bearing blog: Differences in the mirror.

My daughter's First Holy Communon will be this morning.

My intention? Besides all the usual ones, that I don't let my hurry-up-and-don't-be-late demeanor, business as usual on any school day, show quite so much. It's a special day. It should feel like one.

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Mothering a little girl can seem so different from mothering a little boy, especially through the milestones. For instance, this never happened on the eves of my older sons' First Holy Communions:

You try not to make it all about the dress and the veil and the shoes. You really, really try.

(Check out that little foot kicking up so she can admire her shoes, the ribbon trim on which matches the dress Grandma made perfectly.)

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This is not, of course, entirely anyway, a Boy vs. Girl thing. They are all individuals with personalities of their own. Surely some boys would be too eager to wait to check out themselves, looking like Dad in a real necktie and shiny shoes, and who would be sure to try it all on the night before just to make sure it will all go together right.

And I know darn well there are many girls who won't be able to wait to get out of their scratchy, stiff dress and back into their jammies so they can eat pizza back home, the shiny shoes kicked into a corner without a thought except when she reaches down absentmindedly a week later to pick at the blister on her little toe.

But you know, when we look back at them, we can't help ourselves from projecting what's inside of us.

(I know, I don't speak for everyone.)

Sons and daughters make us feel... differently, don't they? I think when we watch our sons play and our daughters play, we say to ourselves "Boys and girls are so different, it's true!" and a lot of the time (not all of the time) they aren't actually doing anything all that different, certainly not Representative Of Their Respective Classes, but we the watchers overlay our own interpretations on them.

She does X and her brother did Y when he was that age; boys and girls are so different!

(I wonder if it's worse for kids who grow up with exactly one sibling of the opposite sex: if they end up, by default, being the sole Representative of Their Class. Having four boys gives me a chance to see up close some -- a tiny fraction -- of the many different ways there are to be a boy.)

The interpretations we project don't have to be the traditional ones -- boys with their trucks and girls with their dolls, athletic boys and bookish girls, the "tomboy" trope. They can be the pressures to rail against traditional constraints; we feel those pressures differently for sons and for daughters. Since each of us parents is an individual, the spin we put on "raising boys is different from raising girls" is individual; but we all have that spin, I think.

Maybe it would be better simply to note that "raising Jack is different from raising Jane." It would certainly be safer to mix it up a bit. No kid should be made to feel that they have to be a representative of their class all the time.

More importantly: being a girl, or being a boy, is part of each child's identity, and that identity is unique. They should get to figure out how they live out femininity and masculinity, how it's expressed uniquely in their own personalities. I'm not sure how best to encourage that, but it's a goal.

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Later today, my girl gets her first taste of the mystery of being doubly feminine, of being a part of the Bride of Christ.

There's no escaping that she lives this mystery differently from the boys. Where she and her companions in their white dresses and veils are a sign of fittingness, the little boys in their blazers and suits today must be a sort of a sign of contradiction, a masculinity that must become receptive to the life Christ offers as free gift to us.

Equal, yet living out the gift they receive in purely individual ways.

Time to get dressed, beloved.