Girls pee out of their butts. (part one)

(written 6/2009)

I’m a babysitter.  I watch a 1 year old and his 3 year old brother when he’s not at daycare.  I’m constantly watching their training in gender and sexuality.  Neither has yet noticed (or verbalized in the 3 year old’s case) much about race or class.  Luckily their parents are sociologists, so maybe they’re better off than other kids on the block.  But the 1 year old is always playing with his penis when his diaper’s off and the 3 year old is constantly in dialogue about who’s a girl and who’s a boy because the kids in his class are 4 and have already been taught that it matters.

About a month ago, he told me that his friend at school was a girl.  I asked him how he knew and all he could tell me that she was yellow and he was green on their name board at daycare, so that means she’s a girl and he’s a boy.  His little brother, age 1, has a playmate come over a few mornings a week.  I watch both of them, together.  When I change her diaper, he stares at her vulva.  He doesn’t ask questions in his language of sounds; he just stares as closely as she lets him, and silently.

The other day, the 3 year old told me that I am a girl while he was in the bathroom watching me sit on the toilet.  I asked him how he knew:  "Boys stand up and girls sit."  Me:  "To pee?"  Him: "Yep."
I then asked him if people who sit down to pee have penises.  He said that boys have penises and girls have butts.  Sure, his perspective is that female bodies he's experienced do not have penises like he does, so it's a logical step to assume that they just pee out of their butts. So I explained to him that if you don't have a penis, you have a vulva (I wasn’t sure whether to say vulva or vagina, so I went for vulva).  He smiled and said, ohhhhhh.  I asked him to repeat it. He did.

And now as I’m writing this, I come to the conclusion again that the connections classmates and tv shows and, often, families make between sex and gender create the complication for children.  Children learn at age one that they have a penis or vulva and like to play with it while they’re naked.  They learn with their eyes before language even comes to them; before they can ask questions about what they see.  Then by age 3, when their words have developed, they learn that girls are yellow and boys are green (or pink and blue) and that boys have penises and girls ‘don’t’ and that girls play with dolls and boy’s ‘don’t', etc..  I am constantly seeing (with every single child I babysit) this forced binary. Already at age 3 this child is wrongly being taught to bridge the disconnect between the body and gender.  He knows it doesn’t necessarily make sense.  But he’s listening very carefully to people around him to hear what’s 'right' about the world.  As long as they tell him the that the body and gender are related,  I will always be the girl babysitter with no penis.

(And I’m tired of hearing the ‘kids-who'll-stand-up-to-pee’ on the block tell him that his Hello Kitty stuffed animal is for girls.)

Life Crises

I haven't written for awhile because I was busy going through life crises (many of them). They come almost monthly now and are either induced by money (lack thereof) or aspiration or both. I've become increasingly tired of being unable to save money because of my thousands of dollars of loan debt from undergrad. I make enough to pay my bills, buy my groceries, and go out for drinks, but I just don't save anything. But I'm not willing to spend the rest of my twenties in NYC trapped in my apartment on the weekends drinking watered down whiskey. I'm trying to enjoy my time here before the 9-5 plague gets to me and fucks over my sleep schedule. So it's a catch-22. Either I stop enjoying myself now and start saving a mere $100 per month or spend that on making the rest of my twenties a good freaking time before I'm consumed by a job that gives me weekends off, 10 vacation days per year, and makes me wake up at 6am (impulsively on the weekends). So please, call me young and naive. I'm not willing to accept it.

Simultaneous Toddler Naps in a 2 bedroom apt.

So some days remind me how good I am at this job and that it is, indeed, a job that requires skills. This is how it all happened: A (19 mo. old) was scheduled to come over to D's (17 mo. old) house at 12:30 to take a nap in his parent's bedroom (in the pack-and-play). While D started to wind down around 12:15, I set nap-mosphere in the parents' bedroom for A and scooped up D, changed his diaper while his eyes were rolling back, popped in his pacifier and set him in his crib at just the right time that he fell right asleep. Ten minutes later, A comes in the door with her mom who passes her off to me, we read Go, Dog, Go! in the bed and sing a few songs before I convince her the pack-and-play is a nice place to sleep (she's a screamer) if you've got your very exciting music box playing "Edelwiess" in the background. With no complaints, she's out cold in 3 minutes.

a moment (love)

They knew one another quite well, now.  It had been years since they first met. Their bodies didn't jump at an unannounced touch.  Sitting beside one another, silent, in the small room, fore-arm to fore-arm, they read their respective books.  Sometimes, one might look up to reflect, and the other might take notice, and one set of eyes would move quickly to meet the others for a wordless glance.