Like a mommy

In case you missed it, there was a cute video circulating just before Christmas of President Obama helping to sort toys that had been donated to Toys for Tots. Obama was supposed to divide the toys into bins intended for "girls' toys" or "boys' toys," but -- like anyone who's seen this graphic demonstrating how to tell if a toy is intended for girls or boys ("Do you operate the toy with your genitalia?") -- Obama thought the sorting wasn't so obvious. "I want to make sure some girls play basketball," he said as he tossed a basketball into the girls' pile. "Let's break down these gender stereotypes."

Following on the heels of the little girl scowling at the "gifts for boys" sign and the renaissance of the vintage Lego ad that makes it clear that Legos are unisex toys, it feels like it's been a good year for the de-genderization of toys.

But when I watched the crowd applaud Obama's decision to put a T-ball set into the girls' pile ("Girls like T-ball!"), I wondered if the reaction would have been so positive if he had, say, put a set of princess dolls into the boys' pile. Or if he had given the boys a tea set and said, "Boys like tea parties!"

I find myself wrestling a lot with this issue. For example: I buy Eli cars to play with because he likes to play with cars. But does he like to play with cars because he likes to play with cars, or does he like to play with cars because I bought him cars because I've assumed that, as a boy, he would like to play with cars? I know that girls like to play with cars, too; in fact, one of my favorite childhood memories is lining up toy cars on the floor of my living room and racing them. So it wouldn't surprise me at all to see cars in a girl's room. But would it surprise me to see, say, My Little Ponies in a boy's room?

In October, just for fun, I brought Eli into a Halloween store and showed him some costumes, which he playfully rejected one by one. Then on the way out of the store, we happened to walk into the princess costume aisle. His eyes got wide; he literally oohed and ahhed. Who can resist all the sparkles and glitter in the princess aisle? After that, at home, he'd sometimes hold his blankie around his waist like a dress and exclaim, "Look, I'm a princess!"

He had a brief but torrid week-long love affair with Doc McStuffins during which I bought him a Doc McStuffins figurine playset, and yet in all this time I've never bought him any princesses to play with. But why? If he were a girl and he had shown the slightest interest in princesses, we'd probably already have princess paraphernalia in our house by now.

Phil says that once he was at an arcade with Eli picking out a toy, and the man behind the counter offered Eli his choice of colors. Eli systematically rejected each one until Phil finally asked if he wanted the purple (which he did, because who doesn't love purple). The man hadn't even offered it to him.

For a long while at school Eli's class was doing a "color of the week" theme where they'd all wear that week's color on Fridays. At some point I wondered what we'd do when they came to pink and purple, because he doesn't own any pink or purple clothing. Then we got a newsletter mentioning the end of the color theme. They'd done red, blue, green, orange (Eli wore his trick-or-treating shirt), yellow (pajama shirt), brown (Mommy's sweater) and white (out sick that day), but they skipped pink and purple entirely. I still wonder why.

Occasionally Eli requests to wear nail polish. The other day, while he was in the bath, I painted a few of his nails. He held his hands out, admiring them, and declared, "Beautiful!" It occurred to me that I should buy some non-toxic Piggy Paint for future rainy day manicures, so I hopped on Amazon. Besides being shocked at the price ($8.99 for a tiny bottle!), I was disappointed that their motto is "For fancy girls." What about fancy boys?

This summer, one of my favorite mom bloggers, Mommy Shorts, posted about an Always ad campaign that asks: When did the phrase "like a girl" become a bad thing? She did an awesome post of reader-submitted photos of their girls kicking ass: playing baseball, catching fish, earning black belts, riding road bikes. All the photos were hashtagged #likeagirl.

Then she followed it up with a post of boys acting #likeaboy: having tea parties, baking cakes, wearing Mommy's heels, getting their nails done.

I LOVED IT. Both posts made me teary.

Phil and I are like 99% sure that Eli will be our only child, and every so often I feel sad that I'll never have a daughter. And then I think: What if I wanted to have a daughter to dress in sparkly clothes and get my nails done with, and then my daughter wanted to play with cars and ride dirt bikes?

A few months ago, I took this adorable video of Eli walking around the apartment wearing my shoes and my work bag. He reached inside it and pulled out my work ID, which I've attached to this funky beaded necklace. "Oooh!" he said. "A necklace!" He immediately put it around his neck and then, studying it more closely, he noticed my picture. "It's you!" he said to me. I'm always showing him pictures of himself as an infant and telling him, "It's you! When you were a baby!" so he started to say, "Like a baby" and then corrected himself: "Like a mommy!" So I know that's the reason he likes to wear my heels and ask for painted nails; he wants to be like me.

And I want to embrace that idea that I, and mommies, and girls, can be emulated in all sorts of ways, that it's fine to choose the purple toy and crash your cars and wear nail polish and build with Legos. Like a girl. Like a boy. Like a mommy. Like an Eli.