If you say so
Lila’s sick. Third day out of school. It’s the kind of sickness that I find especially confounding — she seems fine during the day, but once she goes to bed she spikes a fever. The especially cruel irony is that Lila wants nothing more than to be at school. Stella, meanwhile, would be overjoyed to have a legit reason to skip kindergarten. She has fun once she’s there, but convincing her to go again, morning after morning, is a job. She clearly has doubts about the entire educational enterprise.
“You think you’d like to stay home, but you wouldn’t really,” Lila said huffily to her this morning. ”It’s not as fun as you think. After having to stay home for three days, going back to school would feel like the best day of your life!”
Stella shrugged her skinny shoulders in reply: If you say so.
Anyway, Stella had other things on her mind. To wit: “Why do people say Jamie is a boy?”
“Um…because he is one?” I answer.
“I mean, why do they say he’s a girl? Is it because his hair goes down” —Stella swirls her hands around her ears to her shoulders— “instead of staying in a circle on top of his head?”
“Maybe,” I say. “But it’s okay if his hair looks different from others boys’.”
“I know,” she says. But there’s that same skinny-shouldered shrug: If you say so.
It reminds me of a time years ago when Lila and I were discussing a reality of living where we live: Many of her friends have two mommies. She’s so used to this arrangement that it never occurred to her to question it or find it strange. The day same-sex marriage was legalized in Massachusetts, I walked Lila downtown and we saw a couple of women marrying on the steps of City Hall. I stopped and pointed out the scene to her. She saw nothing noteworthy about it. I tried to explain to her to significance — that there had been laws against this, and that sometimes laws are wrong and have to be challenged.
“Some kids have a mommy and a daddy, like you,” I pointed out. “And some kids have two mommies, like Jessup and Jack. And some kids have two daddies, for that matter.”
“Two daddies?” Lila stopped in her tracks. This was surprising. “Two daddies? How would that even work?”
I mentioned adoption, then considered trying to explain surrogacy, but she’d moved on. We were near Herrell’s, and thoughts naturally turned to ice cream.
That was years ago now. Today she’s lying on the couch, watching a little PBS Kids, fretting about what she’s missing in class today. If she feels well enough later I may bring her out to Herrell’s again.
