Mothering daughters, mothering sons

My seven year old son is obsessed with Star Wars. I don’t know how it happened, and frankly, I don’t understand the attraction myself. But I suppose I have encouraged him, much the way I encourage all of my children’s hobbies, interests and fixations – short of hurting another person. And yet, the other day, as he watched the Empire Strikes Back for the zillionth time, I looked around our house, at the different creations of my son and my daughters, and I couldn’t help notice how “gendered” it all was, despite myself. My son with the sticks, the wood, hoards of cardboard boxes and rocks around his room and around the yard, plus all the Luke Skywalker and Spiderman paraphernalia that I can’t even remember buying him (when did I become that commercial?). Then I look at my daughters’ room, with the drawings, clay, hairpieces and dolls. For sure they both have lots of books and games – although my son prefers books on snakes and spiders. And their rooms are all equally messy, and it is an equal struggle to get my children to pick up after themselves. Nonetheless, the differences in their play habits are very striking.

My seven year old son is obsessed with Star Wars. I don’t know how it happened, and frankly, I don’t understand the attraction myself. But I suppose I have encouraged him, much the way I encourage all of my children’s hobbies, interests and fixations – short of hurting another person. And yet, the other day, as he watched the Empire Strikes Back for the zillionth time, I looked around our house, at the different creations of my son and my daughters, and I couldn’t help notice how “gendered” it all was, despite myself. My son with the sticks, the wood, hoards of cardboard boxes and rocks around his room and around the yard, plus all the Luke Skywalker and Spiderman paraphernalia that I can’t even remember buying him (when did I become that commercial?). Then I look at my daughters’ room, with the drawings, clay, hairpieces and dolls. For sure they both have lots of books and games – although my son prefers books on snakes and spiders. And their rooms are all equally messy, and it is an equal struggle to get my children to pick up after themselves. Nonetheless, the differences in their play habits are very striking.

I’m sure I’ve encouraged it. Like I said, if my child has an interest that does not involve someone else’s pain – (or emptying our entire bank account) – my attitude is generally, go for it. So when my daughter expresses interest in drawing, I help her make time and make sure she has proper pencils. And when, at the library, my son asks for books on lizards, I think it’s a wonderful thing – after all, he’ll be learning to read. But yes, I admit, after six months of listening to my son beg for Star Wars videos, I finally caved in. I never bought my daughters a special set of videos that way. Perhaps they never had such a strong passion about one. More likely, they never nudged the way he did. That is the part that troubles me most: that I unwittingly encouraged my daughters to give up, to hear “no” and accept that. When my son heard “no”, he was unmoved. My daughters perhaps back off more easily, and in my own passive way, I allow that to happen.

I swore I would never be that kind of parent. That I would never treat my children differently based on gender, that I would never encourage my girls to be weak-minded, dependent, feeble, or passive. I’m not sure if I am. Perhaps I am simply sitting back a bit and letting them turn out the way they want to turn out. But the idea that this sort of “natural” outcome is so differentiated leads me to believe that it is not natural but an outcome of society. After all, my son saw Star Wars at his friend’s house, and in shops and on TV commercials. And images of “girlness” are so abundant that I imagine if I were to be absent from my daughters’ lives for ten years, they might come out looking like Barbie. In short, I feel like my children are being culturally constructed much more powerfully than I can resist myself. And my attempts to let them be as they want to be have led to this state where they are much more “boy” or “girl” and much less “kid” than I had hoped for.

But really, what am I supposed to do about that exactly? Force my son to not watch Star Wars, not go to his friends’ house, not have interests? Or perhaps I should be forcing my daughters to love Star Wars and spiders the way their brother does? It doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t want to force anything. I want them to just be. But why does being have to be so…predictable?

I’m searching for a different answer. I thought about the idea of resistance. That I should be teaching my kids to resist the consumer culture which has such a strong interest in forming their little beings as predictable purchasers. But it is such a hard task. Teach them to not want toys, to not watch tv commercials – to not watch TV! It’s a dream. We actually tried it for around a year, but it didn’t matter much. They went to friends’ houses, we passed video stores – and, to my surprise, in preschool, they actually watch videos every day! My five-year old daughter knows all about Quasimodo and explained the story to me that she “learned” in school. So, yes, fighting the consumer culture is just a losing battle.

Teaching them to be critical of what they see is another matter. But even that has its challenges. Like the time they watched Beauty and the Beast over my objections, but I insisted on pointing out that it is hard to “love” someone who hurts and imprisons you. I didn’t actually say, “Beauty is a classic abused woman,” but I tried to talk to my kids as we watched, to point out the unrealistic and overly romanticized aspects of the story. At one point, my ten-year old daughter simply said, “Mommy, can you please stop?” I’ve heard that so many times already. Usually when I bring up a gender issue. Like why Cinderella must have a prince to save her (“Mommy, stop”) or why in Toy Story there is only one girl toy, and she is Little Bo Beep who is in love with the main character, Woody (“Mommy, please stop.”). Uphill battles.

So I feel like, if I try too hard, I am going to lose them in the other direction. If I don’t try at all, I may lose them period. If I simply “let them be”, I thought I would be doing okay. Until I realized that I’m giving into cultural forces which are stronger than me. So I try to offer glimpses of resistance. And my daughter is about ready to throw things at me.

I suppose the bottom line is that I have to let them go through their own processes. And if, as part of that process, my son needs to be Luke Skywalker and my daughter needs to be Belle, I suppose I have to let that happen. I keep thinking about the time when they were each around one and a half, learning to climb stairs. I remember thinking how this is the most terrifying thing in the world, and each time, in turn, I couldn’t imagine there would ever actually come a day when I would allow them to climb stairs when I wasn’t around. Things change quickly. But I remember, too, thinking that they have to learn eventually, and the only way for them to learn is to do it themselves. It would have been easier for me to simply carry them up. But that’s not how life works. I had to let them do it themselves. So, like any good parent, I stood a few steps behind them, with my hands a few inches from their bottoms – not supporting, not touching, not doing for them. Just providing the cushioning for when they were to fall. That is my metaphor for parenting. Being the net, the cushion. I can’t do anything for them, I can’t go through their processes for them. All I can do it be there to catch them so they don’t hurt themselves. But they have to learn to climb all by themselves, and that’s the way life goes.

So I’ll continue to back off, let them draw, play with dolls, or build play rocket ships, as the mood takes them. Of course, I don’t know if I’ll ever stop commenting on videos – sometimes, I just can’t help myself. I guess it depends how insistent my daughter gets. Maybe what I really need to do is be so annoying that she will allow her passion to explode. I suppose that would be a good moment in a way. Ironic as it sounds, I will wait for her to get so irritated by me that she fully asserts herself against me. Good moment, funny that way.