All posts tagged: bullying

Why Does Everyone Hate Charlie Brown?

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On Christmas night, the screen time my kids chose (for daddies’ down time) was “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.” I was happy to hear the familiar music and dialogue in the background as I sipped bourbon and stared at my phone. Around the fourteenth time Lucy declared, “You blockhead, Charlie Brown,” my older kid asked, “Why does everyone hate Charlie Brown?” And it gave me pause. Why does everyone hate Charlie Brown? In the Christmas special, Charlie’s the Christmas pageant director. Leadership often brings up conflict. But all Charlie’s trying to do is focus collective effort on getting the damn pageant done. But just because Charlie can’t control the cast doesn’t justify the near-universal derision of his peers. It’s not like Charlie’s leading acting exercises that force Lucy to dredge up that time a teacher told her she’ll never amount to anything after which the class bully looked over and said, “you smell like shit and you’ll never find love in life and you’ll end up with warts all over your nose and children will run …

So That’s Where We Are, Now

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Welp, we’ve hit another funky milestone. We’re trying on different pronouns in our household. Before school started, my partner and I asked the big kid, “What would you like to say, this year? ‘He’ or ‘she’?” Kiddo answered sheepishly, “She.” Oh. Okay. So there we are. An hour later, we were discussing my show, Head Over Heels,in which a trans actress plays a non-binary character. My older kid is officially obsessed with this gender-bending character (played by Peppermint, the drag queenfamous for her stellar turn on RuPaul’s Drag Raceas well as for being the first contestant who was outwardly trans beforecompeting on RuPaul.) In the conversation with my kiddo, I had to backtrack withhersaying, “But wait. You know Peppermint is a trans woman playing a non-binary role?” “Yeah! A ‘they’. Like me! I’m ‘they’!” Oh. Okay. So there we are. An hour later, I sat with her/theyand said, “Now, sweetie, do you want me to say something to your teachers about how you want to be addressed?” “Daddy,” she/they said, “can we stop talking about …

Major Strides, Minor Paranoia

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So it’s been a bit since I stopped to reflect on my family and wonderful trials of parenting. Luckily, I haven’t had major dramas to sort out, all year. How magical is that? But something cropped up, recently. The other night, my older, gender-fluid kiddo went to bed seemingly without a care. Later, my partner poked his head in and kid crying in bed. Though I was in another room, my antennae snapped to. I knew something was up. I poked my head in right as older peanut explained why he was crying to my partner. As an avid reader of my blog, you might recall (ahem) that we had a bit of bathroom anxiety at the beginning of the year, which my kid admirably solved for himself. But unbeknownst to us, he’d been using the girls’ room for the past few months. From what we were able to decipher through the 1stgrade sniffling, our kid peed in the bathroom and another girl (we’ll call her Anna) was “in” the bathroom. For some reason, that …

Now I’m Scared…

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It’s not very often you (well, I) say, “My greatest fears have come to pass.” But now, I’m scared. My oldest son (he of the self-proclaimed Disney Princess “excession”) got unexpectedly melancholy, this afternoon, sat on my lap and (unprompted) said, “Some kids at my school say pink is a girl’s color.” All the pink drained out of my skin pigmentation. I was crestfallen. My worry-free cherub just exposed his first sign of social suffering. I quelled suddenly-savage defensiveness and did NOT bombard him with statements like: “Buddy, pink is the BEST boy’s color!” or “You wear your pink shirt and color your pink pictures and admire pink dresses all you WANT!” I needed so badly to cover him with hugs and kisses and protect him. As with so many other moments in his 4 ½-year-old life, it felt like the beginning of the end of his innocence. Desperately measuring my response so as not to make a pink mountain out of a pink molehill, I said, “Really? That’s kind of silly, isn’t it? That …

Dear Other Dude at the Playground…

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Dear Other Dude at the Playground on Saturday – I couldn’t fight the need to write you about an incident between our kids.Remember me? I was the dad with the son wearing a pink dress. Before he burst onto the playground, and as I parked the car, he was positively vibrating. I asked, “Now…you’re sure you want to wear your dress?” He shouted in response, “Yes! Because I want to show everyone how beautiful I am in this beautiful dress!” It was a big deal for him; and for me. He hasn’t asked to wear a dress “out,” before. I didn’t fight it. Who cares, right? Or so we’d like to think. As you noticed, he couldn’t contain his excitement showing off the dress to the only two kids playing…your daughter and her friend. He skipped and twirled and chased them for ten minutes shouting, “Do you like my dress? I’m wearing a dress! Can I play with you? Will you play with me?” Remembering those ten minutes fills me with emotion…because his unencumbered joy …

Dressin’ Up as Daisy Duke

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A dear friend wrote a touching piece about her son who currently dresses in skirts and flowery shirts. She makes several points we all intrinsically know: Girls are encouraged to dress like boys, not vice-versa. Boys who dress like girls are shamed, bullied, etc., which is intrinsically misogynistic. What a preschooler wears doesn’t mean anything about gender or sexuality or proclivities. It makes them happy. So who cares? I venture to say anyone reading this blog accepts these points easily. My friend’s piece took this conversation an illuminating step further by highlighting her pride in her son for emulating the dynamic women in his life. Why shouldn’t he celebrate women, right? Boys celebrate Spider-Man, Elsa, Curious George, Dora and Clifford; why not also surrounding girls and women? Before my friend published her piece, we discussed her son’s interests and our worries about cultural context and self-expression. And I was a little flummoxed. I wanted to say, “It’s all good. Don’t stress it, just let him have fun and express himself and see where it takes …