All The Girls Are Reading It

Children do not constitute anyone's property: 

they are neither the property of their parents nor even of society. 

They belong only to their own future freedom."

 — Mikhail Bakunin

Years ago just after my son started Sunday school, he came home one day and whispered conspiratorially to me, "Noah has two moms."  Then he leaned back and watched my reaction.

Instead of giving him one, I leaned in close and said, also in a whisper, "so do you."

He thought for a moment, scrunching up his face. "Oh. You’re my mom, and also I have a bio mom." I nodded. He nodded. He filed it away and moved on, the way he always does.  The world handed him new information and he just quietly made room for it.

Lately he's stopped using gender-specific pronouns. Everyone is "they" or "them." Sometimes I lose track of who he's talking about mid-story, which he finds hilarious and I find mildly chaotic. But I love his choice. It tells me something about how he sees people: as people, first, before anything else.

Remember Scholastic book fairs? They're still exactly that great.  Core memories every day.  Right now my library is having one.   And at my school, which sits in an absolute  book desert — no bookstores or libraries anywhere in walking distance — they're not just cutesy fun. They're a lifeline to new books and new ideas.

Every time I host a fair, I buy my son books.  I make him a silly video first, walking through each table and display, narrating everything in my most enthusiastic librarian voice. I remind him, every time, that yes, he can choose any books he wants and no, I am not buying him more posters even when there's something he absolutely loves because he still has posters from two years ago that haven't been put up yet. 

He finds this very funny. I find this very accurate.

This time after he watched my video, he said only, "all the girls are reading the Powerless books."

Not, "hey, can I get the Powerless series?" Not "I would like those, please." But: "all the girls are reading that series."

All the girls are reading this, apparently. Go Lauren!

I just felt, deeply, that it was going to be a moment.

"Oh, really? Do you think it's any good?" I asked.

He shrugged. "All I know is that all the girls are reading it."

"Well." I paused. This felt strange — not how I'd raised him. He's always had full latitude in his reading choices. I don't really care what he reads, as long as it's age-appropriate. Ish.  "I can bring them home and you can read them, and let me know what you think."

He shrugged again. "Ok."  He was nonchalant.  Cool.  Thirteen.

The books are now at home, on his desk. Waiting. He'll read them, or he'll move them to the TBR pile on his bookshelf, or they'll just sit there. I'm not going to push.

But I've been thinking about that shrug. About the particular shape of a kid who uses "they" for everyone but just couldn't say "I want those books." About how we can raise a child to be open and expansive and free, and then watch the world hand them a smaller box anyway — quietly, the way middle school does everything, like a rumor passed in the hallway.

I don't think he was ashamed, exactly. I think he just didn't have the language yet for "I want this but I'm not sure I'm supposed to." Which is funny in its way, because he has pronouns for everyone else, just not permission for himself to be himself quite yet.

He'll get there. He always does — he just quietly makes room, files it away, and moves on. He's been doing it his whole life: two moms, gender-neutral pronouns, and now a fantasy series that apparently all the girls are reading.

I know who he is. A kid who recalibrates, who makes room, who moves through the world with more grace than he knows. He filed it away and moved on the day he learned he had two moms. He'll file this away too.

Middle school, though? Middle school is just going to be middle school. 

I work there. 

I know.