Friday, April 7, 2006

Dum dum da dum... Here's the link to my Fussy story.... 7:21:57 PM     comment [] trackback []

Crossing the Aisle First things first:  my profile of Mrs. Kennedy (that's Fussy to you) ran today in the Santa Barbara Independent. Whoohoo!  It should be online soon; their site seems to run behind the print edition.  If you happen to know of Santa Barbarans doing fascinating things, shoot me an email and I'll see if the paper has any interest.  I've written two of these short profiles now, and find them fun and challenging to write (capturing a boring person is hard in just 500 words, so if the person has anything going on, imagine the difficulty.) Tonight we went to Dido's school play. There's not much more endearing than a bunch of 2-5 year olds very sincerely putting on a Shakespeare play, and tonight's production of "The Tempest"did not disappoint.  It represented a major victory for my son, who, for the first time, managed to get through the whole show without starting to cry and needing to come offstage to find me and his dad.  He played the Wind, responsible for blowing the ship off course during the title storm.  In his role, he had to do a lovely Wind dance, and (his favorite part, I think) corral three smaller children who were his co-Winds.  As much as he is plagued by stage fright sometimes, he is very good at telling others what to do, and I think he had a blast (I'm judging this by the happy smiles afterward and the entirely overstimulated failure to go to sleep until 9 o'clock experience we had upon returning home.)  Going to the play reminded me, as it always does (they do these plays, extremely elaborate, highly costumed, well-adapted, musical plays, three times every school year) how  much I really do love my preschool. I think I can safely say it's a truth that any parent would say that no school is perfect.  There's always something wrong.  But our little preschool fires on most cylinders, most of the time.  One of the key challenges (read: potential landmines) of enrolling your progeny is, of course, the other parents.  You get a whole new set of "friends", whether you want them or not. And again, at our school, the parent group is really pretty great.   The cynic in me would say that finding a mix of people who actually interest you and you don't think are jerks is harder in L.A. than elsewhere, but that's probably just naive.  In any case, these people (ruthlessly selected to get along with one another, I suspect, by the director of the school who maintains iron-fisted and entirely charming control) tend to play nicely, parent conscientiously, and get involved, but not too, in the life of the school. But tonight I was reminded of an enormous divide that exists in our little utopia.  Girl moms, and boy moms.  We might as well be red staters and blue staters for all the interaction that exists between the two camps.  Willful segregation by gender among the kids seems to start around 3-4; before that, it seems less of an issue. But by the time your kid is one of the big kids, meaning, interested in going home to others' houses after school to play, insisting on seeing school friends on the weekend, generally shanghai'ing your social life, he (or she) likely only wants to see friends of the same sex.  And so, I don't really know the girl moms. There are one or two for whom I have felt such an affinity that I've made the effort to get to know them a bit, and at the beginning of the year, I nearly succeeded in having a couple of girl playdates.  But that plan was nixed, summarily, by Dido.  Not happening,  not at his house. Girls don't like guns, or Star Wars, and therefore, aren't necessary.  (I exaggerate slightly.  There are girls he plays with, girls who don't go to the same school as he does, whose mothers are my dear friends, and therefore, he has to play with them, whether he likes it or not.  One of them can always be convinced to play pirates, the other is the younger sister of his oldest friend and thinks he walks on water, and the third he has an enormous crush on; they play Simba and Nyala.  If you don't know what that means, you don't have small children.) I never thought of myself as a boy mom. When I contemplated having children, in my fantasy, they were always girls.  I thought that other women, stronger, more athletic, perhaps, looking vaguely like models in the J. Crew catalog (if any catalog featured 35-40 year old models) would mother the boys. Best laid plans.  I love having a son. I felt, quite sincerely, during my last pregnancy, that I'd be thrilled to have another one.  Getting a girl wasn't so much a bonus as a happy surprise, proof that parenting a second child would present new unknowns (as though that wouldn't have been the case with a different boy--of course it would have.)  My friends with two boys tell me that it's easy for me to say I would have been thrilled with another male child;  they do seem to feel they're missing out, and I understand this, especially now that I have a girl. Girls are different, or, at least, I perceive them (and the Babe) that way.  I relate to her (probably, again, in a way that has much more to do with my fantasy than with her reality) as though I know her mind clearly, while Dido's can sometimes be inscrutable.  Sometimes, I find him alien, and then he surprises me by reacting or acting exactly as I've thought or hoped he would.  The girl moms seem, often, more girly.  They seem to cluster together.  I feel, emanating from their tight circles, the same kind of anxious exclusion that I experienced throughout my childhood, wanting to belong, and not quite knowing how.  The boy moms, on the other hand, seem more approachable.  Friendlier.   Cooler, not in the sense of  hip, but in the sense of ...relaxed.  And perhaps, this is all, only, because I know their kids a bit better than the little girls, who, by the way, I now find somewhat unknown.  Meanwhile, my daughter is nearly talking.  (She in fact does talk, but very few of us understand what she's saying, much to  her irritation.)  She's walking, when she feels like it.  And, I suspect, she's pretty girly.  She loves flowers.  She loves books.  She's really energetic and active, but also able to sit still.  My children will not be in preschool together; when she starts in a year and a half, or so, Dido will already be in kindergarten, at a different school. So--will I then be one of the girl moms?  And what will that mean? 4:34:25 AM     comment [] trackback []