Girly-girl
For those of you who know me only by blog (and there ain’t that many of you - I know how few folks read this thing!), there are a few key characteristics of me that impact this entry. I’m not a girly-girl - I hated dolls as a kid, wouldn’t be caught dead in pink, and my idea of a great afternoon in college was getting muddy playing rugby and finishing off the day with a rousing round of bawdy songs and beer. My knees can no longer handle the rugby thing, but I’d much rather be out fishing/hiking/camping (and drinking beer, though I tend to pass the bawdy songs by) than doing anything that requires me to wear something frilly.
I figured when I had a daughter that I’d introduce her to all of the great virtues of being a tomboy. Sure, she’d have teddy bears, but she’d also play with footballs. At the moment she wears a lot of pink, but face it, there aren’t that many other colors available out there for ten month old girls. (I’m not so out there as to dress her in boy clothes. . . somehow I’m not comfortable putting her in a sweatshirt with little toy trucks on it.)
For Christmas Cora got all sorts of neat stuff. And she’d been playing with it all happily - gender-neutral stuff like stacker cups and Elmo balls and stuffed bunnies (hey, my nephews got the same stuffed bunnies). Then my neighbor showed up with one last Christmas present for her. It sat, unopened, for a couple of hours: Cora really doesn’t get the present thing yet. Finally my curiousity got the best of me and I prodded her to open it. Meaning, I mostly opened it and she played with a piece of the paper. Inside was a baby doll. One with a hard plastic head, plastic hands and feet, dressed in all pink. The very kind of thing that I wouldn’t have anything to do with as a kid, and teased my little sister unmercifully about. In the wondeful karma of life, however, my daughter has adopted this baby doll as her favorite toy. She often picks it up and carries it around, dives into it if it’s on the floor, pets its head. . . My vision of her future as a truck driving/motorcycle-riding/neurosurgeon has suddenly been clouded - suddenly the mist forms into a perfectly coifed, minivanner who is wildly successful running a company that makes Baby Einstein tape knockoffs. (OK, so that that’s not such a bad vision - do you know how popular those Baby Einstein tapes are?)
We’re guessing she might think it’s a baby that’s littler than she is. She’s often watched other babies and tried to interact with them. Maybe this is just a smaller baby from the nursery. Or maybe she’s pretending to be like her mommy and daddy, in which case she has some odd ideas of how we care for her, as she picks up her baby doll by the collar of its shirt.
Whatever the explanation, my utopian vision of a gender-role-blind child has been cracked. It turns out that there might be some kernel of truth to the girls will be girls and boys will be boys idea: my daughter will earn her own sense of what’s right for her as a little girl, and her poor mother will just have to live with it, and maybe get used to the idea of little baby dolls. Just so long as she doesn’t want to become a ballerina. (smile)
10 comments January 1st, 2003