Brown White Black

by Nishta J. Mehra

  We don’t want to pull back the front into a clip or a bow.

  * * *

  I think about how we were initially told that Shiv would be a girl. It’s a story that we recount with humor: He was being shy! or I guess the tech just wasn’t paying close attention! This, too, is a symptom of a culture that is uncomfortable with vagary or uncertainty, the idea that even a fetus in the womb might be misidentified, assigned the wrong sex or gender. We are so invested in the correctness of these designations, so troubled by the muddling of the waters.

  When you adopt, the baby’s sex is already determined by the time you match with a birth mother. Jill and I had not specified boy or girl when we registered with our agency, but for some reason I imagined us with a boy. Whenever I pictured us with a child, or had a dream with a baby in it, that baby was always male. When we heard, “It’s a girl!” I thought about whether my expectations or plans should change. We enlisted our friend Kym for hair help; black hair was not something either one of us had experience with, and we knew that it was an important matter. I planned to buy posters of Venus and Serena Williams for her room, because I wanted there to be strong black women for her to look at every day. We asked for gender-neutral clothes and bedding; we painted the nursery green as a way of resisting that whole pink situation. Both Jill and I had been girls who chafed under the aesthetic expectations placed on our gender, and while we knew we wouldn’t be able to give our daughter a blank canvas, we wanted to give her a wide palette.

  Then Shiv was born, and when I saw the doctor raise that taut red body into the air, the fact of his being a boy was subsumed into the larger miracle of his sudden emergence. In that moment, we were gobsmacked so completely by the fact that our child was finally here, an actual person, a baby we could hold, that we did not give much thought to what it would or should mean that we now had a son.

  Right away, we had to decide what conventions we would hold on to and which we would challenge or ignore. Did it matter if our son wore the pink-and-purple onesies with flowers and hearts that we’d already washed with baby-friendly, non-irritating laundry detergent? We kept those. But did it make sense to dress our son in the striped skirts and frilly, ruffled things that had been handed down to us by friends with older daughters? We gave those away, even though I didn’t see a reason for doing so beyond the socially conditioned response that it “felt weird.” Even though I knew that up until fairly recently, boys in this country wore dresses and gowns until they were five or six years old. Even though I knew that in many parts of the world, boys still wear dresses and skirts. Even though I knew that Shiv didn’t care, because all he wanted at that point in his life was food, sleep, a clean butt, and cuddles.

  “If we put him in that,” Jill said, pointing to a small pink sundress, “he’s going to hate us for it someday.”

  “Babe,” I replied, “someday he’s going to hate us anyway, no matter what we do.”

  But I took her point; it felt too far. To keep the less neutral, more explicitly “girl” clothes made sense in a vacuum but failed to take into consideration the world as it existed around our son. I could have pushed for a completely category- and boundaryless approach to Shiv’s clothes but worried that it would be more about proving a point or performing an experiment, two things that I didn’t want guiding our parenting choices. I also didn’t want to have to explain my parenting philosophy and position on gender norms every time we encountered a puzzled stranger, so I let that be reason enough to get rid of the explicitly girly clothes. Still—it irked me. I felt like I was giving in. It was a feeling that would soon become familiar.

  * * *

  As a baby, Shiv was mistaken for a girl a few times, mostly when I was wearing him in a sling or wrap and what was visible were his chubby cheeks and mound of dark curls. I fought back my reflex to correct passing strangers when they would say, “Oh, she’s beautiful!” because, you know, he was beautiful. And something about the urge to correct felt a little bit too much like reinforcing the notion that there is a set standard for “what a girl looks like” and “what a boy looks like.” When I thought we were having a girl, I was staunchly against affixing a (sometimes alarmingly large) bow to the head of an infant, as if to clearly stake territory for the correct team, like planting a flag on the moon. Why should it bother me if she’s mistaken for a boy? was now So what if people think he’s a girl?

  It was easy to think that when Shiv was just a baby and the lines were blurrier, when the reaction to wrong assumptions was no more than a shrug of the shoulders and a shared laugh if someone got my child’s gender wrong. People desperately want to know the gender of your baby, but they usually don’t go so far as to police the gender expression of that baby—after all, gender-neutral baby clothes do exist, a phenomenon that disappears after age one or two. With babies, there is not yet the threat of a gender-nonconforming child being seen as the reflection of a parent’s moral failing, a mistake in need of correction. There is not yet the threat of violence and intimidation—verbal, psychological, physical—against those who do not play by the rules.

  That threat started to creep in around the edges at age two, when Shiv went through a phase where he would ask us to paint his toes and fingernails because he saw us painting ours. (And also, let’s face it, because from the perspective of a kid who loves bright colors and attention, why wouldn’t you want to paint your nails?) Even though he was still a toddler, he encountered resistance, objections from all kinds of people in all kinds of places: our middle-aged neighbor John, who brings back gifts for Shiv whenever he goes to visit his family in China; Gloria, the security guard who sits at the entrance of Shiv’s grandparents’ neighborhood and who herself sports long neon acrylic nails; and the little girl at the library who asked my son, “Are you a girl?” to which he replied, “No, I a boy.” “But your fingernails are painted,” she insisted. “Only girls paint their fingernails.” Five years old and already toeing the party line.

  We’re the opposite of helicopter parents when it comes to things like climbing trees, getting dirty, using knives to help make dinner, but we’ve been doggedly careful about whom Shiv spends his time around: the school he attends, the babysitters we employ, the friends with whom he has playdates; we can afford that luxury of choice, and we’ve taken full advantage. I knew all along that we could control only so much, but still, I am dazzled by how fast the indoctrination has happened, how futile it was to think that we would ever keep him mostly away from this stuff when it is, in fact, the water we swim in.

  * * *

  When I taught eighth grade, I did a unit on media and pop culture; we examined TV commercials, magazine ads, song lyrics. At the start of the unit, I divided the students by gender and asked them to construct two lists—one for the “ideal man” and one for the “ideal woman,” by asking themselves, according to society, what does the ideal man or woman say, do, look like, care about, and so forth? They always worked eagerly on this task, talking excitedly in their separate groups. At the end, we compared their lists, which were, of course, basically identical. Then I would ask, “So where do you think these rules come from? Did anyone ever sit you down and tell you these things? How or when do you think you learned them?”

  The ideas we inherit, the ones we construct, and what is inherently true: These are like overlapping Venn diagrams, invisible and pervasive, coloring every interaction and reaction. Is it possible to untangle them, to know what we’re choosing versus what is really there? Probably not. But I still find myself wishing that as a society we could, as my students did, at least get a better look at the whole messy ball of string.

  * * *

  Shiv was about one month shy of turning three when he ran into my closet and declared, “I wanna wear a dress, Mama!”

  “You want to wear a dress?” I echoed. He’d never expressed this desire before. I thought maybe he meant a “towel dress,” which is what we call his postbath habit of asking one of us to wrap and tuck his towel around him, just
under his armpits.

  “You want a towel dress, baby?”

  “No, not towel dress. A dress!” he insisted.

  So I did what all parents and caregivers of toddlers do—I improvised. Using a tropical-patterned summer shirt I pulled from a hanger, I fashioned my son a dress. He immediately pranced to the full-length mirror to admire himself and swish around in his new attire. He was delighted.

  A day before, we were shopping at Target when we went to look at their kids’ shoes. Shiv’s feet, it seems, are always growing, and always growing out of the shoes he already owns. As I pushed him through the narrow aisles, he pointed at a pair of Frozen-themed “girl shoes” and declared, “I want those.” He hadn’t seen the movie yet and didn’t realize they were Frozen-themed “girl shoes,” but he wanted them, probably because they had a swatch of pink and silver on them. I hesitated at his request, then was ashamed of myself for hesitating, then glanced over my shoulder to make sure there weren’t fellow shoppers close by who were going to pass judgment or intervene. I looked for the shoes in his size and was relieved when there didn’t seem to be any. He settled for a pair of more boring but still fairly cool-looking Shaun White–themed “boy shoes.”

  I hear a lot of fellow parents talk about how they “constantly” worry about their kids, worry about whether they’re good parents, worry about the future, worry about bad things that could potentially happen. I don’t experience that kind of worry, or I haven’t yet. My anxiety tends to stem from the micro-level details rather than the big picture. On the whole, I think we’re doing pretty well with this parenting thing; I don’t fret about the generalities. But the specific moments, the ones where I manage to betray my deeply held values—the ones I promised myself I’d parent around—they haunt me. What kind of message am I sending? Will Shiv remember this moment? What if my momentary hesitation is what pushes him to decide to forever abandon some part of his true self-expression?

  To assuage my guilt over this particular incident, I attempted to redeem myself at Old Navy a few weeks later. I was there to return a few things, and I told him we could spend the resulting store credit (about $20) on a few new things for him; he selected a Spider-Man T-shirt from the boys’ section and a pair of gray flats with silver studs from the girls’.

  During this time in his life, Shiv used exclusively female pronouns for everyone. When he played pretend and wanted to assume a position of power, he referred to himself as a “lady princess.” He would put on a pair of my heels, throw Jill’s purse over his arm, and tell us, “I going to work!” More recently, he’s become obsessed with superheroes, as many boys his age do, except that he pretends to be Batgirl as often as or more than he pretends to be Batman. When Gigi offered to buy him a cape and mask to wear to my school on superhero-themed field day, he picked the pink-and-purple Spider-Girl set.

  I wonder how much all of this is due to the fact that he spends the majority of his time with women: me, Jill, my mom. His teachers are all women, though he plays equally with boys and girls at school. He sees his grandfather regularly, who wrestles with him and occasionally tells him to be “tough” but also keeps his peace whenever Shiv shows up in a dress.

  I’ve learned from many male friends (who are now men in Shiv’s life, whom he does see and spend time with, just not on a daily basis) that much of this policing of gender roles is internalized by boys very early in life and passed along both as a way of enforcing one’s own belonging and as a method of protecting the vulnerable. Every guy I know can pinpoint a moment when they stepped outside the boundaries of what was acceptably masculine and got quickly corrected. And that begets many years of self-censorship. Of course, women can be just as guilty and militant about enforcing men’s masculinity. Jill and I have both accumulated quite the roster of attempts to get out from under our own ties to expectations of gender. She had to work to convince her parents to pay for drum lessons, even though girls “didn’t play the drums” in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the 1970s (she did, and she did it better than any of the boys or men twice her age). At my childhood birthday parties, I would grin with delight whenever I’d unwrap a Barbie, not because that was what I wanted but because I knew my mom would let me return every last one of them, giving me the equivalent amount of cash to spend at the bookstore however I liked. We know what it’s like to carve out room for yourself in a crowded space; we want our son to have more breathing room than we did.

  Though his aesthetics tend toward the “girl” side of whatever store we happen to be in, Shiv also spends a lot of time doing things generally associated with boys: play-fighting, pretending to be a superhero, shooting water guns, wrestling, growling like a dinosaur/bear/lion, running at alarmingly fast speeds, getting dirty, talking about farts and poop. Many men I know were kicked out of the realm of princesses and playing house as boys, just as many women I know were kicked out of the trees they loved climbing or told they were no longer allowed to ride around the neighborhood shirtless. In childhood, we are permitted to blur boundaries that later get drawn with permanent-marker thickness, permitted to occupy multiple realms that we are later told are mutually exclusive.

  It’s cliché to say that we parents learn from our children, but Shiv has taught me to be less afraid of what others think. Because I am so invested in protecting his relatively egalitarian notions about what belongs to whom and giving his self-expression as much room as I possibly can, my own comfort level comes second. I have been scared, and scared of him seeing my fear; scared of what the checkout lady would say when he held up the Elsa costume he had asked me to buy him; scared of what would happen on the day he asked to wear that costume to school; scared of who was going to burst his beautiful bubble.

  * * *

  Not far behind dresses came an interest in hair, specifically long hair. Shiv started with T-shirts, which he used as a stand-in for real hair. I don’t recall the exact origin of this look, but somehow he and Jill created a system where he’d wear a polo shirt on his head, the neck of the shirt snug against his actual hairline, with the rest of the shirt hanging down to his shoulders. Eventually, we bought him headbands so that he was wearing the shirts in a Lawrence of Arabia/kaffiyeh–type style. As this sartorial habit developed, it became more and more elaborate. Sometimes he wanted the sleeves of the shirt tucked in. Sometimes he wanted his “hair” in a ponytail. Sometimes he wanted to sub in other things for the T-shirt: a tutu, a stuffed octopus, a dish towel. Everything, it seemed, had the potential to be hair.

  Because there is nothing one cannot purchase via Amazon Prime, Jill ordered wigs on the internet and those took over for a time as his preferred hair; he has a long black one (which he eventually asked Jill to cut short, with bangs, to match his aunt Kym), a short pink one, and a long blond Elsa wig in a braid. He is so often “wearing hair” of some kind or another that it has become routine: at home, at Target, at school, at the rodeo, at the doctor’s office. It’s ironic that Jill and I thought we wouldn’t be “doing hair” when we found out Shiv was a boy, because we have spent all kinds of time and energy styling, restyling, locating rubber bands, and vacuuming up wig hair. For a while, Shiv became so fixated on and so particular about his hair that it led to fights and meltdowns. If we didn’t get his hair just right, he’d freak out, or he’d change his mind about the style he wanted, asking us to re-do it over and over again. At one point, the hair situation was so intense that my mom outright banned the wigs from her house. In our house, it is considered a privilege that, like screen time, can be taken away as a consequence of unacceptable behavior.

  It’s common for toddlers to use whatever they can to exert control inside a life where they have very little say; we tell them where to go and when, what to eat and when, how to behave … so the hair, to at least some extent, seemed like a demonstration of autonomy. And as Shiv has increased his capacity for self-control and developed more and more the ability to articulate and manage his feelings, “doing his hair” is no longer equivalent with gearing up for
battle.

  Still, I wonder what it’s all about. It’s not like he’s watching us do our hair; Jill and my mom both keep theirs very short, and my head is shaved, precisely because I got tired of dealing with it. He talks about hairstyles of the girls he plays with at school—I want my hair to look like Kathryn’s! Can I have a ponytail like Nedi? He’ll notice the hairstyles of strangers on playgrounds or female characters in books. Recently, we agreed to let him grow his own hair out so that more styling options would be available to him; because of his proclivity to roll around in sand and dirt, we had previously kept his hair extremely short. Now, the curls are mounding up on his head and he regards them with impatient anticipation, tolerates my scrubbing of his head in the bath because it’s a condition of the grow-out-your-hair plan:

  ME: Wow, bud, your curls are getting so long!

  HIM: Really, really long? When are they going to be really, really long?

  ME: Well, it’s going to take a while, sugar, but you’re getting there.

  HIM: I want my hair to be really, really long, like a girl!

  ME: You know, there are lots of boys and men with long hair, too.

  HIM: No! I want my hair to be long like a girl’s.

  I get the sense not that Shiv wishes to be differently gendered but rather that he wants access to the trappings that society has designated as belonging to girls—long hair, dresses, ribbons, pink, sparkly things. And what if that’s all there is to it? A simple aesthetic preference for long hair, nothing to understand or contextualize or try to explain. The only difficult thing about this, really, is resisting the impulse to make it mean something.

  For a while, I had to deliberately cultivate an attitude of nonchalance about Shiv’s hair, acting like it was nothing out of the ordinary, while daring people to say something rude so that I could educate them. But over time, my defensiveness wore away, bolstered by Shiv’s complete lack of self-consciousness; if people were staring, he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. When strangers asked questions about his hair, I deferred to Shiv, working hard not to match their tone of amusement, tempting though it was to shrug my shoulders and employ a “kids will be kids” kind of dismissiveness. This was clearly important to him, clearly part of his self-expression, so I felt I owed him that. For his part, when questioned, he would put on his best teenager/toddler face and respond, “It’s my hair,” as if it should be obvious.