My two little guys got their hair cut today, Charlie for the first time. They hated it. No amount of toys or singing would keep them from batting at the lady with her scissors and her comb. Charlie confiscated the comb. The lady gave us an envelop with his little scraps of hair in it.

The Intersex Society of North America (which apparently has disbanded) recommends avoiding infant surgery and picking a gender in which to raise your child, later letting your more grown child make his or her own choices. This rough paraphrase is from memory based on information I’ve learned at the shows of my friend Thea Hillman, whose book Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word was released this month from Manic D Press.

When I first heard these ideas expressed, I fancied myself a gender-radical, formed by the brilliant work of Kate Bornstein and Judith Butler and others who challenged the very notion of a dual-gender system. I was disappointed in the idea of conforming to the dual-gender system, of raising your children in it, especially those whose bodies already seemed to lean away from it.

These days, I spot Judith Butler, her equally brilliant partner Wendy Brown, and their tall son at my local farmer’s market, where I am wheeling a double stroller while Angie feels up the pluots. But I guess what’s changed most is that while I’d still like the world to be a radically different place, I do not want to put my kids on the front line of the revolution. I actually think that imposing my own resistences to gender norms on them would offer no more secure a place from which they might begin to find their own way.

It’s true that as often as I imagine them growing up to be heterosexual men, I imagine them growing up to be gay men, or women of various persuasions. I’m guessing this is a little unusual, but when you’ve met the range of people I know, you’ve heard some nightmarish childhood stories about parents’ painful and limiting assumptions and the struggles to reconcile a budding sense of self with those external directives.

So I’m following ISNA’s advice. I’m picking a gender to raise them within (more or less, in a Berkeley sort of way). I’m aware that this is based on the fact that they have male genitalia. Unlike the experience many parents describe, I do not feel hit over the head with the inate gendering of my little guys. Our baby sitter has an eighteen-month-old daughter who is apparently a spit-fire, and compared with taking care of her, adding in our two boys is easy peasy. They are “mellow” and “follow instructions” and so forth. (Yeah, yeah, their donor must be a zen monk . . .) If the genders of these kids were switched, everyone would be attributing her energy and zeal to the fact that she was a boy, and my little fellows’ relative calm to the fact that they are girls. Instead, these get to be individual qualities, having nothing to do with gender.

Meanwhile, if you are getting tired of What to Expect: The Toddler Years (or if, like me, you can’t find your copy), check out a couple of books all parents should have on hand. Thea’s book Intersex: For Lack of a Better Word has at its core–I think–her relationship with her mother who, surprisingly, diagnosed Thea at a very young age. There is a lot to this little book, and Thea’s characteristic candor etches layers of pictures that might change the way you think about people and the world.

Kate Bornstein has an amazing little book (these are both just small–Kate’s in shape and Thea’s in width–powerful books) called Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws.
Also, if you ever get the chance to see Kate’s theater–grab it up. What’s the adjective for “circus-like transcendent magnificence”?

I will say that when Leo got his first haircut, I cried. There is something shocking about your larval little primate (mixed metaphor, I know, but right in this instance) emerging from the chrysalis of your own body and encountering . . . this world. This unchanged world, which is suddenly both gorgeous and dangerous, fatally flawed and dazzlingly alive. Unrevolutionized, but evolving. Leo held onto a little red metal train car during that earlier haircut, clutching it in his baby hand, and he loved that little train. About a block after we left the store, I realized it was still clutched in his hand. I knew it wasn’t radical or even right, but I let him keep it.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of board books. You know, the square-ish kind with thick, cardboard pages. Goodnight, Moon and Bert’s Bedtime Story and Brown Bear, Brown Bear. I read them aloud, of course, and Leo and Charlie take turns (more or less) turning the pages. Very often, they turn two or three or five pages at once–sometimes on purpose, when the pace of the story needs some pick-up, and often by accident, when enthusiasm to see what happens next overcomes finger dexterity. In those latter instances, we find ourselves suddenly on the wrong page, a step ahead of where the story should be. We pause. I say, “We skipped a page!” and back we go to rescue the overlooked piece of the rhyme or plot turn.

I have such a strong memory of this phenomenon: skipping a page. The visceral feeling of suddenly landing where you did not expect to land. You see, we readers are participant storytellers. We understand the build of a story as well as any writer; the story operates in concert with our expectations–meeting them, surprising them convincingly, or surprising them wrongly, terribly wrongly–as when a page is simply skipped.

So strong is my memory of this, that I came back to it at this juncture in my life without realizing that it really doesn’t happen to me anymore in my own reading. I had to stop and think about this; I no longer accidentally skip a page–or very rarely. Well, come to think of it, I suppose there have been those moments when the line of text on the following page did not sensically flow from the preceeding page. So it does happen as an adult, but not five, six times a day. And yet I know exactly what has happened, as if I myself were one or two or three just yesterday and not some decades back.

There are other things like this, stuff we learn to navigate, only to outgrow: Stepping on the heel of our own shoe. Falling over onto flat palms. (Remember the sting?) The heaviness of jeans logged with wet sand. Bringing a piece of cheese up to your mouth and popping it in, only to discover that the cheese has tumbled away and you are popping in nothing. (“Goodnight Nobody.”) The pleasure of being able to accurately identify your own nose and head and ears and belly. And how LONG an hour can be, filled with so many different books and games and activities and maybe a snack, too.

This is what writing gives back to you, and children, too: attention to detail, delight in detail, and yes, sometimes, frustration with detail. A genuine love affair with the minutiae that, in the end, may be all there really is, though we shift our investments to theories and overviews and goals, to large organizing principles that claim to move and sort the details.

Story makes that claim, too, I suppose. I am in the process of mapping a book I wrote–first draft–in seven weeks. Now I am imposing order, logic, a train of motion. But I think it’s important to remember the surprise of skipping a page, the close-up view of the sidewalk when suddenly you’re horizontal and your hands sting, the world of the story that is made up of invisible pieces of cheese that leave your mouth empty and wondering.

In raising two lovely little boys, I have been thinking a lot about praise. People and books offer all sorts of advice about how to raise children, and one suggestion is that parents praise effort and persistence, rather than simply the child’s existence. Obviously, the idea is that if you reward the push, you’ll get a child (and then a grown-up) who keeps trying, who doesn’t give up. These qualities are required for success or even just for hobbling along in the world, so why not nurture them?

I was at a dinner party last night, and someone talked about praising children so that they would grow-up feeling good about themselves. I pointed out that “self-esteem” acquired from being told you are great is hollow if effort and persistence haven’t been encouraged. Someone else pointed out that praising kids for “trying” sometimes leaves us with people who feel good about making an effort even if they don’t actually achieve anything or gain the necessary skills to accomplish whatever they are trying to do.

As a parent, abandoning formulas which can never be proven anyway, I find myself praising all of it: effort that leads to failure, effort that leads to success, and just the downright praisability of their very beings.

In editing writers, people often forget the importance of praise. Here I do not mean empty or false praise. I mean praise, lodged in the middle of a rigorous critique, that acknowledges what is working (and perhaps why). Writers need to learn what we do right as much or more than we need to learn what we do wrong. Writers need to be guided by the light of their own visions along the paths they are attempting to hack through the jungle, rather than be pointed toward some far distant light or hounded off the path with complaints. A smart reader brings out a smart writer.

Self-praise

I can give you the harshest critique of “The Secret” and other like-minded new ageiness that makes all of us the authors of our own destinies. This logic can be cruel in many instances, and unhelpful. But in those moments of those lives that have a heck of a lot of leeway and privilege–like mine, knock wood, most days–a little dose of optimism surely goes a long way.

I’ll tell you a secret.

A writer friend of mine, Katia Noyes–hostess of the wonderful dinner party last night and author of an amazing novel called Crashing America–has been helping me structure my revisions of my third novel. First, I went through the whole thing (which I wrote in seven crazy, sleep-deprived weeks with two babies under eight-months old) and created a fifteen-page, detailed outline, a list really, of the book. Each day I had to go through a minimum of ten pages, and then report to Katia by email. In the email, I also had to include an affirmation to the effect that this novel does not have to be perfect, and that I know what the book needs and what I want.

There is a lot the affirmations cannot fix. But none of this–my hesitancy, my fear based on past experience and fatigue, my self-doubt–is one of those things.

I was supposed to post affirmations all over the house before giving birth, and you know, we never got around to it. Instead, Angie voiced them all to me throughout my labor, and that worked fine. I am not a devotee of affirmations. Or I didn’t used to be. But this daily reporting to Katia got me going. It shifted the way I felt about the project and its writer.

There’s that old story of Niels Bohr, the physicist. He had a horseshoe hanging over his office door, and a colleague said, “Niels, why do have a horseshoe there?” Niels said, “They say it brings good luck.” “Surely,” the colleague replied, “you don’t believe in that.” “No,” Niels said, “but they say that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

So, too, with affirmations. Try it. Not for curing cancer, you know? But for changing attitudes: at least your own.

What do you affirm?