As California goes…
In honor of gay marriage now being legal in California, I present to you a conversation I had yesterday with my 5 year old:
5yo: Hey mom? Do men marry men sometimes?
me: Yes, sometimes they do.
5yo: Well then can they combine their 2 sperm cells and make a baby?
me: No, you need sperm and an egg to make a baby, so you need a man and a woman.
5yo: Well how do they have a baby then?
me: Well, sometimes they adopt a baby who grew in someone else’s tummy, just like we adopted Sam. Remember, there are a lot of different ways that babies join families.
5yo: Well, I’m not going to marry a man. I’m going to marry Saffron so she can grow a baby in her tummy.
me: OK.
5yo: And then when I go to astronaut school, she can stay home and take care of him! And his name will be Henry. Like the neighbor’s dog in Jack and Annie.
me: I thought you said Saffron was going to be an architect?
5yo: She can do that job later.
Despite the fact that I may be raising a mini chauvinist, at least he’s open minded about the marriage issue. (He later came up with: “Well, girls can marry girls, then, and then you’d have two moms!”) OK, but you’re thinking “stop blogging about your kids already — what does this have to do with libraries?” Simply this: a lot of kids in his generation are growing up thinking of things like gay marriage and adoption and multiethnic families as natural, just another way to do things. This should be a wakeup call for librarians to continue standing on our principles in terms of the way that we provide services to all.
I feel the same way about librarians who refuse to work Harry Potter parties, who won’t purchase materials on homosexuality (or witchcraft, or what the heck, even “intelligent design”) — or who block MySpace — as I do about pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraception: You’re in the wrong profession, folks.
julieatlu:
Rachel,
Thank you, thank you for your blog (always!) And thank you for talking to your kids about alternative families in a way I have also found myself talking to mine. My kids are now 10 and 12 and I’ve gone through the friends telling them same sex unions are “gross’ and “unnatural” and all things in between. I have always tried to tell them that love happens to people, no matter who they love and all will be OK in the end. I think same sex marriage (unions, whatever), adoption (multiracial or whatever) and “natural” kids are all great and ALL make great families. And that librarians are the key to helping any and all viewpoints understand one and other. Let’s hope we keep doing our jobs as well as we should.
JF
18 June 2008, 8:38 pmJeff:
That’s funny. My six year old son has the same conversations about who is going to marry and have children with. He also knows about men marrying men and women marrying men without batting an eye. He did ask if men could get pregnant. This future married couple will also have four jobs (one of them is to be a library manager ahhh
19 June 2008, 11:32 amMarcyB:
You guys are lucky to have such savvy kids. Eight-year-old Avery knows all about gestation and delivery, but every time I try to tell him about S-E-X (he knows the word, if nothing else) he does the Talk To The Hand gesture while shaking his head vehemently and saying, “No thanks, I don’t wanna hear about that.” It’s actually kind of funny. But you’re absolutely right, Rachel, that when he IS ready to learn all about sexuality and its many forms, I want there to be good resources available to help me help him.
19 June 2008, 3:13 pmJoan:
My son told me when he was five that he was very glad to be a boy, because having a baby would be extremely “uncomfortable”.
22 June 2008, 7:53 amgin davis:
well it’s funny how the child wonders by himself he wonders and i also wonder about procreation
1 July 2008, 7:25 am……………………………
gin davis
Addiction Recovery Arizona
Mike Shell:
Thanks for this. It delights me as a 50-something gay man to know how much has changed.
When I was in grade school–way back in another century, the 1950s, to be precise–my Mom read to me from a progessive child sex ed book of the time about how intercourse worked.
My childish thought was, “Yuck! Do I have to do that?!” So, I asked if babies could be made “by accident”–by which I meant “by kissing” or something else less “yucky”!
Mom, thinking adult thoughts, said yes–by which I now know she meant “unplanned.”
It took about 10 years before I learned the truth.”
Mike
2 July 2008, 5:26 pm