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Period. Fact or Fantasy?

 

  Liam has been obsessed with books by Tamora Pierce, who writes fantasy-adventure books filled with magic, knights, quests, and feats of derring-do. The protagonists in most of these books, however, are girls, and I wondered, in a brief moment of gender stereotyping, why Liam found them so fascinating.

The first quartet, Song of the Lioness, is about a girl named Alanna, who switches places with her twin brother Thom. Thom goes off to study socerery and Alanna dresses up as “Alan” in order to take Thom’s place as an apprentice knight.  In Alanna, The First Adventure, “Alan” must struggle to compete against other apprentices who are all bigger and stronger than she is, so she studies and practices endlessly in order to triumph in her various endeavors.

I realized that in Alanna, Liam found a kindred spirit: he’s the smallest kid in fourth grade and despite being incredibly athletic, he has to work twice as hard to keep up with the other boys, many of whom are already half-a-foot taller than he is.

Unlike Alanna, however, Liam doesn’t have magical powers.  Alanna is also a Healer,  it seems, and when she helps to heal people, she glows with a violet light; she can also create an electric-blue force field between herself and her enemies. 

During her time as an apprentice, Alanna starts to grow up: first her breasts start to develop, but she figures out how to wrap her chest tightly so that her body doesn’t give away her secret (it is forbidden for women to become knights, in this world).  Alanna also experiences her first period, which is explained in vague terms as “bleeding from a secret place between her leg,” and later as her “monthly cycle.” She finds a woman who explains what the blood means–that she can now bear children if she “lies with a man,” but that’s the extent of the detail.

Curious about how Liam reacted to these descriptions of a girl coming of age, I brought it up the other night when I was helping wash his hair: “When Alanna has that ‘monthly cycle,’ you remember, I wondered if you had any questions about that, because that’s part of what happens when a girl starts to grow up…”

He stared at me, eyes wide open.

“You mean that stuff REALLY HAPPENS?”

I guess his reaction makes sense. I mean, what’s more fantastical: occasionally glowing purple or bleeding from some secret place once a month?

Read full story · Comments { 2 } on March 31, 2010 in growing up, Kids

How do you punctuate a tantrum?

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Caleb had a temper tantrum this afternoon.

Actually, he had several.

Actually, most of his afternoon was spent in a state of upheaval, starting with being angry with his brother about the Wii game they were playing (wii: from the ancient Japanese word for “fratricide”). 

At some point, without any of us noticing, he scrawled a message for us on the seen-way-better-days wall-to-wall carpet that came with our apartment:  I heyt you.

Washable marker, but still. Pretty bad stuff. Of course, Husband and I didn’t notice it until after both boys were in their kennels–I mean, tucked in their beddy-byes asleep. We figure tomorrow we’ll do the “it hurts our feelings when you say these things, and you know better than to write on the rug,  etc etc” and other namby-pamby progressive parenting blather, and then ask him to help us scrub the carpet clean.

To add insult to injury, the kid misspelled the word “hate.” For crissake.

But at least he realized that you put a period at the end of a sentence.

Guess that fancy-ass gifted-and-talented kindergarten is good for something.

Read full story · Comments { 5 } on March 27, 2010 in Parenting

Oh That Pesky Big Government!

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Here’s a lovely historical confluence for you: today the House ratified the “fixes” in the Health Care Reform Bill Law. Today is also the 99th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which killed 146 women, most of them immigrants who spoke little or no English.

The women died in all kinds of ways: some were trapped in the burning building , some fell when the single fire escape that could be reached ripped away from the wall of the building, some jumped from windows and were impaled on the wrought-iron fence below, others suffocated from smoke inhalation.

But mostly the women–some of whom were as young as 15–died because there weren’t any rules in place about workplace safety, about fire codes, about workers’ rights. There weren’t even any rules mandating that fire engines have ladders long enough to reach the upper floors of buildings–the fire engines at the factory fire reached to the 6th floor, but the fire started on the 9th floor. 

A  jury acquitted the factory owners at trial, although a later civil suit forced the owners to pay the whopping sum of $75 per victim. The insurance company–the insurance company — later paid the factory owners about $60,000 in damages, which amounts to about $400 per victim.

Funny, you know, 99 years ago, in the aftermath of this disaster, when labor advocates and progressives started advocating and agitating for reform, they were told that the reforms would drive companies out of business; that it would be too expensive; that it was the workers own fault for not knowing English, because they couldn’t understand the shouted instructions of the firemen who were yelling at them to jump into the safety nets nine stories below. Frances Parker, one of the most outspoken reformers (who later went on to work for that notorious socialist, FDR) was told repeatedly that the government had no right to intervene in business practices.

Hmm.

Read full story · Comments { 0 } on March 25, 2010 in Politics