On the Nature of Tears

Diva burst into tears.

Normally, I would follow those four words with something descriptive like “…when we told her it was bedtime” or “…when she lost her ‘My Little Pony’ unicorn” or “…when the bear attacked.” But this week, it hardly seems worth categorizing why she was a yowling mess; to do so would suggest a rarity about the condition, a need for a special cause. And, trust me, it wasn’t that kind of week.

Diva has always had a dramatic personality. When she’s happy, she absolutely sparkles; when she feels angry, she glowers blackly. And when she cries, she likes to go for full-wail lamentations. Her cries do not bespeak sadness, typically, but injustice: the howl of the wronged. It is amazing how explicit in meaning a seemingly inarticulate shrieking “waaaaa” sound can be: “WHY is the universe so CRUEL as to stick me with EVIL dads who insist that my FAVORITE sandals do NOT qualify as sneakers for gym class?”

Thankfully, our gal isn’t prone to tears most of the time. But this week the tears seemed to wait around every corner. In the span of a half hour, we might face her blubbering dismay over being asked to swap dirty clothes for clean pajamas, followed soon after by a round of hysterics because the bedtime reading selection was too short, capped with the sobs of the misbegotten because her do-rag fell off in bed, exposing her beautiful new braids to the elements. If there was a soundtrack to the week, it was the Eurhythmics: Here comes the rain again.

Thankfully, I have now been a dad long enough to know that all emotional bursts come in waves. The Mildly Terrible Twos are followed by the Actually Terrible Threes and the Banshee Fours. In each case, we’re not talking about solid year-long periods of extreme behavior so much as months-long clusters of madness, during which physical growth, newfound mental discoveries, and burgeoning willpower transform otherwise adorable children into mini-Kraken. I have not yet nicknamed age 5 because, on the whole, it has been a lovely time; but I must note that when Diva does plummet from the sunny heights to disproportionate grief, the combined power of her lungs and her vast reserve of stubbornness well outpace any stockpile of reason she might otherwise possess.

The goal for her dads is to resist the urge to try and fix every situation that causes tears. If you set the precedent that each cry is equal, every single howl worth your undivided attention, it won’t be long before a keen little mind has figured out that she can control your behavior, turning you into Pavlov’s Parent reacting on cue. Learning when to respond most profoundly, to comfort when it’s really needed, helps both parent and child. Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I cannot work up much sympathy over her total devastation that an especially enthralling episode of Curious George has come to an end.

The Hubby has a theory that I like: Crying is a child’s re-boot button. All the processes of her little life—emotions, impulses, senses—can simply feel like overload. So if the wild keening that make us crazy is actually the control-alt-delete of Diva’s system, fair enough. Alas, the computer metaphor breaks down in one regard: I still haven’t found the settings for volume control.

Color Me Mommy

When Lily’s first hand-drawn family portrait came home from Kindergarten, it contained a little Crayola surprise: it contained what appeared to a little girl, her poodle, her dad, and, um, her mom. By “dad,” I mean that one of the two grown-up figures was bald and had long legs; by “mom,” I mean the other had long hair and seemed to be wearing a dress.

Casually feigning ignorance, I asked Lily about the drawing. “That’s me walking Sasha,” she said, pointing at the two smaller figures. Then she indicated the bald character. “That’s Daddy.” My husband is indeed a cue ball, so that seemed fair enough, but that also meant I was missing from the picture. I held my breath a little as I waited to see what she had to say about the skirt-wearing usurper in my place. She sounded perfectly pleased with herself as she finished her narration. “And that’s you!”

Now, I admit to some conflicted emotions here. On one hand, my existence in the family had not been erased—which is good, since I rather like being a VG. On the other hand, I had been depicted as a woman, which I’m fairly certain Lily knows I am not. I have nothing against the female gender, mind you, and I’ve always had more female friends than male ones. (Hell, I had two bridesmaids to one groomsman at my wedding). But I am male, really truly, and Lily has never come down to breakfast to find me in a dressing gown and marabou mules. So how did I end up in drag in the picture?

I played it cool, indicating the knee-length red shift. “What am I wearing there?”

She looked at me like I was cretin, “A big shirt!” Her tone was clear: Well, duh, Papa.

I was not convinced. “My hair looks awfully long.”

The words were out of her mouth in an instant. “I just forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

The gist was this: She’d forgotten that the mom in our family doesn’t have long hair like she does in most. You see, in making her portrait, she hadn’t been choosing between including me or a mom at all: I was both.

It doesn’t matter that she has only ever known life with two dads. Or that she knows gobs of two-mom families, a smaller number of all-dad households, a three-parent family, and a household led by a single mom. (That’s the one she finds mind-blowing—one parent, really?) She has nonetheless correctly intuited that all of these families combined are still the minority. TV shows, books, movies, cereal box packaging, and even the calendar (thank you May and June) all feature one dad and one mom. And you bet every sample family portrait at daycare, preschool, and kindergarten do, too.

There’s no point in getting worked up about it. Children are more capable of negotiating a little cognitive dissonance than they get credit for. By first grade, I had started trying to figure out which of my male schoolmates I would marry when I grew up, yet whenever I drew pictures of weddings (and I loved to draw of pictures of weddings), I still always showed a bride and a groom. In fact, I was kind of obsessed with brides: I didn’t plan to ever have one myself but they were way more fun to draw. I mean, really: brides all had long dresses and tiaras and flowers. Grooms were just men in suits—total yawn. But it was social fact, not nuptial fashion, that truly dictated the content of my drawings: I kept brides in the pictures because I knew that was the norm.

Thirty years later, the same is true of my daughter. Diva had been asked to draw a family portrait, and she knew that usually means a mom and a dad. With her task clear, she completed her illustration in the traditional way, with all the standard distinctions: “dad” was taller than “mom” and “mom’s” hair fell to her stick shoulders. And I’m betting Diva didn’t hesitate for a moment when deciding who was who: I’m so the mom.

Though neither of her parents particularly fits the old school stereotype of a dad (car-fixing, football-watching, wielder of power tools), I do in many ways resemble the moms my daughter has seen on TV shows or in movies: I’m a playdate-going, costume-sewing, decorator of holiday cookies.

But wait—why didn’t she pick Daddy for this gender-bending caricature? My husband cooks almost all the meals and does all the laundry, and he’s hooked on romantic comedies with Reese Witherspoon in them. If stereotypes alone are the definitive guide, you could argue that Diva has two moms.

In reality, many parents (and not just gay ones) exceed the old gender roles these days; indeed, with every passing decade, fewer and fewer of us are willing to conform to the outdated notions that still surround us. Just in our circle, we know straight dads who eschew sports but rule the kitchen, as well as straight moms who travel for business while their husbands stay home with the kids. Regardless of gender or orientation, our fellow parents in the 21^st century are freer than ever to choose upon which of their own strengths and interests they wish capitalize. But the first few drawings of kindergarten are unlikely to show this.

Subtleties are hard to illustrate when you’re five. Then again, Diva did get a few things exactly right, including one little detail which made me feel enormously better: Dad may be bald, but Mom still has his hair.

The Invisible Friends

“I played with two girls today at school.” Diva told me this with an air of casual confidence as we walked down the street to her dance class. I asked the girls’ names and my daughter shrugged; she’s terrible at names, and offered instead only this vague description. “One of them is the girl I played with yesterday.” With it being her first week of Kindergarten, I was just so glad she was already making friends, even nameless ones.

Except that she was lying.

Just days before, when we’d taken her up the hill for her first day of school, all three of us were thrilled and anxious. When the classes lined up on the playground, she didn’t complain that all of her buddies from preschool had been assigned to the same other class instead of hers. And when her teacher announced it was time to head inside, Diva seemed ready. Parents could walk with the children all the way to the school doors or just let the kids go ahead, and when I asked my daughter what she wanted, she was clear: “I’m good—you can go.”

Every day after school, when Daddy and I casually asked how school was, we’d go right to questions like “have you made a friend yet” or “did you play with anybody new?” On the first two days, she said, yes, that there was a girl whose name she didn’t know; on the third day, the two of them were joined by another girl whose name was also a mystery. As friends and family asked how Diva liked kindergarten, I trotted out the nameless playmates as examples of how smoothly it was going.

Apparently, I just fell off the turnip truck. Based on my complete overconfidence about the transition, you’d never guess I have been a parent for five years already, someone who should know better that big moves—say, going to a new school, six hours a day, five days a week with 20 complete strangers—might be exhausting and unsettling. But, no, I wanted to hear that she was happy and surrounded by friends, even “Miss Fill in the Blank” or “Little Somethingorother.”

The truth came out on the fourth night when Daddy asked how her two new friends were. She was matter of fact. “Oh, I made them up.” He was dumbfounded. Hadn’t she been telling Papa about these imaginary girls for days? She agreed that this was true.   

Go ahead, put on your parent hat and decide which issue needed to be addressed first. That she had no friends at school? That she felt compelled to tell us that she did, so we would be happy even if she wasn’t? Or that she was so comfortable just lying outright to her dads?

It is possible, of course, that she had made friends after all. But if so, then she was lying about lying, which is very meta and would make an excellent conceit for a novel, but still meant that we wouldn’t know which stories to trust about her life at school. So Daddy settled on starting with the truth issue.

He reminded her that telling an untrue story is lying and that we aren’t supposed to lie to each other. He assured her that we want her to be able to express how she really feels, and that her Daddy and Papa are the two people she should trust the most. She tried to reposition things a bit, saying that she had only been “joking” about having friends. Later, when I tried to remind her that she really does know the difference between a joke and a lie, she remained adamant: it wasn’t a lie if she didn’t mean it to be.

Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to flash ahead to when she is 16. Just imagine the apocalyptic wreckage of her fathers’ nervous systems as she employs that logic in other settings. (“College is going just fine, Papa, and the sounds you hear in the background are not a huge biker rally in South Dakota that I dropped out of school to attend.”)

To be fair, she was actually showing a sad kind of maturity here: she had already learned that grown-ups ask many questions with a set answer in mind, so intuiting the desired answer allowed her to perform well in conversation. If her dads asked every single day if she had made friends, then not yet having made any must not only be scary to her but be bad and disappointing to us, so she gave the response that would please 2 out of 3 people in our family. She might not have been answering in the best way by offering up a lie, but we hadn’t exactly been asking the best questions either.

Over the weekend, I noticed how much the pattern repeated in her interactions with adults. On Sunday alone, three separate grown-ups asked Lily if she liked (or in one case loved) Kindergarten. She said yes all three times, and added nothing else, while the grown-ups filled in the blanks, exclaiming about how excited she must be and what a big girl she was. I could see the stillness on my daughter’s face, her lack of enthusiasm masked by her absolute awareness that only one answer would do.

I tell my college students that research never begins with a question that can be answered “yes” or “no,” because you always end up squeezing your results to fit. True learning comes from an open-ended question, with the information you find shaping an outcome that may well be complicated and not easy to boil down. This is going to have to be my task as a parent as well, remembering to ask the open question, instead of shoehorning the data into the desired result. Instead of starting with “Did you play with someone today?” I need to try the less-leading, “Tell me about recess.” If her answer involves a specific classmate, perhaps even one with a name, excellent; but if she focuses instead on her monkey bars progress, then I guess we’ll talk about monkey bars.

Last night, at bedtime, I told Diva that she can feel any way she likes about Kindergarten. If, when questioned by a grown-up, she wants to say she enjoys school, great. But if she doesn’t like it very much that day, she should say that, too. And so she said something I knew she meant, at least for this moment: “Kindergarten is boring. Except recess. That’s the best.”

Ok, so that may not be the happiest sentiment she’s ever expressed, but it contains the one thing I do want to hear: the truth.

IN THE NAME OF LOVE (Diva's first crush)

It was the last night of the last vacation of summer, and my husband and daughter were snuggled up for bedtime story when she dropped a bomb. “Daddy,” she said, “I love someone here.”

My hubby tried to play dumb. “You mean Daddy and Papa?” Nope. She shook her little curls and waited, wanting him to guess. But he didn’t need to; he already knew.

Though there were six families sharing the rental house, not all the kids were created equal in Lily’s eyes. She was clearly smitten with Cole, a boy her age who boasted all sorts of magic qualities: he ran as fast she did, needed to be active just as constantly, and was willing to play Baby Cheetah, a chase-and-growl game that she’d invented and never wearies of. All weekend, she had maneuvered herself next to Cole at the table or at the beach. And when nine kids settled in for a movie viewing, she snagged the spot nearest him on the floor.

She’s 5.

Let me pause for a moment here to hyperventilate. She’s crushing out on boys at five?

Thankfully, it was her Daddy on the mattress and not her Papa. I might have been tempted to tell her that it’s not appropriate to chase after members of the opposite sex until she’s, I don’t know, 25. And then I would have changed the subject to puppies or cheetahs or something.

Her Daddy went the gentle, liberal parent route instead: asking what she meant by “love” and what she thought people did when they felt that way. Even when she said boys and girls who love each other kiss on the lips—demonstrating that the girl has to turn her head sideways—Daddy did not leap up off the floor shrieking, nor immediately start shopping online for future scarlet letter sweaters. He softly explained that kissing is for older people and that she could show her love in lots of other ways (all of them lip-and-hand-free). He was a model of parental calm.

Of course, as soon as she was asleep, he poured himself a stiff drink.

When he recounted Lily’s bedtime confession to me, we were both flummoxed. How did we end up here? We don’t have cable. We limit her TV viewing largely to PBS and Disney. And she sure as hell isn’t seeing a lot of girls tilting their heads to kiss boys in our house.

We began to second-guess ourselves, considering all the exceptions to our careful media monitoring—we had after all, let her watch High School Musical, and, ok, she may have seen Hannah Montana once. Even old Disney movies might have been the culprits, what with smooth operator Tramp using his artful lies to woo Lady, or Mowgli following a human girl into her village after she summoned him with that horrifying come-hither gaze.   

Or maybe it’s just the age. When my husband sounded a note of disbelief that a five year-old could actually have a crush, I reminded him that I knew I was gay when I was six. I knew because I got caught playing an elaborate kissing game that I had orchestrated with a neighbor boy, Coty; the older kid who discovered us called us pansies. While that was the day I got a name for what I felt, I had been convinced for months that I would marry this particular boy next door. Which means, yes indeed, my first crush was also at age 5.

This is not comforting exactly, since I never relented in my ardor. The object of my crushes changed but there was always some boy I adored, from grade school into high school, and on into college and grad school, where I could finally date guys instead of worshipping them from afar. When I got married, my husband stood at the end of an aisle I started walking down two decades before. So I can be forgiven for already obsessing about my daughter’s romantic inclinations—can’t I?

I know, I know: what all this really means is that I need to learn to breathe out and accept that she’s going to keep growing up, no matter how much each new stage startles and unsettles me. Freaking out, overreacting, and nakedly quashing her emotions will just make me the reincarnation of my grandmother, who washed my mouth out with soap when I told her I loved a boy. I must instead resolve not to be afraid of my child’s very natural feelings.

At least that’s what I’ll tell myself until we buy a mountain compound with a nice perimeter fence and a cozy guard house, where any suitor who wants to pass will have to get by Papa first.