The Garden
As I sit with my baby in our upstairs loft, an area that grants us the much needed play space for our baby but also isn’t high enough for me to stand straight without bumping my head, I hold the book board page still. My son is ready to see the next page, so he starts to turn the page.
“Hold on. Wait a minute. I haven’t finished this page yet.”
He whines for a second, but I divert his attention to the bird on the page. It’s a regular-ass pigeon, but I guess that’s kind of what they were going for in this book on construction in the city. Even as one of those parents who waited until the birth of my baby to find out the gender, it’s hard not to attach so much to gender. The page we are on shows a wrecking ball breaking through bricks. The only remotely close thing I can pull from past experiences to connect with the story in front of me is Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball”. (Oddly enough, her use of tongue in that music video is similar to my teething 19-month-old son.) Am I so far removed from the book in my hands because I’m a woman? A female? Or is it because there were only Barbie hand-me-downs from sisters, but no brothers with tractor or bulldozer toys to borrow from in my childhood?
Did my son think a wrecking ball was cool or was his reaction to the tool of destruction equal to his expression when he spotted the pigeon? Why was I reading a book about machines? I was always a sucker for character-driven narratives, and the people in this book were less human than the engined vehicles. So why was this the book in my hands? Did I grab it or did my son hand it to me? I’ve only slept 12 hours in the last two days, so I can’t really remember.
My favorite of Candland’s books lately is one called You Be Daddy. It’s rather funny because the dad is Asian and has longer bangs and glasses. When I have my reading glasses on, my husband and I discovered weeks after we had purchased the book that the fictional father looked much like myself. It makes David and I giggle every time we look at the cover, but I think there’s something deeper there.
After all, David and I break a lot of gender stereotypes. Some of it is circumstantial and some of it is just being ourselves. When David and I took the first photos of when I was pregnant, I had short hair and David long. It seems simple enough. I think I can say that I understand more than most people that “it’s just hair.” But the topic of our hair lengths came up in conversations regularly. And I’d be lying if I didn’t think about it every now and then when I look at photos where I had the short boy cut, and David had the bun.
Now, in music class, I have been able to step away from work to join on the rare occasion. Sitting beside my husband, I listen to him sing every word of the melodies Miss Melissa sings with all of the other women and their children. That’s right. David is the only man in our class. The others are mothers and a couple are nannies. Nobody knows the words to the songs better than David. After three more tunes circulate as David bounces Candland from side to side, I decide he might even know them better than Miss Melissa who is subbing for our regular teacher.
I don’t know any words, and give up looking at the screen to try and contribute a somewhat on-key voice and decide to focus my attention on my son and husband. I want to remember what it looks like when my husband touches his nose to my son’s nose as he holds a finger puppet of a spider singing, “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” That way when I’m working next week at this same time, I can close my eyes and imagine them together. Singing. Loving. Growing. Outshining all of the other mothers… I know it’s not a competition, and I’m not very competitive, but when it comes to my husband…I can’t help but feel he is always the best.
Short hair, long hair. Full time worker—“breadwinner” is a common term I have grown to despise. Your partner is literally your team. There is no one who is more on your team than your partner. So I refuse to identify as “winner” when juxtapositioned beside my husband. We win together. But, as it stands, I am the only one who is salaried right now. David, whose job is relentless, is not salaried. He is the primary caretaker. In children’s terms, I am the gruff tractor. David is the sparkly unicorn. (Also, when did unicorns become so much more for girls than boys? Horses with sharp horns? I just don’t see how it went that way. Maybe it’s the rainbows they’re associated with? I don’t know.)
And our roles are fine. Just like when Candland likes the pink crayon is fine. Everything is fine.
But there are those times…
The time I returned from work and my coworker asked if I did daycare or went for the nanny. I know there’s no offense meant in this comment. And there was no offense taken by it. But I did feel somewhat…cornered. And by the nature of how the question was asked, it took much longer to cut to the chase: “My husband is the primary caretaker” somehow came out as, “Well…Neither. We thought about both, but you know. David was in school so it just made more sense to… well, he’s the primary caretaker for now. Yeah…”
Why did I do that? Why did I flounder? Why did I add the “for now” part?
My coworker wasn’t asking what our long game was. She wasn’t asking if this is what we had imagined when we first got married. She wasn’t asking about my husband’s role at all—even if that’s because it was simply assumed.
My son excuses himself into my thoughts suddenly. He entertained me by looking at the wrecking ball for a few more seconds. Now he’s ready to turn the page. I obliged. The next page is a cement truck.
“Oh, I know this one,” I say out loud. “It pours concrete on the ground that hardens to create a foundation.”
I look at my son. I hope all of these books harden in his head. I hope his foundation is made of stories. But, steering away from the rigidity that my father raised me with, I quickly add, ...but it’s okay if it isn’t made of stories and something else, to the end of my internal dialogue.
On our last long drive, my husband read a quote to me while our son slept. I don’t have it word for word, and I don’t have it credited. But it spoke about raising a child and how parenting should resemble growing a plant in a garden rather than building a chair. Parents were gardeners, not carpenters. We could sometimes choose where our child would be planted, but we could never carve the pieces that make up our child’s soul. Our child’s soul came as it was, just as we came as we were. We could only water our little plant. Nourish it with sunlight. Remove most pests. And whether our child was a lychee tree or a carrot… That wasn’t up to us. We weren’t there to determine what the plant would grow to be, we were only there to help the plant grow.
I like that analogy.
Candland is ready for the next page again. He turns the stiff page with his tiny fingers, and I allow it.
A steamroller.
I close the book. There are Barbies in the bucket across the room. I point.
“Enough steamrollers. Go get me the princesses!” I say.
Candland stands up, wobbly legs and all. He heads obediently in the direction I point. I’m relieved to find that his ability to understand direction has improved immensely over the last few weeks. I owe that to his dad. The one working and growing with him every day.
Candland stops two steps short of the toy bucket full of the toys stereotypically made for little girls. I’m excited to blow his mind with the Princess of the Danish court that I received for Christmas 27 years ago, but Candland has found a rainbow glimmering on the floor. It’s coming through the window and reflecting off of a mirror we used mostly for tummy time when he was smaller. He is transfixed by this fairy-like spot of light that shimmers directly on a single wooden plank.
I laugh at the irony. Here I am, promising myself the next time someone asks me who cares for our child, I’ll be direct as fuck. Here I am, trying to choose between work trucks and princesses, guilty of how gender neutral I am obviously not, when my son chooses the unintended prism of light shining on a wooden plank on the floor.
Concrete trucks. Pink unicorns. Blocks. Stories. It doesn’t matter what he chooses. I’m just the gardener.