Jess Banks schools you.

On December 28, I turned 40. This came as no surprise, even to one as math-impaired as me.

It’s virtually impossible to throw a birthday party on my birthday, since everyone is exhausted from Christmas and saving up energy for a big New Year’s Eve blowout (if they’re even in town). There’s even an Old English word for it: symbel-werig. It means “feast-weary,” and that’s what everyone is on my birthday.

The worst it ever got was my 18th birthday. My parents had dinner theater tickets, and my brother was at his friend’s house (after his birthday, the day before mine. No, really.). My sister and I were home alone. She made a Pyrex bowl of raspberry Jell-O and stuck a taper candle in it. We watched Schindler’s List. Whoop-de-doo.

For the big one this year, though, I decided that nothing said “me at 40” like riding rollercoasters. Thanks to Nickelodeon Universe, the indoor theme park in the middle of the Mall of America, it’s actually possible to do this in a Minnesota winter. Also, yay for half-price unlimited ride wristbands from 5-10pm. There was the entertaining possibility that I’d get a mall security escort because I’d been a marshal at the #BlackLivesMatterMOA protest two weeks earlier. I planned to lure him onto rides, in case I felt like chanting anti-oppression slogans on the loop-de-loops. Alas, no joy.

Rolling over the odometer also made me think about what can happen in just one decade of living. I don’t feel older, or even different, just more like the person 30-year-old me hoped to be eventually. Still, I learned a lot of lessons in the last 10 years, so here’s the top 10 lessons I learned in my 30s.

1) Having a second child is nothing like having the first. I had my first son when I was 28, and my second one when I was 32. Instead of throwing up 20 hours a day for 5.5 months, I threw up 24 hours a day for 7.5 months in my second pregnancy. My labor couldn’t have been more different, too. And you needn’t look any further than this blog for how different the boys are from one another. Motherhood: what a weird, wonderful ride.

2) The key to my kid is the key to myself. When I was a kid, my parents and teachers told me I was “socially backward” because I was intellectually advanced. Slamming doors and balloons popping gave me migraines. I preferred the company of adults. And I recognized a lot of these traits in my older son; we joked that he inherited those traits. In fact, what we both were was autistic. Learning that unlocked memories and mysteries that plagued me my whole life, and understanding those helped me translate the world for my kid. We’re all so much better for knowing ourselves.

3) Intersectionality is everything. I’ve felt this way forever, but didn’t know there was a word for it until I read a Flavia Dzodan blog post that introduced me to the term, coined by UCLA prof Kimberlé Crenshaw. I also didn’t realize it was such a controversial idea until I started advocating it. How is this difficult for people to understand? We are all so many different people, and all of our selves are bound together when it comes to liberation. How can you be a feminist who excludes trans women? How can you be anti-racism and simultaneously suppress the contributions of women? How can you demand an end to oppression but hold planning meetings that are inaccessible to disabled people? In Flavia’s words, “My activism will be intersectional or it will be shit.”

4) Don’t move without a safety net. I learned this one the hard way. In Minnesota, you have to be a resident before you can apply for state health insurance. We had paperwork ready to go the day we moved, but we encountered a four-month wait. We’d saved money for an appointment to get me set up with bridge coverage for my fibro and depression. What I didn’t do was research doctors—the one I went to refused to continue the treatment plan I’d had for over a decade. The decompensation that happened without my prescriptions resulted in a summer lost to pain and despair, ultimately landing me in the hospital. Lesson learned? You cannot overplan for your medical care when moving–your life literally depends on it.

5) Family is what you make it. I grew up so close to my family that I refused to even consider moving to New Zealand to be with my Darling Husband, because I couldn’t imagine going so long between visits with my parents and siblings. But after I called out my family about 4 years ago for treating my autistic son like crap and undermining our parenting, everything changed. My brother and sister still won’t talk to me for hurting my mom, even though she and I are fine now. Thankfully, we’ve built a family of friends, old and young, near and far, who more than make up for the love lost. All that’s left to mourn is the continuity.

6) Sharing knowledge is more than the letters after your name. My grad school department kicked me out in 2005 because my area of study didn’t match their idea of subjects that build a “world-class history program.” Despite that, I have 15 years of teaching experience, and knowledge that I use everyday—with my kids, with other kids, with other adults, and in my organizing. Teaching is my vocation, plainly put. Even if the flood of post-recession Ph.D.s makes it unlikely I’ll get a college job again, I’m always looking for ways to share what I know in engaging ways.

7) Caucusing is hazardous to your health. Until we moved to Minnesota, I’d always lived in states with primary elections, so I was extremely excited to attend my first caucus on February 2, 2012. It was weird and idiosyncratic and strangely wonderful; I was too hyped about democracy to sleep until midnight. At about 1:00 AM, I woke with abdominal pain. By 5:00 AM, it was worse than labor, and Darling Husband took me to the ER. I had acute pancreatitis, caused by a gallstone. I spent a week in the hospital, and they surgically removed a bag of rocks from my gut. I now view caucuses as highly suspicious and potentially life-threatening.

8) I am committed with my whole heart and soul to equity. This isn’t about rights, or even history. It’s about empathy. If anyone’s potential is oppressed for who they are, then my potential is also less. I see the beautiful humanity in everyone, and want for them the joys I’ve found and the opportunity to be all of themselves. And yes, I’m willing to block traffic, invade public spaces, and commit civil disobedience to make this happen. I consider it a sacred duty.

9) Together, we win. I’ve never been very competitive, and I always plan for failure so that, as Lloyd Dobbler wisely advised, “…everything’s kind of a pleasant surprise.” But with the campaign for marriage equality, and against Voter ID, and for a new anti-bullying bill and a higher minimum wage, guess what I discovered? I like to win. I like it almost as much as the conversations and organizing it takes to come out victorious. These efforts and the folks I’ve met in them evaporated any cynicism I had about the potential of people power. I highly recommend it to everyone.

10) It’s never too late. I didn’t intend to really go balls-out for the last year of my 30s, but I accidentally did. I learned and performed burlesque dance, even in this imperfect body. I got two big tattoos, the first I’ve ever had. I went to a national convention for community organizers. I shut down highways, corporate offices, and the largest mall in America. I made my kid’s middle school change their negative, reactive response to common autistic behaviors, and re-centered them on positive reinforcement that nourishes all children’s education. All this with my physical and mental limitations. It’s never too late to do important things, and if you forget that, just ask me for a reminder.

Because it is my highest aspiration to be a troublemaker, I’m setting out today to problematize something we all take for granted. I want to argue that the gendering of parenthood does very little good, and no small amount of harm.

This post springboards off posts by Amanda Valentine and me about the media portrayals of men and fathers as bumbling, hapless idiots who are as likely to diaper the Thanksgiving turkey and put the baby in the oven as watch the football game afterward. It also relates directly to the historic cases about same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court this week.

My point is very simple: there is very little difference between the duties my husband and I assume with regard to our children. And since the earliest days–specifically, since I stopped breastfeeding them–the differences in parenting caused by our genders have been vanishingly small.

As parents, we make sure they wash, dress, eat reasonably well (at least over the course of a week, if not each and every day). We send them to school, help with homework, take the inevitable phone calls that come from sending two active, intelligent boys to school every day. We monitor their media, we break up arguments, we cause arguments, and at the end of the day, we tuck them in at night with kisses and dire warnings against getting out of bed again for anything short of a fire.

Absolutely none of these things, or the billion other duties and blessings that comprise parenthood, depend on our biology.

The division of labor that takes place between modern co-parents comes from the frank assessment of one another’s particular strengths and struggles. I crack the whip over homework and science fair projects because I am an educator, not because I am a woman. My Darling Husband does more of the day-to-day housework because I am disabled, not because he is a man. Nor does this indicate I am a failure as a wife and mother, or that he is a weakened, hen-pecked husband and father. Someday, our boys will require The Talk (or to be more correct, The Talks); I honestly have no idea who’s going to give it. I hear the DH has a leg up on me in the visual aids department.

In one of the early hearings on the same-sex marriage bill currently under consideration here in Minnesota, the measure’s opponents brought out an 11-year-old girl to testify against the idea of marriage equality. (You may have also seen her on the steps of the Supreme Court this week; she’s one of their star witnesses right now.) She told the legislators that she loved her mommy and daddy, but that under this bill, some children wouldn’t have a mommy or a daddy, but two of one. “Which parent do I not need, my mom or my dad?” she asked the committee.

And I finally understood why fighting same-sex marriage matters so much to many of its fiercest opponents.

In their world, mothers and fathers do different things for the children. Fathers can’t do mothering, and mothers can’t do fathering. If a single mom or a pair of dads raises a child, there is work being left undone, and the child can’t help but suffer for it. How could anyone possibly be in favor of only half an upbringing?

The gendering of parenthood not only diminishes the power of what parents of both sexes do for their children everyday, but it also confuses the living heck out of some people. When you see signs decrying the erosion of “traditional marriage,” they’re not just talking about divorce and same-sex couples–they mean me and my oh-so-traditional marriage, too.

Even though I’m married to a spouse of the opposite gender, we’re destroying traditional marriage too, by sharing the work–the hardships, the effort, the joys, the rewards–of creating a new family. We’re also undermining the institution by teaching our children (made in the traditional “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…” biological way) that moms and dads cook dinner, attend school conferences, travel for work, and tell them to turn off the iPod at bedtime. For the most part, we’re interchangeable.

And our evil scheme is clearly working. They accept their friends with two moms, or one mom, or a dad and a grandma without so much as a bat of the eye. If I had a dime for every time they called the wrong one of us “Mom” or “Dad,” we could afford a bigger apartment. To them, “Mom” and “Dad” are just names to help differentiate between whose attention they’re demanding. It’d probably be easier on us all if there were a random name for “Whichever of you can help me first with what I want.”

My sons are growing up healthy and happy with two loving parents. They’d be no less loved if only one of us were around, or if we were both the same gender, or no gender at all. That’s not how love works–it’s not a zero-sum game.

And when you think of it like that, it’s pretty hard to see two loving, married parents eroding anything about our future.

This post is part of the Fairytale Fortnight, organized by fellow blogger The Book Rat and A Backwards Story. It’s a super cool idea, and there’ll be posts all over the web for two whole weeks, so I hope you come back for more here, and search out other interesting observations and book reviews as a part of the event!

*****

When I asked my sons about fairytales, they didn’t have much to say beyond, “We love them.” I wasn’t surprised–I’ve raised them on mythology and folklore of every kind since they were born. Fairy tales are an essential part of the narrative fabric we’ve woven around them for their whole lives.

I wasn’t surprised either that it’s the twisted modern retellings that particularly tickle their fancy. The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, The Frog Prince Continued…, and The Stinky Cheese Man are popular because of their humor as well as the subversive, topsy-turvy act of inverting classic story structures. Our boys are raised on satire like mother’s milk, so it’s natural that they’d prefer twisted tales to the straightforward ones.

When I asked if there were any lessons the fairytales taught them, though, both boys were at a bit of a loss. I mentioned how many parents of daughters worried that fairytales taught girls to wait for a man to solve their problems for them, and asked if that seemed right. (They’re quite the little feminists; of course they said it wasn’t right.)

But when I thought of the male characters in the revised fairytales of recent years that are designed to address that lack of feminine agency, I came up embarrassingly short of good lessons for boys. Current fairytale telling seems to operate on the idea that there’s a finite amount of power and smarts in the story, and if the women get more of it now, it has to happen at the expense of the men.

This certainly isn’t the only place in society that smart women are rising and smart men are falling in the media. My friend Amanda Valentine wrote a scathing post recently about how gendered entertainment and advertising–especially as it’s targeted at parents–does men an incredible disservice by portraying them all as bumbling idiots who shouldn’t be trusted with home or offspring.

Princess Fiona, Merida, and Rapunzel are smart, feisty, and entirely capable of their own liberation and defense in times of peril. Heroes, on the other hand, like Shrek, Merida’s father Fergus, and Flynn, the hero-rogue in Tangled, are to varying degrees incompetent, gullible, morally weak, and easily distracted from their goals, dependent on the women in their lives to keep them in line and out of trouble. The only male characters that go through real, multi-layered, character evolution in recent years are Beast from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Hiccup in How To Train Your Dragon. Jack in the recent Jack the Giant-Killer is a fairly humble live-action hero whose love for the princess, at the very least, does not make him stupid. Shrek does go through some evolution, but seems to stumble his way from lesson to lesson, and seems weakened and henpecked by the end of the series.

My boys love that these stories are full of adventure and derring-do, and they honestly don’t care too much who’s doing the swashing and the buckling. They’re just as in love with Merida as they were with Shrek. I’m proud of the fact that they don’t see much difference among heroes of different genders. They buck the convention that “you can get a girl to see a boys’ movie, but you can never, not ever, get a boy to watch a girls’ movie.”

But I wish there were room between the domineering, Johnny-Come-Latelys of Charles Perrault and classic Disney, and the updated, apologist buffoons that Hollywood is serving up to boys like mine. They don’t want their fairytales to undergo a gory reversal toward the truly grim versions of Grimm’s. My ten-year-old understood that once parents felt the need to educate their kids that the outside world was a scary, unpredictable place, but when asked if boys still need brutal fairytales to teach that lesson, he replied with a snort, “Are you kidding? All you have to do to learn that is watch the news, for gods’ sakes.”

That’s how I feel too as his mother–no kid growing up today needs fantasy violence to learn that the world is dangerous. Fantasy can be safer and more meaningfully inclusive of rich, complex, powerful characters of both genders (or *gasp* fluid genders!) doing fun, adventurous things in challenging situations. Maybe then, we’d both be satisfied at last with a Happily Ever After.

A middle school near here had a lockdown today. Not a drill, an honest-to-goodness code red lockdown. I saw the news flash over Twitter that there were reports of shots fired. My heart stopped for about a half-hour. It’s not the school of anyone I know, but it’s close enough to my son’s age to fix in my mind’s eye until police reported the all-clear.

Turns out, it was a 12-year-old boy who called 911 with a locked cell phone (it would only dial an emergency number). It was a prank. A middle-school-aged boy thought it was funny to tell an operator that someone was firing a gun in a full school on a Wednesday morning, three months after the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Over 900 students, teachers, administrators, and staff were on lockdown for hours because nobody told a 12 year old never to ever call 911 as a joke, or if they did, he didn’t absorb the lesson.

And now he’s sitting in a jail.

Two other young men are sitting in a jail tonight, too, and will be for at least the next year of their lives, contemplating the horror they wrought on a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, Ohio. They didn’t learn the meaning of the word “prank” either. They violated her body and her privacy because they thought it was funny.

How are we failing so completely to teach kids not to make decisions like this, or excuse them as humor?

I certainly don’t have all the answers; I probably don’t even have any good ones. But I want, for a moment, to explore the idea of consent as it relates to children. The current discussion around rape prevention in feminist circles focuses on the word “no” as insufficient, because the responsibility to say it still rests on the victim. If we teach kids that “‘no’ means ‘no,'” but if the victim is incapable of saying “no,” those kids with their miraculously literal (and literally miraculous) minds will understand that no one’s going to stop them.

And not too long from then, they’ll be adults who think no one’s going to stop them. This isn’t a slippery slope; it’s just time elapsing.

I’m the big disciplinarian in our house, and I draw a pretty strict line for my boys to toe. It’s not that the Darling Husband doesn’t have expectations as high as mine, but I think I’m more concerned about them following invisible social strictures, because I had to work so hard at their ages to just figure them out. Part of my mind still thinks I can save my kids the trouble I had by telling them how to maneuver, but I know that’s not the case.

More important to me, though, than whether they’re thoroughly civilized is whether or not they can make a good decision when left to their own devices. When I’m there, I can tell them the processes and rules. When I’m not, I need to know they’re capable of reaching the same conclusion. And just telling them over and over isn’t enough. The trick is, I have to let them do things and make mistakes to convey this lesson. And we parents aren’t very good at allowing a child to make decisions for themselves these days.

The whole endeavor of childhood is currently an exercise in coercion and control, rather than consent. It starts early: mothers who may not have much choice about whether or how to be pregnant or give birth seek to reclaim control by exercising their choice about issues like circumcision and vaccinations. We turn day care and school choice into a major undertaking that continues to be pushed back further and further into infancy–it seems inevitable that parents will consider which schools are accepting applications before attempting to conceive–rather than waiting to see which environment best suits the child’s personality. School attendance and activity is mandatory, with little or no flexibility for the majority of students. Parents who juggle complex schedules don’t consult children about when (or even whether, sometimes) to have lessons, homework, dinner, or bedtime, passing on the lack of control they may experience in their work and social environments.

Parents obviously want what’s best, but the simple fact is that almost no one bothers to obtain a child’s consent for anything. When they do, it often conforms to the illusion of choice, which is a helpful vehicle in speeding through more fundamental objections. Which jacket do you want to wear, red or blue? It’s shower time; here, choose your shower setting and temperature, the color of your towel. Would you prefer carrots or peas as your dinner vegetable? “No” only gets you a restatement of the choices or a deferment, rarely a conversation about why they’re objecting. That’s not surprising; “no” is a powerful word, as kids discover early on, and in a world where they’re so powerless, they often use it without checking to see if it’s really needed, just because it gets a reaction.

I’m not proposing that parents be completely permissive and let their kids boss them around, or be rude, or break all the rules. And I’m certainly not going to relinquish my control as a parent to make judgment calls that keep my kid healthy, safe, or in line with a program that benefits everyone in the family. Sometimes, you’ve just got to take one for the team, and I’d like to think I do a decent job explaining to my sons why that decision is necessary at that time, and when they might next make a decision for themselves.

But if taking a shower or eating vegetables or doing math homework is always a matter of when, not if, even when the child has legitimate objections, is it any wonder that our kids don’t know that they can say “no” to a child molester or abductor? What good has it done them before to say “no”? And why should they listen to someone else say “no” when it’s never worked for them when they didn’t want to do something. Silence isn’t the same as consent, but neither is age a replacement for asking.

When the ultrasound tech asked if we wanted to know the sex of our second child, we said yes. We’d already decided with our first son that the advice that made the most sense was that which suggested that we’d mourn the child who didn’t show up if we waited until birth to find out. I’d been so sick with both pregnancies: 20 hours a day for 5 1/2 months with the first one, and 24 hours a day for what would end up being 7 1/2 months with the second.

I still had hopes of joining the great matriarchal line of my family with a daughter of my own, and I’d been suffering badly with this pregnancy. So when it didn’t even feel like the tech had touched the ultrasound wand to my belly before she announced, “It’s a boy,” I burst out crying. “No, no! He’s okay! Everything looks fine!” she said in a frantic rush, as if she’d never before had a wildly hormonal woman on her table.

“I’m not worried,” I said, waving at the Darling Husband for a tissue. “It’s just another goddamned boy!”

It took me several years to come to peace with the fact that I am, for better or for worse, a Mother of Sons. All my dreams of braids and warrior women and Girl Scouts were exchanged for a clothing section 1/3 the size of the girls’ one and a future of ripe smells and gross habits.

Where I found that hard-won peace, though, was this: I was born to raise sons who are ready to be good men in this world of ours. And they’re amazing so far, if I do say so myself. The people they are have already changed how I feel about so many things, much like Ohio Senator Rob Portman has been changed by the experience of raising a gay son, as we learned this week. And if who we know changes who we are, I’m sure they’re changed by knowing a mother like me. (If only other men would have the transformative experience of knowing a woman….)

Especially this week, it feels like the next generation of men has a great deal to correct for their forebears. So this is my promise to the world, ten years after I began this great endeavor of mothering boys:

I am raising sons who will know that the best way to stop rape is to not rape.

I am raising sons who will wonder why anything would fail the Bechdel Test.

I am raising sons who will believe that consent of every kind is an inalienable human right.

I am raising sons who will stand on the side of love for everyone.

I am raising sons who will know that a mother has a woman’s body and everything that goes with one.

I am raising sons who will not be grossed out by breastfeeding.

I am raising sons who will be capable of comforting without fixing.

I am raising sons who will know how to take criticism and blame as easily as credit.

I am raising sons who will value their own bodies as much as those of others.

I am raising sons who will prefer their romantic encounters in the 1st person plural: “We,” not “I.”

I am raising sons who will leave the damn seat down and dry.

I am raising sons who will know the pleasures of folding warm laundry and cooking for loved ones.

I am raising sons who will understand that all bodies should be as varied and valued as all minds.

I am raising sons who will treat the names and images of fellow humans with as much care as their own.

I am raising sons who will reject carelessness that approaches maliciousness.

I am raising sons who will derive power from the happiness, not control, of others.

I know the Internet is designed to inspire fury. That hasn’t been the majority of my experience with it, but lately, it seems determined to correct my underestimation of its rage-inducing qualities.

So before I proceed with this post, please go read this article about why Mattel thinks moms don’t “get” toy cars. Go ahead–I’ll wait for you.

Thanks for taking the time to do that. You may or may not be seething with anger right now. If you’re not, that’s okay, but I’m going to explain why I (and several other mothers I know) are. Let me put on my sherpa hat.

PROBLEM #1: THERE’S A VP AT MATTEL FOR “BOYS’ TOYS AND GAMES.” I’m the mother of two boys, and I’ll be the first to say that they play with different toys, in different ways, than many girls would. Griffin was about nine months old when he distinctly said “Vroom” to a squishy car toy which none of us had yet bothered to introduce to him by name or sound.

But I’ve been told I “play wrong” for a girl since I was two years old. Imagine that: TWO YEARS OLD. That’s the year I saw Star Wars on a drive-in movie screen and was hooked for life. All my friends in preschool were boys, because they would play what I wanted to. In sixth grade, my teacher introduced me to games of war and strategy, and I was hooked once again. I went on to be the only girl among 23 boys in the Strategy and Tactics Club in high school, and I was very happy there. I never felt left out or isolated because I was doing what came naturally to me.

Even as an adult, I’ve mainly played games with men, but the many women gamers I’ve played with over the years were as viciously cutthroat as they needed to be to succeed. If anything, we were more terrifying because we collaborated to do awful things, and we needed to set down our needlework or knitting to wipe out whole parties of monsters or even the roof of a building once. “Knit one, purl one…natural 20…I kill it. A lot.”

There’s no such thing as “boys’ toys” and “girls’ toys.” There are just boys and girls who play with toys. Whichever ones they pick, they’re doing it right. It’s okay to appeal to some of the differences between the genders, but the pink-and-blue-washing needs to stop NOW. If you want to see how a company can tailor toys for greater appeal and accessibility to one gender or another, consider the upcoming “girls’ line” of Nerf toys, which feature ergonomic adjustments to make them easier to use, as well as styles that correspond to popular culture models like Katniss and Merida. Disney should follow their advice with the Marvel line–I know a whole lot of girls and women who will happily fork over for some good Marvel toys, games, and apparel.

PROBLEM #2: HE FELT THE NEED TO EXPLAIN TO A ROOM FULL OF MOTHERS WHY THEY WERE DOING THEIR JOB WRONG. There are many ways mothers do do their jobs wrong, and society isn’t shy about telling us so. We know we’re not perfect, but unless you’re the sort of mom who’s likely to end up in court, you’re trying very hard to do your best. The days of the pretty moms who won’t lie down on the floor in their crinolines and frilly aprons to play with kids of both genders are past. I play with my boys, and I play hard. I certainly don’t need a toy executive to tell me how to make my kids happy or have a good time.

Moms are bad enough on themselves and each other. Tiger Moms, Princess Moms, Geek Moms, Stay-At-Home Moms, Working Moms…we’re all being told we’re doing it wrong, that our kids will end up in therapy for sure if we don’t buy them the right things and hover over them like paranoid black helicopters every second of the day. Petersen’s voice shouldn’t be in this discussion at all, let alone lecturing a room full of “mommy bloggers,” whatever the hell that sexist, reductive label means.

PROBLEM #3: HE THINKS THERE’S ONLY ONE WAY TO PLAY WITH TOY CARS. This one particularly burns my ass, because I know from experience that he’s wrong. When I was a kid, I played with toy cars by lining them up in perfectly symmetrical, parallel rows, sorted by shape, size, and color. Then my sister would walk through the lines like Godzilla, kicking them to kingdom come. And then I would line them up again in different patterns. I picked my favorites by the way they felt in my palm, my closed fist.

I realize that much of this comes from my autism. But I know I’m not the only one who didn’t play smash ‘n crash all the time. In fact, most of the boys I knew didn’t play with their favorite cars at all–they set them on a high shelf where they’d be safe and beautiful. Petersen’s model of play is a marketer’s one, not a player’s one. If you smash your cars all the time, your parents have to buy you new ones all the time. Planned obsolescence is not a game.

PROBLEM #4: HE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND WHY KIDS WOULD RATHER PLAY WITH OTHER TOYS. Finally, Petersen doesn’t understand why toy cars are less relevant today. The problem lies in a few areas. If a kid wants to pretend with cars these days, why would you want to drive a four-inch replica across the berber carpet when you can boot up the XBox or Playstation or 3DS and actually feel like you’re driving a real car? Why play with a pre-made car when you can build your own models?

Cars have the same problem I see occasionally with “action playsets”: they’re single-use toys. There are only so many ways you can play with a toy car, or with the Spiderman 3 Sandstorm Action Playset. You basically get to recreate one storyline, and then you’re done. The reason action figures and dolls are more popular is because you can tell infinite stories with them. An imaginative kid (i.e., all of them) doesn’t even need every action figure, because one character can be many characters. LEGO offers another solution to this problem by offering single-use builds with infinite rebuilding potential. Who wouldn’t rather play any story you can think of, rather than “They drive somewhere. Along the way, they crash into something”? According to child development expert Penny Holland, single-purpose toys are far more damaging to our kids’ minds than toy guns. Think about that for a second.

The graph in the Bloomberg article suggests an even more interesting quandary to consider: There’s a gender gap in board games too. According to their statistics, 46 percent of girls between ages 6 and 12 list board games as their favorite toy, as opposed to only 33 percent of boys. I’d be interested to know which games girls are playing, because we’re past the days of the Barbie Dreamdate Board Game (which I played, I’ll have you know, and ended up marrying Poindexter in real life). 

Board games aren’t even strongly marketed, as far as I can tell, for one gender or another. RPGs (tabletop, video, and online) are, though, and I’d be interested to see a more nuanced breakdown of a wider variety of games. I’d also like to know whether the gender gap among young girls and boys who play board games correlates to the education gap–there may be room for board games to help boys catch up on certain academic and social skills that they aren’t getting enough support for in schools that have to teach to the test.

All this fury has direction. We don’t have to settle for executives trying to sell our kids crappy toys. We know what our kids like, and we should put our money where their preferences are. Play has the capacity to teach and to heal, as well as to entertain. As parents, we shouldn’t settle for anything less.

Friday is the Autistic Day of Mourning, a day to honor the autistic people who have lost their lives to the desperate or careless actions of parents and guardians, or to the crushing weight of the sensory world that seems inescapable by any other means but death.

As long as myths and misinformation are spread about what life on the autism spectrum is like, there will continue to be caretakers who feel that autistics are less than human, and autistics who feel that every door in the world is shut and locked against them. This is my story of those doors and locks, and the keys that turn up in the most unexpected of places.

I wrote this for an event around Mothers’ Day, called Listen To Your Mother. (It may have been too weird for them.) But I really wanted to share these words I’ve crafted, and the occasion to commemorate those who never found their keys seemed fitting. I hope it unlocks something for you, too.

________

Parenthood is all doors and windows, keys and locks. Change blows them open and slams them shut. Heat and grief swell the frames so they stick stubbornly. Time and anger jam the pins and squeak the hinges. Then suddenly, a word, a fall, a breakthrough, and we stumble over the threshold.

My son’s autism diagnosis was the key to a lock I didn’t even know existed. Kindergarten was rough, rougher than it needed to be. Connor talked as fast as he thought, ideas rushing out so fast his little mouth garbled and stammered over the vocabulary of a high schooler. He knew the names and origins of every superhero and Star Wars character, but related them with so much detail, kids his age gave up and walked away. He struggled to function in the constant noise and color of the classroom, where he could never settle and instead slingshotted among activities and classmates.

The other kindergartners didn’t understand, and responded with cruelty beyond comprehension. Five-year-olds on the bus home at half-day told him they would beat him like a piñata until he broke open. They said they would come into his room and set his bed on fire. They hit him in the face with ice balls until he needed stitches. And I cried as I scrubbed the blood out of his little winter coat, as I held him in the night after dreams that woke him screaming. As I filed the papers to transfer him to somewhere safer.

We got called to a meeting within the first month at his new school. “We’ve noticed some things we’d like to talk to you about,” the counselor said. We feared a repeat of the last school’s message: “Your son is a discipline problem. Fix that.” But in that room with his teacher and a staff we barely knew, they slid a list across the table to us that told the story of our son.

My husband and I laughed. Out loud. It startled the school folks to see parents erupt in gales of hilarity and recognition at an inventory of symptoms. But there it was, clear as day on that paper: every strange, wonderful, frustrating, inexplicable thing that our son did. “It’s okay,” we tried to reassure them. “This is the Book of Connor, the pattern we couldn’t figure out. Until now, we thought it was crap parenting.”

It has a name, they told us: Asperger’s Syndrome. “How wonderful,” we replied. “If it has a name, it’s a language we can learn.” We shook their hands, agreed to meet again soon to talk about how to help him. We thanked them, over and over. “Thank you for giving us the key to unlock our son.” I went to the library, checked out armloads of books, and built a fortress around myself, so I could read us all out of the dark.

But the key we had fit another lock, too. It fit a lock in me, a lock I didn’t know I had. His patterns were my patterns, or had been as a child before I learned to hide or work around them. I saw the world in stories too, and had visions clearer than eyesight from the books where I went to hide. I fixated on things without even trying or wanting to. And when it was too much, only dark and quiet and heavy blankets and the rushing, patternless sound of a fan could steady me on the tightrope again.

His lock, my lock, they’re the same. My son is autistic. I am autistic. We are both autistic together. We share this key, and we’re unlocking doors I never dreamed I would pass down to my child.

Grownups say they wish they knew then what they know now. They have no idea.

My son’s lock is my lock. His key is my key. Every door it opens, it opens for him and me. And I walk that terrible, glorious road of discovery with him again like it’s the first time for us both.

My mom could have legally aborted me.

Not that she did, obviously. She didn’t even want to. I was her first child, conceived in wedlock at a perfectly reasonable childbearing age.

But I just turned 38 in December, which means that about a year and three months before I was conceived, the Supreme Court ruled on the case of Roe v. Wade and declared that American women had a Constitutionally protected right to seek an abortion for whatever reason they saw fit. And when my mom discovered she was pregnant in the spring of 1974, she had more options than she had only fifteen months earlier.

The historian in me watches the observance of Roe v. Wade‘s 40th anniversary with a mixture of gratitude, dismay, and bemusement. I’m grateful to have lived my whole life in an America where the highest court of the land could write such a powerful statement of trust in women’s wisdom about their own reproductive rights. I’m dismayed that, in the intervening time, people who don’t trust women with such power have been so successful in circumventing this fundamental, adjudicated right.

And I’m utterly bemused by the multiple levels of collective amnesia surrounding the real history of abortion, fraught as it is. The surveys released this week that showed how few women under 30 actually know that Roe v. Wade was about abortion have conjured a great deal of justified facepalming. But I’d like to see a little acknowledgement that abortion is as old as civilization, and that for most of that time, women had control over those decisions. It wasn’t considered a conflict with one’s religious beliefs; every medieval woman knew how to make tea from rue, tansy, bayberry, or pennyroyal to “bring on late menses.” Only with the  pathologizing of reproduction, with male doctors in charge, did abortion become a battleground and women the most unreliable judges of their own best interests.

I’ve said for a long time that I’m unequivocally pro-choice. I turned out for the 2004 March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C.. I march at Planned Parenthood on Good Friday, as a visible contradiction to the crowds of abortion opponents who clog the sidewalks to shame and condemn the workers inside, despite the lifesaving work (overwhelmingly above and beyond abortion) they do for our communities’ most vulnerable women.

But I’ve always said that, while I’ll gladly fight for every other woman’s choice, I couldn’t choose that for myself. I’m a living, breathing paradox: an anti-abortion, pro-child,  pro-choice American woman. And I am far from alone in this slippery category. In fact, I have a feeling that we’re the silent majority.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have chosen when and how many times I became pregnant, and that I was able to carry those pregnancies to term. That said, my pregnancies were absolute hell. I was nauseated and vomiting 20 hours a day for 5 1/2 months with the first one, 24 hours a day for 7 1/2 months with the second, which contributed to the most excruciating, interminable flares of fibromyalgia in my entire life with the disorder. And as much as I love and prize my amazing, energetic, hilarious, brilliant, gorgeous sons, they both have special needs that make parenting an exhausting challenge on the best of days. As my husband and I age, the chances of another child bearing those same conditions only rise.

So I need to be perfectly honest: if I became pregnant again, I don’t know that abortion would seem as impossible as it once did. My health would suffer immeasurably, leaving me unable to work, so our family’s finances would strain to the breaking point. The upheaval would have a massive impact on the equilibrium and routine that help our sons function, with unimaginable consequences. It’s said that all a child needs from its family is love, but diapers and an active mom help too.

And before someone suggests that I’m too educated and self-aware to face an unplanned pregnancy, let’s be honest: education doesn’t magically repel sperm anymore than a lack of consent. While our kids are a phenomenally effective form of birth control, like any other form, they are not 100 percent foolproof. By age 45, over half of American women will experience at least one accidental pregnancy. And 61 percent of women seeking abortions are already mothers; more than three-quarters of them cite the impact of another child on their precarious balance of responsibilities. (All statistics are from a 2011 study by the Guttmacher Institute.)

I don’t have a story to tell about how abortion has impacted my life. I don’t have an important point to make on this anniversary of a landmark declaration of rights that are in some ways more difficult and dangerous to exercise today than 40 years ago. I don’t even have a deeper analysis of the shift in my feelings on my own holistic, reproductive health.

What I do have, though, thanks to Roe v. Wade, is a choice.

One summer day when I was about 10 years old, my grandma was driving us down to catch an old movie in the blessedly cool interior of the old Oriental Theater. We came to stop at an intersection, not far from the MECCA Arena.

And a man in full plate mail and medieval tabard walked over the crosswalk, right in front of our car.

I was in the front seat (it was the ’80s–seat belts, wha?), and my jaw dropped to my lap, where it remained for the rest of the car ride. When I finally achieved intelligible thought, my one focus was: “Wherever he was going, I have got to get there too.”

When I was 16, I finally got there: Gen Con. I’d been playing AD&D in our church library on Sunday afternoons for a few years, and tabletop strategic wargames for a few more years than that. So when some of the guys said, “Let’s go to the big game convention in Milwaukee,” I was all in. Of course, I didn’t know that’s where the guys in plate mail were from, but I found out fast enough.

I was too uncertain to assert myself at the big tables, full of miniature mecha-robots and World War I dogfighting planes, surrounded by very intense, slightly malodorous young men. And I wasn’t ready to ask questions, to invite myself into the pick-up roleplaying groups scattered throughout the convention center and the labyrinthine guts of the arena building. I was a young woman, and there weren’t many of us there.

Instead, I just took it all in. Dice, in numbers and colors and polyhedrons and sizes I’d never dreamt existed. Men, like carnival hucksters, hawking their models or settings or must-have game accessories. T-shirts with slogans and jokes I mostly didn’t get (though I loved the Douglas Adams references; I’d never seen those in America before). And enthusiasm–so much enthusiasm, everywhere.

I came again the next year, and the whole world had changed. TSR was under siege, in their four-story castle in the center of the dealer’s hall, but there were sappers among us in the crowds, skulking around in clown white and satin capes. Vampire: The Masquerade had arrived, and with it, a small but palpable influx of female gamers, drawn to a game that made strengths of drama and emotion and relationships.

I didn’t get to all the Gen Cons during my college years, but I kept my foot in the pool. I looked at the new games, lurked and watched, occasionally sat down when invited. One year, I waited all night in the lobby of the Hyatt for someone from a scheduled AmberMUSH get-together to recognize me. Only after about three hours of waiting did it occur to me that nobody knew what anyone else looked like in real life.

I’d been married for about three years before I went again. It was a homecoming, but it was also the Darling Husband’s first trip. He’d read about Gen Con in magazines and rulebooks, half a world away, never dreaming he’d not only ever have the chance to go, but to go for the purpose of meeting his heroes. He’d earned a place on the (volunteer, but still nerd-prestigious) Whitestone Council, the organizers and fact-checkers-par-excellence of the online Dragonlance Nexus, and as a result, was invited to meet Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, authors of the groundbreaking Dragonlance novels. He was gobsmacked at every turn, and I basked in his excitement and some better-planned meetups with Amber friends.

Gen Con became an every-year thing for a while there. I mourned through the last one in Milwaukee, but did so with good friends, good (Persian) food, and hours-long sessions of a pirate RPG that cleared a good section of the under-arena area and left me hoarse for days afterward.

That was also Connor’s first trip to Gen Con, when he was six weeks old. I didn’t see another mother with an infant in arms the whole time, and I had to crouch in stairwells and on bathroom floors to nurse him. I asked Warwick Davis (Willow, Professor Flitwick, etc.) to hold him for a picture. Surprised and nervous, he acceded. (I cannot find the digital file of this picture, which is driving me crazy, and my scanner won’t work. Trust me, it’s adorable.)

Next year, I watched the con breathe and unfurl its wings in Indianapolis, expanding into the vast new spaces with a sigh of both sorrow and relief. And it grew and grew, every year–every year, more of a reunion and a blessed, brief respite from the Mommyverse. At Gen Con, I was just Jess again, not Mommy. I needed that.

But Griffin came to his first Gen Con when he was three months old, and though I still needed to find secluded corners to breastfeed, at least I no longer felt like I was the weird woman with one tit at time on display for interested passers-by. Sure, there were still jerks who thought families didn’t belong at the convention. One of them said, behind me in the crowded dealer hall, “I can’t BELIEVE someone would bring a FREAKING STROLLER in here. This isn’t the place for that. How selfish.”

To which I turned around and replied, “At least I can park the extra forty pounds I’m pushing around in here and walk away from it.”

I hear there are nursing rooms, changing stations, and child care providers now. It makes me so happy. It says to me, “Gen Con belongs to all of us, and I don’t have to grow up and give it away if I don’t want to. I’ll keep coming, I’ll keep gaming, and I’ll raise my family here.” The Gen Con community is aging, yes, but it’s maturing and diversifying too.

I hoped this would be the year I brought my boys back to Gen Con and let them get dizzy and overwhelmed and excited and exhausted by the people, the choices, the magic. But it didn’t happen. I haven’t gone for four years, and I miss the friends (family, really) I’ve made like I would miss a limb. But I know that, when the stars are right, I’ll come back, and I’ll tell my boys, “Here’s where you belong. You’ve belonged here since before you can remember.”

And Gen Con will be waiting for us with open arms.

Convention Season has started in Geekland–though it never really ends, just takes a brief winter breather–and that means that the Darling Husband is in high demand. This is nothing to complain about, and I generally see the exertion of multi-day stretches of single parenting as the price I pay to have him so flexible the rest of the year. Some stretches are better than others, and there’s always a day in there somewhere that doesn’t exactly show any of us at our best. But we muddle through pretty well, for the most part.

Here’s how these weekends usually go:

DAY 1–Darling Husband departs with hugs and kisses early in the morning. Kids are at school, I’m at work. I have to leave a little early to be there when the bus drops them off, but that’s like a little vacation. I sit out in the sun while they play on the playground with friends, maybe do a little reading between general referreeing. I ask what they want for dinner. They say McDonalds. I playfully swat that idea, and we all pile into the car, go to the grocery store, and get ingredients for me to cook dinner. We munch on pasta carbonara or a casserole while watching Cartoon Network. They get ready for bed without a fight, and I tuck them in with a story and a kiss. I watch a documentary with a glass of wine, and go to bed relatively early, but read a few chapters of a trashy novel before sleep.

DAY 2–Boy, that alarm goes off early. Good thing I got a decent night’s sleep. I bulldoze the kids out of bed, dump them in the shower to general protests, and get them out the door to the bus. I find the missing jacket they swore was nowhere lying in the middle of the living room floor. I drop off a forgotten sheet of homework at school on my way to work. I’m yawning by 2pm, but there’s no time for a nap before the bus arrives at 3. I bring a book to read on the playground, but I CANNOT STAND THE SCREAMING. I retreat inside, and break up fights through the window screen. I pull them off the playground to run a few errands; there are many tears and recriminations. I ask what they want for dinner. They say McDonalds. I say fine, whatever, just use your inside voices. I catch them eating french fries off the carpet and wiping ketchup on their pants. More protests at bedtime–“I’m not tired! My show’s not done! We don’t have school tomorrow!”–until I’m the one who’s yelling now. I do not care that you don’t have school. I do not care that your show isn’t done. I do not care that we didn’t read a story. Get in bed and give me ten freaking minutes of silence, would you? I skip the documentary, maybe get a few pages of my book before sleep. Kids call me into their room at 2-hour intervals all night for essential services as covering and restarting music. Unfortunately, they never need these things at the same time.

DAY 3–No alarm set, but then again, no alarm needed. The sound of arguing awakens me earlier than the birds get up. Control of screens suddenly needs a UN peacekeeping force. I settle the fight, and try to go back to bed, but if I have to say more than a yes/no, my brain boots up to day speed. No more sleep for me. I watch the red light on the TiVo box that says fascinating news shows are taping; they watch another Phineas & Ferb marathon (things could be much worse). I’ve planned to take us out to a museum today to kill time. I feed them breakfast and pack many snacks, to avoid exorbitant museum food prices. I give the kids a long leash because I’m too tired to keep up, but I still feel like I got dragged around the block by a pair of St Bernard’s. I’m just glad I don’t have to break up any fist fights in the pirate exhibit. The exit, however, is through the gift shop. This should be outlawed. I consider myself lucky to escape with an exhibit book, though I play the parental version of Whack-A-Mole in which I yank an overpriced “science” toy out of a child’s hand every time they say “MOM!” I apologize to the actual parent of one of the kids from whose hands I take a toy. I reach around while driving home to tickle and pinch the kids so they don’t fall asleep. I don’t ask them what they want for dinner. They get macaroni and cheese. They also get to stay up later because I’ve fallen asleep on the couch while they ate. They wake me up to tuck them in, and I stagger off to my own bed.

DAY 4–I wake up hurting before the sun comes up. Kids are sleeping soundly, so I take painkillers and figure I’ll catch up on news shows I’ve taped. Alas, one kid rises 20 minutes after me, so I surrender the TV and try to read. The other kid sleeps in until 9, at which point I ask if I can go back to sleep for a little while. Sometimes this works, and I get another hour of rest. Sometimes this does not work, and I end up yelling at them through my bedroom door until I give up. They ask where we’re going today. I say nowhere–all my money and energy is gone after yesterday. They cry and call me the worst mom ever. They wish Daddy was home instead of me. I cry and say I wish that too. I feed them fruit snacks and graham crackers for brunch. They spend a few hours running back and forth between apartment and playground in random and irritating patterns. One kid does something incredibly dumb/dangerous/dumb outside, and I am forced to put on a bra and non-pajama pants and go outside and watch them. The sun melts a little of the pain in my back. The look I give the kids when they get close buys me a little time to read. I say a little prayer to the makers of ibuprofen and Xanax. I feel better; they get tired. I ask what they want for dinner. They say McDonalds. I make them spaghetti. They say, “This isn’t McDonalds.” I say, “This is all you’re getting.” I remember they haven’t showered since Day 2. I cannot care. I send them to bed early under the pretense of “school night.” Daddy comes home late. I give him a kiss and go to bed, where I stay for much of the next day.

RESULT: No hospital, no Child Services, no overdrafts, no corporal punishment. I declare victory.