Boy's Life

Kindergarten. Week 2.

I have a lot of concerns about kindergarten. A lot. Like, will the Doozer like it? Will he be happy? Will they be nice to him? Will he be one of the smart ones? Another one is the exposure to a whole lot of boys. I’m concerned about an excessive amount of boyness. And archetypal masculine crap.

See, we watched Tangled recently. If you don’t know it, it’s a Disney cartoon, a musical, a re-telling of the story of Rapunzel. We’ve worked our way through most of the Pixar flicks at this point and The Nightmare Before Christmas and even Madagascar. (The less said about that one, the better.) And right now, to him, they’re all the same thing. He doesn’t discriminate or distinguish. They’re just movies.

Here’s a kid who loved Dora the Explorer and, more recently, Doc McStuffins (though now he seems to have moved on to Scooby-Doo). So recently, we watched Pocahontas. And now Tangled. (The Princess and the Frog is next up on the DVR.) I don’t want him to lose this. This openness. I hope we can avoid the rigidity of gender roles. Boy stuff and girl stuff. It’s just stuff. Let’s keep it that way.

Because honestly, Tangled is kinda awesome. I’m not sure he was completely down with the love story and the whole thing with the princess being reunited with her true parents. He liked the action and the humor (there was an old drunk bandit who went over big—I tried not to think too deeply on that). But still. It’s not like he said Ugh or Gross or wanted to turn it off. And it wasn’t all adventure and comedy all the time. He was with it.

I’m afraid this is going to fade. Sure, it might come back when he gets older. But I like this right now. Where we’re not locked into boy stuff. Yes, we have a house full of superheroes and race cars and books about superheroes. And yes, I turned him on to Star Wars. But this is also a kid who likes playing with a dollhouse sometimes and who is just as apt to cuddle with me as try to wrestle.

I like to think of him as an ambassador of this openness. There was at least one girl in his preschool class that he got hooked on Star Wars. (Note to Doozer: You might want to remember her name even though she no longer goes to the same school. I mean, a girl who’s into Star Wars? You might want to marry her someday.)

One of his other favorite things at this moment is the song “San Francisco” by The Mowgli’s. Who look like a bunch of hippies and spend the entire video being all blissed out about love and all that mushy stuff. It’s super-gushy. And he loves it. I hope this is the kind of thing he continues to gravitate toward. I hope this is a sign that he’s going to be this sweet, sensitive kid for a while.

And if any of those kids with the light-up sneakers and the Ninjago T-shirts try to initiate him into a world of wrestling and G.I. Joe and No Girls Allowed, I’m going to punch them in the face.

Okay, okay. So I’m not going to punch little kids in the face. Unless they’re mean to my kid. And then they’re totally asking for it.