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Learning from the Livingstones

October 4, 2009 by Sarah

Sam brought Adele Griffin’s Vampire Island home from his school library this week, and we’ve been reading a chapter every night. The book’s protagonists, Hudson, Maddy, and Lexie Livingstone, are hybrids: half vampire, half fruit bat. They live in Manhattan with their fruit-eating, rock-star parents.

As we all know, it’s tough to be a hybrid—the other kids just don’t get it. Nine-year-old Hudson can’t exactly tell his fellow fourth-graders that he spends the pre-dawn hours flying over Central Park, scattering fruit seeds. Maddy, eleven, has ideas about the suspected vampires across the street that even her family can’t understand. And thirteen-year-old Lexie is never sure how much of her bat-talents she can allow herself to show at school.

Sam is concerned about the Livingstone kids’ futures. “What will happen,” he asked me last night, “when they grow up and want to get married?”

For a self-proclaimed part-boy, part-girl hybrid, this is a concern.

I ventured: “Maybe they’ll find another hybrid to marry?”

“Or maybe,” Sam suggested, “they’ll just tell their husband or wife, and if that person loves them, they’ll understand.”

Kids like Sam need models of other people who are different— kids who succeed because they have people who love and accept them, kids who make a go of it in a world that doesn’t necessarily understand them. They make the connections themselves, once the adults in their lives—in this case, our school librarian—give them the tools.

When I hear Sam come up with ideas like successful hybrid marriage, I have a two-part (dare I say hybrid?) reaction. I hate to watch Sam learn things the hard way, as he so often does. But when I get a glimpse of the wisdom he is gaining as someone not-quite-like his peers, I realize that his difference is a blessing, too.

On Anger

September 30, 2009 by Sarah

The other day, I wrote in my blog about coaching my son Sam to cope with the people who bully him at school. A reader, who I’ll call Angry Man, wrote in:

You are encouraging this behavior of his, and have likely done irreparable harm to his psychological state. It’s disgusting that they’ve allowed this child to remain in your care. He’ll never get a fair chance at life.

The vast majority of the readers who write me letters are people with the opposite message, people moved to tears that the story of their son (grandson, nephew, student, neighbor, brother, patient) is being told, that there is someone in the world who thinks it’s OK to be a pink boy. I get letters from men who were pink boys as children, who have never talked about it to a soul because of the abuse they suffered in childhood. These letters give me strength, they give me hope, they make me realize that there are many pink boys in the world, many parents like my husband and me.

But people like Angry Man inspire me, too; they help me see we’re shaking things up. People were angry when women demanded the right to vote. People were angry when African Americans wanted to attend “whites only” schools. People are angry right now that gay people are insisting on the right to marry their loved ones.

This anger will get louder as we get more vocal about the rights of boys who are different. That’s a good thing—it brings the hatred out in the open, where we can look at it, think about it, and address it. I don’t enjoy being the recipient of that hatred, but I’d rather have it where I can see it, where we can all deal with it, instead of it lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike.

The Pink Yarmulke of Change

September 28, 2009 by Sarah

Today is Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. Or, as our ultra-progressive Bay Area synagogue calls it, the day of at-one-ment: the day when we remember we are all part of one interrelated entity. The idea that, whatever religion we practice—or don’t—we are all, really, working toward the same things: moral lives, goodness, making the world a better place.

Traditionally, Yom Kippur is the day we atone for the mistakes we’ve made over the last year. Today, our rabbi asked us not only to think about things we’ve done wrong and to ask forgiveness, but think of ways we’ve been wronged, and to forgive.

Sam went to temple this morning wearing a hot pink polo shirt. On the way in he picked up a matching pink satin yarmulke and put it on his head. It’s traditional to wear white on Yom Kippur. Today, it’s hot pink. Maybe hot pink is the new white?

In public, people always think Sam’s a girl. If I’m out with Sam and Ruby, people ask how old my girls are. I don’t usually correct them. But when I’m introducing Sam, as I did several times this morning, I make a point of using his gender: “Do you remember Sam? He’s seven now!” Using my most matter-of-fact and friendly tone to reveal that my child is male when he looks so female is a small act of activism. It’s easy to do that here, in this warm and welcoming community. There is the playwright whose son liked to wear a princess costume in preschool, the family of the tomboy who understands, the congregants who have known Sam since he was a baby.

In the wider world, there are the people who do not understand. Who disparage Sam, wish him harm, wish me to be relieved of my children for allowing Sam to be who he is. Most days, I fight against these people. Today, I aim to forgive them. Not because I agree with them, but because I hold open that they can change.

It might sound presumptuous: forgiving people who have not asked my forgiveness, hoping that strangers will change. But I don’t want to return hate with hate—that’s not going to change anything. So instead I forgive, and I hope.

I tell Sam this all the time: the world is changing. People are changing. A long time ago women were not allowed to vote. A less-long time ago, black people were not allowed to drink from the same water fountains as white people. And someday, a boy will be allowed to wear a dress to school. It just takes time—and hope, and forgiveness—for minds to change.

Learning from the Livingstones

On Anger

The Pink Yarmulke of Change

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