Because I Said So (27 page)

Kate is ready for kindergarten, and we go looking at schools. I like one a lot until I hear the teacher say to a kid who has just finished a drawing, “That’s a nice drawing, Mickey. Now put all the crayons away. And remember, the blue doesn’t go here.”

No control-freak teachers for my child. Been there, done that.

Let her put that blue crayon where the red one goes. I let her bite off bigger pieces than are humanly possible to eat. She will learn what she can and cannot chew. She will know if she needs to wear a jacket or not. I evoke Buddha’s definition of health: to eat when you are hungry and sleep when you are tired. I’m going with Zen.

At night I ask her to help me with dinner. When I was grow-C h a o s T h e o r y

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ing up, my mother shouted up at me every night, “Mary, make the salad.” It was not a request but an order, one I was loath to follow. For years, as an adult, I couldn’t bring myself to make a salad. I try a different approach with Kate. I say, “Okay, here’s what we need to do. We have to set the table, feed the animals, and make the stir-fry.” She opts to do the stir-fry. She chops the vegetables. Ginger, scallions, mushrooms. In a few years she will become a fairly accomplished cook.

After dinner we luxuriate in baths and I comb and braid her hair. One day Kate shows me a picture from a magazine. She announces that she wants to cut off her rich, thick, almost red hair; to wear overalls and become a tomboy. She is perhaps eight or nine. I am, well, looking at fifty. I have great plans for my little girl and that hair. There is a closet full of dresses, boxes of ribbons and barrettes.

For weeks I try to find reasons why she can’t cut her hair.

Then I hope she’ll just forget about it, but she doesn’t. “I want short hair,” she says, holding the picture in my face. Late one night I run this by Larry.

“She wants to cut off her hair.”

“It’s her hair,” he says.

We go to the beauty shop and Kate sits on the phone books from New York City’s biggest boroughs. How can she make such a big decision when she’s so small? Then I remember all the decisions that were made for me. I’ve brought a plastic bag, and as that lush, red hair cascades to the ground, I crawl on the floor, scooping her thick curls into the bag, which I still keep in a drawer.

But the situation grows complex. Kate is barred from a women’s washroom in a restaurant in Florida. In Alaska, when we have a run-in with a state trooper, he refers to Kate repeatedly as “son.”

“So, son . . .” I am walking down the street with a friend I hold dear and I tell her I am being tested. My daughter won’t put a dress on.

She’s cut off her hair. People think she’s a boy.

And my friend says, “One day Kate will look in the mirror and know she’s a knockout. Until then, let her be her own person.

And pick your battles. . . .”

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Pick my battles—that was good advice. And of course my friend was right.

“Okay, Kate, so you’re going to go to so-and-so’s party in jeans and a T-shirt. In that tie-dye shirt you made at summer camp.” The hair stays short. I grit my teeth. I make a decision then and there: She will be her own person. I will not run her life the way other people ran mine. I give up on the shoulds and shouldn’ts, on curfews and punishments. Our message to her becomes clear: The only thing that matters is truth and trust.

She’ll be admonished only for a lie.

In school she picks her own courses, her own friends. She decides when she’s ready to go to bed. We set limits but no strict rules. In fourth grade she wants to walk to school on her own. I make her a deal. There is a payphone at the entrance to the school. I go and get a roll of quarters. “Here’s what you do,” I tell her. “Every day when you get to school, put a quarter in that phone. Let it ring once so I know you’re safe, then hang up, and you keep the quarter. If you don’t call, I’ll be on my way to school.”

That year she has candy money in her pocket and I never have to chase her down.

She grows older. The hair grows back. We go shopping at Urban Outfitters and, with background techno music blaring, I let her pick out weird T-shirts with silver sequins and name brands emblazoned across the chest, jeans with rips on the butt. (I don’t even say, “Let’s buy a cheap pair of jeans and you can rip the butt yourself.”)

But she’s still a little girl—barely ten. I still tuck her in. One night I’ve just read to her and given her a backrub, and she turns to me and says, “Mommy, I love you more than anything in the world.”

“Really?” I say, my heart beating hard in my chest. “How come?”

“’Cuz you let me be what I want to be.”

“Oh yeah,” I say, my throat constricting. “Well, that’s all I wanted for you, really. Nothing more.”

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I place a kiss on her brow. I close the door behind me. Tears run down my face. Okay, that’s it. I did it.

Recently my daughter,
who will soon be graduating from high school, applied to become a peer counselor in her school, giving guidance to entering freshmen. She was asked to name her strengths and weaknesses. “My weakness,” she wrote, “is that I am a sloth.” She described the lazy sloth, munching mangoes in its tree. It only comes down once a week to go to the bathroom.

That, of course, is not my child at all, but we laughed over the description. My life is another minefield now, different from the one I grew up with—one of dirty laundry I must tiptoe over, a parrot who tosses her food on the floor, a kitchen of dishes in the sink. The signs of people eating, sleeping, in a hurry, with too many things to do and not enough time to do it all. I revel in the mess. One day soon my house will be neat again, and oh how I will miss it.

Are Hunters Born or Made?

A n a C a s t i l l o

I was in the kitchen
one late afternoon last summer when my son stopped by. Actually, he was moving back home.

The first year of college I had put him in the dorm. (That sounds as if I had him incarcerated. The truth is that I had suggested, in no uncertain terms, that he stay in a dorm.) Never mind that the university he chose is exactly two blocks from the high school he attended, and both schools are exactly five quick “L”

train stops away from our place. It was time, his mother felt, for him to take the next step toward independence. His and mine.

Just like when I weaned him from the bottle and potty trained him right after his second birthday. Now we do it,
Mi’jo. Y ya
.

You might say it has always been a matter of unilateral decision-making in our family of two. “Such a feminist having to raise a boy!” was the customary response to my status as a mother, as if there were a secret feminist agenda to procreate a race of Amazons.

This was not true, of course. I raised my son much the same way that I would have raised a daughter, conscious not to fall into gender stereotypes. You monitor TV programs, reading materials, music, activities, and playmates.

While he was growing up I took writing residencies around the country. At the end of one school year and in receipt of a letter inviting me to join the faculty of some department in a university across the country, off we went. Mama packed, made
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arrangements, a trail of furnishings and personal belongings left in storage rentals strewn along the way; I sold and bought things as needed. I found new schools, encouraged friendships, signed him up for a basketball team at a boys club in one town, sent him off to basketball camp in another, taught him to ride a bike at five, drive at sixteen, slow dance, shave, do his own laundry from the age of twelve, and, once, when he broke my French espresso pot while doing the dinner dishes with an attitude, I made him pay for it then and there. He never broke anything again.

We managed. He grew up; he’s got about six inches on me now. In high school he lived in his bedroom. He never ate. I was certain that my gaunt, dark—in mood as well as in pallor—child had been bitten by a vampire. But even vampires need to learn independence. He took this particular stage with him to the freshman dorm.

He didn’t care for the dorm that freshman year. He came home, he said, to shower. Apparently he didn’t like sleeping in the dorm much either: more often than not when I’d get up and walk past his old bedroom, I’d find the blankets on the bed making a much bigger, or more specifically, longer lump than
Mi’jo
’s little Boston terrier, who still slept there, possibly could.

What my son really wanted was his own apartment.

“That’s why I am putting you through college,” was the usual course of our brief exchanges that year. This way—or more precisely,
my
way—someday, with the right credentials, he’d get a job, and thereby support himself. Then he could afford his own place.

Nevertheless, the following autumn, at the start of his second year of college, he found a roommate with a job. They got an apartment in a neighborhood that I wish I could say would have caused any parent to worry—but then so would the neighborhood we have lived in for nearly seven years. Unlike the roommate’s mother, who immediately set herself to the task of redoing her son’s vacant bedroom in her own house and turning it into a sewing room for herself, I kind of lapsed into a period of domestic confusion. What now?

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He’d left behind his bedroom furniture, taking only the bed, as well as a spare dresser and futon that had been in the guest room.

During the following school year both my son’s former bedroom and the semi-plundered guest room remained in a perpetual state of suspension, the absence of their defining accoutrements giving the term “empty nest” literal meaning in my home.

Even the little dog, with its year-round shorthaired shedding, had moved out. (Actually, the dog’s departure had been upon my own insistence. One more opportunity for my son to learn responsibility, I believed.)

We had been separated many times during my son’s lifetime.

His father had maintained
Mi’jo
during all of his vacations and holidays. Weeks had passed during his childhood when I received no return phone calls.

But of course, this was different.

Have I mentioned yet that I teach at the same university my son attends?

He avoids my office. But not those of my fellow colleagues, from whom he’ll take classes or to whom he’ll look for guidance, at least with regard to his education. So I knew some things about his life during that second year. Meanwhile, with each rare visit home, he showed increasing signs of intentional disregard for the hygiene and other regimens strictly enforced during his upbringing—even commonsense rules like wearing gloves in mid-winter in Chicago—

so that one night he ended up in an emergency room with frostbit-ten hands. Most grating to a mother or to any reasonable, mature individual, he continued to refine his contrariness toward any and all opinions and advice I offered.

His junior year of college was coming up, and he was moving back in. I made it look like it was his idea. That is, once his roommate announced he couldn’t keep up with the rent and go to school, while my son, a full-time student, had a mother living all of a fifteen-minute train ride from campus, I did not have to point out the obvious.

Instead, I kept quiet. If the truth be known, I was starting to get used to prancing around in my
pantaletas
and skinny tees in
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the morning, once spring came and the gloom of a long, lonely winter was past me. Not that I didn’t miss my boy. The Good Son, that is—the one with the jagged front tooth and traces of baby fat around the middle and the Buster Brown haircut; the one with a forgiving nature who never understood why the girl cousin who was exactly his age (as well as size and weight) was so free with the back of her hand. He had no more wanted to give his girl cousin the back of his hand in return (which was his father’s advice on the telephone) than he wanted to receive one from her, or from anybody.

He had always been and, I assumed, would always be sensitive to others. We had never taken to yelling at home. He learned early on to respect my privacy and my property, as I always did his. For example, he would never have gone into my purse for lunch money. Instead, he would bring the bag to me, as he had been taught, so that I could dole out the dough. He grew up without paramilitary toys. (Prohibition of such gifts elicited some con-sternation on the part of the male family members, who obviously feared that the boy would miss an important aspect of his macho development.) Because I refused to pay for any toy with an implicit political dimension so counter to mine—meanwhile aware that out-and-out denial on my part would render my son an adolescent outcast—he had to buy his own PlayStation, which he got used from some other kid in a later stage of puberty.

He was, as I said, a person who was naturally sensitive, guided further toward being respectful, an independent thinker, responsible. Still, I noticed. It happened subtly: my son’s definite and undeniable enlistment on The Other Side.

Not that he just became a man—a natural process—but he became one to the fullest extent of the sociological and traditional meaning of gender. How and when it happened exactly I cannot say.

But by the time my son, about to start his third year in college, was moving back home, he had definitely become a guy, a dude of the highest rank. Public Enemy Number One for any girl looking for a steady beau and believing that in my sensitive, introspective son she might have found him. By the time it became clear that he had all the
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requisite traits to allow him full lifetime membership into Guyness, she’d realize she was in mined territory.

When a woman gets together with a man, she has to work with what’s there, in terms of the taming process. But when she has issued him forth from her own womb, wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and waded down the river with him to find a place to raise him away from the Pharisees, a place where he might learn to value the gentler and more nurturing culture of women, where household chores are an equal division of labor, where men always put the toilet seat down, brush their teeth before coming to bed (if not take a shower), and not only listen with marked interest to their companion after the perfunctory question, “How was your day?” but actually care, she does not expect ever to stand in her kitchen and hear the following proclamation: “Oh yeah, no doubt about it. I’m a hunter.”