Our beloved neighbors, the B's, handed down a princess costume for Ruby a little while back. I'll be confessing to them through this post that we kept it in a closet for a bit and then took it to the Goodwill store. Ruby never even saw it.
If she had, she'd have loved it, of course. She probably wouldn't have taken it off for two months. It was sooooooo pretty: white and yellow with glittery layers of chiffon forming the long voluminous skirt, puffed sleeves, not a stitch of a natural fiber to be found anywhere. This is the kind of dress that makes little girls go apeshit because it makes them feel like a princess or a fairy or whatever. I remember having a couple of the old school versions of these from the Sears catalog when I was little. I wore the blue one one until the silver fell off the sequins and the tulle skirt was a rag. Girls love these getups because they feel really special in them, like a magical creature of light that we all probably all felt like when we entered this world but have subsequently trained ourselves to believe is childish.
So I have nothing against the fairy princess dress. The problem is the boys. I kept thinking about bringing that dress out of the closet in front of Bennett, who's the same age as Ruby. Because they're twins, they have a pretty well-developed sense of material justice. Not quite "an eye for an eye" but more like "if he gets an eye, then I better be getting one too." So if I bestowed this beautiful, dramatic, sparkly, shiny, colorful fantasy on Ruby but told Bennett that it wasn't for him, only girls like Ruby, what does that tell Bennett about the specialness of boys? He doesn't understand yet the cultural norms we've developed based on gender. He would just get that he is less . . . special, sparkly, beautiful, colorful.
It reminds me of a mom whose son wanted to dress up as Hannah Montana for Halloween a few years ago. Really, how can you blame him? She's one of the most exciting characters out there for kids. When we tell our little boys that all the lightness, magic and beauty is only for the girls, I think we're doing them a real disservice. In fact, if I was a little guy, I think I'd be jealous and mad about it. What do the guys get to make them feel special when they dress up? Not much. They get trained to be little tough guys, before they're anything like tough. This Halloween, I looked around. Cowboy . . . Jedi . . . zombie . . .Transformer . . . and, no lie, a four year-old pimp with fake money coming out of his hat band. And people wonder where misogyny comes from?
Bennett's costume did actually manage to fulfill an almost life-long dream (he's two and a half). For at least a year, he's been obsessed with Humpty Dumpty: books, videos, acting out his brief story thirty or forty times in a stretch. We thought it would go away after he learned to walk really well, but apparently that's not what his fascination is about. So I found him a shiny, colorful plush Humpty costume that made him into the eggman himself, with a little hole for his face and a tiny red hat on top.
When I revealed it to him, he was speechless, and remained so for the better part of a half hour. At one point, he and I were sitting on the bed so he could see himself in our mirror. He turned to me, and in the quietest, most reverent little voice, said: "I wanna break."
So Bennett managed to feel his version of magical at Halloween. I'm not sure how to do that for him on a regular basis, the way little girls can with their trunks full of princess costumes. For now, my plan is to do what I always do when I don't know the answer to a parenting question: I'm gonna kick that shiny can down the road.
