Tonight for her bedtime book E picked Heather Has Two Mommies, a book that we, unlike many people who have a lot to say about it, actually own. Putting aside the heinous 80s feminist ink drawings, Heather is generally a lovely little book. It depicts Heather and her two mommies as a totally ordinary family, and it has a nice riff at the end on how there are all kinds of families: single moms, two dads, divorced and step-parents, etc. It's kind of didactic, but I've found that small children tend to like didactic books that relate to their own lives.
However, there is a real problem with Heather, and the fact that this problem never shows up in discussions about Heather is what suggests to me that the people so avidly discussing Heather have never actually read the book.
Heather Has Two Mommies is clearly aimed at the 3-4 demographic. It's about a three year old, it treats preschool anxieties, it has pictures drawn by preschoolers, it addresses family issues in young children's terms. But it also has a ridiculously explicit passage about Heather's conception:
Kate and Jane went to see a special doctor together. After the doctor examined Jane to make sure that she was healthy, she put some sperm into Jane's vagina. The sperm swam up into Jane's womb. If there was an egg waiting there, the sperm and the egg would meet, and the baby would start to grow.
Now I know this is a zeitgeist 80s feminism kind of rhetorical strategy. But come on. Who talks to their three year olds about sperm, let alone artificial insemination? I was never a stork and cabbage patch kind of mom. But I started with "babies grow in their mommies' bellies." That sufficed for three year olds. Later I expanded the narrative as needed. What did they grow from? Tiny seeds (ok, I should have said eggs, but seeds are more evocative for a three year old thinking about things growing). How did the seeds get there? They were always there. Eventually, after a long time, we got to the daddy's role, and sperm and eggs. I've never not answered a question, but there are some things that small children just don't need to know.
You don't get much more liberal and open than me, but for years I skipped that passage in Heather. And I really hope that none of those conservative ideologues who want to ban the book ever actually read it, because if they start complaining about explicit artificial insemination scenes, I, for one, will have a harder time defending its appropriateness. Somehow, though, I don't think we need to worry too much about that happening.
[And, to return for a moment to Knuffle Bunny, several readers have written in (comments, people, use the comments, so that it at least appears that this pathetic excuse for a blog has a small handful of readers) to suggest that the subtext of Knuffle Bunny is that the dad is an idiot and the mom figures out the problem, which is certainly true and opens up potentially significant gender readings, but hey, what makes texts exciting is that you can read them in lots of different ways!]
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3 comments:
I used a similar progression to yours. My older daughter was 3 when I was pregnant with my younger daughter. I told her about the egg but not the sperm, which she loved. She would (still does occasionally) talk in matter-of-fact tones about "When I was a little egg". The looks on people's faces...
My husband put on an act about leaving out the sperm, but never fear, oh beloved, because soon we acquired Usborne's "Como crecen los bebes" (something like that) which has an entire page dedicated to the sperm and egg. To my surprise, my older daughter absorbed and integrated this new information without any dismay. Meanwhile, my younger daughter, now 4, is still firmly in the egg stage of sex ed. Older daughter has told her about the daddy contribution, but younger daughter could care less. They both seem to derive comfort and pleasure knowing that they existed in me even before they were babies.
Rachel
http://palabreria.bloghole.org
We-ll, we told our three year olds about eggs and sperm both. We didn't explain how they came together in Mommy's uterus (we did use the U word) but our son was going through some serious labia envy. [I hate the word vulva, and would not use it, and when the girls are pointing down there, they're not actually aiming for their vaginas....wait, a rant for a different day.] Anyway, so we have used sperm and egg right from around age 3, because our son was feeling deprived in the baby-making department and the girls were actually piling it on. (Lots of stuffing dolls under shirts and going around "having babies," and our son wailing and gnashing his teeth when they told him to bug off. We needed to reassure him that he did make a contribution, as it were.)
That having been said, I'm not entirely sure I'm hip to this particular description of AI as you describe it. I'd have to think for a minute about how I would phrase it.
Maybe we just had reproductive-obsessed three-year olds, but I can easily imagine them wanting to know how two mommies made a baby. It would be a question we'd have to answer -- certainly we'd have to answer it now, at almost-five.
As for the bigger issue, we started with _And Tango Makes Three_, because the more didactic books are less fun to read. And "Tango" is new, and I'm a sucker for new releases.
You touched on something that's becoming more and more important to me. I think it's possible -- necessary, even -- to support and expose your children to all kinds of ways of living while keeping it age-appropriate. It's not censorship; it's good parenting. One thing has nothing to do with the other, but each cast such a long shadow that it's easy to get lost in it unknowingly. At least that's what I find, the more I sit back and think.
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