Tutu update

Beckett has only worn his tutu outside the house a couple of times in the last few months. For a while, he was wearing it to bed each night but even that has slowed down. Two days ago he wore it to school and I arrived to find it in his cubby. “We had to take it off,” they told me. “It was cutting into his tummy. I think it’s too small.” I think it shrunk the last time we washed it, though it may also be the case that his tummy grew – I have recently found that shorts that fit last week don’t fit now. He has a purple tutu that I proposed as an alternative, but he insists pink is best. With the phase possibly ending, do we shell out for another? We will wait and see.

There is definitely a normal ebb and flow in kid phases and I am sure he would have stopped wearing it soon anyway. I was dismayed, however, when he told me last week that boys can’t be ballerinas. I told him that they absolutely can (two friends immediately had to tweet me that he is correct, that boys are danseurs and girls are ballerinas but they also both know that is absolutely not the point), but he is just beginning to understand that some people are boys and some are girls, and the world is suddenly shaking out into categories for him. I can fight it hard and show him examples of difference, but the world will soon trump me, to some extent. At least for a while. I heard recently that kids are such hardcore sorter categorizer types that they can’t usually make sense of something that doesn’t fit into those pre-made boxes until they are about 8 or 9. This may very well be why I enjoy teaching 3rd graders the most – they are right in the thick of figuring stuff out.

But I became suspicious when I heard my visiting father-in-law teasing Beckett-in-tutu. “Are you a GIRL? She’s a little GIRL!”

It is a whopping great miracle that I refrained from violence.

Beckett was confused more than hurt by this, especially since pronouns are something he has just been figuring out in the last couple of weeks. He corrected his grandfather, “No, I am a boy.” Later Wes asked his father not to do that again. If I ever see that happen again, I can’t be held personally responsible for my actions.

I mean, apart from just the hideous nature of teasing a toddler in such a tone, and apart from our desire to let the kiddo just be and do whatever for as long as he can until the world crashes in… Apart from all that… What the eff is wrong with being a GIRL??? Do people not realize how effed up it is to use the idea of being female as somehow funny and less? Ugh. It is the mothereffing 21st century, for God’s sake. Cut that shit out.

And so I think I know why his natural revelations on boy vs girl are being accelerated a bit. I don’t think it’s the world crashing in and I don’t think it’s kids at school. I think it’s far closer and more insidious. And it makes me want to run off and live in a cave with him to protect him from such soul-crushing bullshit.

I won’t. I am a realist above all else. This happens eventually. This is the way things go. My only recourse is to keep shouting as loud as I can that there are different ways of being apart from than those strict world-imposed categories. I will just keep on it until he is old enough to understand, and then he will discover that he has known it all along.