham, there’s something about her that’s not 100% baby. I think she might be mostly baby but a tiny part warrior. The next time people are attacking the city, we’ll have to report to the baby and find out what weapons she wants us to use.”

So there you go. You can take the overt societally-generated preconceived gender roles out of the boy, but you can’t take the boy out of the overt societally-generated preconceived gender roles.