Boys and Boas
Written By Barbara Hey
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Firefighter and Spider-Man costumes? So last season. Henry preferred the classics -- feathers and tulle.
In preschool, my son Henry's favorite dress-up outfit was a combination of any or all of the following: pastel blue princess dress, gold lamé skirt, multicolored sequined tube top, pink tutu, and a scarf printed with A Chorus Line tickets, held together with tape and worn as a cape.
While Henry in glitter and tulle made his dad a bit queasy ("What's up with Henrietta?" he'd ask), I saw Henry's precocious cross-dressing as evidence that he was oblivious to the gender rules of our culture, that he'd not yet experienced the full-bore peer pressure that abrades the distinctive sparkle of many a child.
More to the point, he was a boy with an older sister. He didn't realize that unlike his sister, he soon would be facing limited fashion options.
I had pointed Henry toward the boy dress-up path, supplying him with an array of gender-appropriate costuming. His blue cardboard trunk came packed with vests, jackets, and assorted accessories for such pragmatic boy fantasy figures as policeman, firefighter, doctor. All the costume pieces seemed carved from plastic -- thick and unyielding, hard edged, outgassing chemicals now probably banned by the EPA. Henry didn't think much of his box of mini manly professional wear.
Meanwhile, his sister Hannah had a stockpile of twirlable billowy formal wear, much more compelling on a visual and tactile level. Her pink cardboard chest was overflowing with diaphanous skirts and veils, pearlescent silky tops and elbowlength gloves, a couple of feather boas, all in shimmering, sherbet colors. Not one real-life-mimicking uniform in the
One afternoon Henry visited the kitchen wearing a Cinderella gown over a navy blue Big Dog T-shirt, fancied up with a bridal veil and one white glove. He headed for the string cheese as if nothing were out of the ordinary.
"Why are you wearing that?" I asked. He ran his hands down the silky folds of the skirt and said, "I like it." Apparently to his 3-year-old eyes it was the perfect snack-time attire. I didn't probe, nor did I get the vapors, because for one, I'd learned most oddities of behavior pass without intervention, and two, his dad worked at a women's magazine and his grandfather was a hairdresser -- the gender divide was fairly fluid in our family.
And so, Henrietta stayed awhile. Until he was 5 or so, Henry spent an occasional day at home looking like a juvenile drag queen. He never went to school in dressup, never asked to be the Little Mermaid for Halloween, and never gussied up in the company of pals -- only with his sister. She freely shared her wardrobe with her brother/mannequin. Henry liked seeing her all excited at the vision of him in satin, and together they'd bounce on the bed, twirling and preening with a glee that bordered on hysteria, particularly if there was a camera nearby. Their collusion made it hard to discern if he was in a tutu because he enjoyed it or because it entertained Hannah.
She was also his aesthetician, painting his nails in color and glitter, which he did proudly display in public. Henry later told me that another schoolboy had better nail polish -- the only memory of his cross-dressing days he'll now admit to.
As kindergarten loomed, I wondered if I should make the organza go away. I wanted Henry to be true to his inner being, yet it seemed wise to avoid unnecessary turbulence. If a little girl dresses like a boy, she blends in; pants and T-shirts cross all gender lines. But when a boy goes princess, he stands out, and I wanted to prepare Henry for the limits of the real world. Also, in the back of my mind, maybe I hoped Henry would be a "regular" guy -- a boy who barreled through life, got hurt but kept playing, whatever the game. But he's never been that boy. Sweet and cautious, he's never risked going near the ball for fear of being trampled by peers, and at 5, when he heard Stevie Nicks sing "Landslide," he cried uncontrollably.
During Henry's glam phase, I checked with our favorite preschool teacher, Dee Otte, who has an instinct for when to divert and when to ignore an idiosyncrasy. She'd helped me many times (when, for instance, my daughter insisted she would not sit in a circle, but in a square). Watch his intensity, she said: Does he enjoy dressing up like a girl or does he absolutely have to do it?
