Keep, Go, or I don’t know

My wife and Oscar stand above the sofa covered in stacks of freshly folded laundry. We don’t have room for everything, the kids keep getting taller…must be feeding them too much…time for another Good Will purge.

My wife holds up a short pink skirt; it had first made its appearance as a costume on Halloween Night when my son was in Kindergarten. The matching paper mache head went into storage, and the skirt became everyday wear sometime the next year.

“Go,” my Oscar says.

Pants with the knees torn out that no longer fit. Too-small t-shirts. As each of the handful of skirts that so defined him, and us, is held up, I catch myself holding my breath. I’m at the computer, pretending to read the NYT, not looking, taking it in, awash in a stew of difficult to describe emotion.

“Go,” Oscar says.

“I don’t know?” My wife says.

“Go,” Oscar says.

She holds up the final skirt, a sort of bluish plaid kinda thing. Damn, it’s almost a kilt.

“Keep.”

I exhale.

A few days later I find a home movie, of my son and his oldest friend.  ”Everybody, come check this out!” The family gathers.

The title reads, The Two Princesses, made with our elderly DV camcorder, starring two little girl-looking creatures abducted by a pudgy monster in a felt hat sprouting six green eyestalks. My even younger son pokes the creature savagely with a plastic sword. It howls in monstrous rage. As the attacks progress and become more vicious, in a more normal voice, it stage whispers—

“Seriously, Leo, that hurts. Stop it. Stop it now.” The kind of thing you don’t edit out of a home movie. The princesses begin to dance and twirl—

“Turn it off!” Oscar shrieks. “Turn it off!” He’s smiling, laughing, cringing at the sight of himself in his Target bought Disney Princess Dress, with the pants underneath.

They told us this might happen, the folks at the CNMC. In fact, this is the most common outcome, for boys who like girl things, as they hit the middle school zone, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. They norm themselves, to varying degrees. So I can’t say I didn’t see it coming.

But I didn’t see it coming.

A week later, at Target, a pinched, beady eyed kid would hand my son a box of condoms and call him a faggot. My boy still has long hair. He still is  who he is. I wasn’t there, which I guess is good, as I haven’t rehearsed what to do when this happens. My first reactions remind me of the people chanting and cheering “USA” at the death of Osama. Understandable, but maybe, not us at our best.

So the fight goes on. But yesterday, at my son’s science fair, as I watched him smiling and laughing with ‘his peeps,’ his word for his school friends, the kids he doesn’t have play dates with but loves, and with his actual friends, kids I know from a hundred after school visits, I realize that my son, the boy who wore the skirt, is having more fun in seventh grade than I had. A lot more fun.

A fact I ponder with gratitude, awe, and a twinge of shameful envy.