Re-Posting from Gayle Sulik: Factoids and Impressions

Factoids and Impressions

BY GAYLE SULIK, ON OCTOBER 4TH, 2011

One might assume that anything involving breast cancer awareness would be based on the best available evidence. Unfortunately, this assumption would be wrong. I’ve evaluated hundreds of campaigns, advertisements, websites, educational brochures, and other sundry materials related to breast cancer awareness only to find information that is inaccurate, incomplete, irrelevant, or out of context. We could spend the whole year analyzing them. For now, consider a print advertisement for mammograms by CENTRA Mammography Services. [Note: I previously shared this ad back in July in an essay called Mammogram Mania.]

The full-page ad was published last October in a special issue magazine devoted to breast cancer awareness. Such special issues are now a common feature in magazines and other media outlets during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. They include personal stories, information, interviews with experts, fund-raising events, pink ribbon promotions, and of course a slew of product placements that come with their own versions of “helpful” health information.

Awareness advertorials tend to include factoids and impressions, and the impressions come first.

Color matching. The reader’s eye moves between a pink foreground and a matching pink sweatshirt. Pink, we already know, signifies breast cancer awareness.

Joy, nature, sisterhood, and health. A group of smiling women, friends in fact, of varied ages and ethnic backgrounds walk outside, arm in arm, wearing sneakers and sweatshirts. The sunshine, trees, and “just do it” attitude nearly walk off the page.

The hook. After the impressions are set, they are reinforced and followed with a directive. A large caption: “All your friends are doing it,” is followed by a sheepish, “Shouldn’t you?” Peer pressure directed toward adult women to sell mammography services. CENTRA follows up its peer pressure with a finger-pointing guilt grip.

“With early detection, diagnosis and improved treatment, women are beating breast cancer. But still, many of you aren’t doing the one thing that may help prevent and diagnose it in the first place, a mammogram.”

The “shame on you” accusations are reminiscent of the bad old days of paternalistic medicine, in which doctors used fear of physical and/or social mutilation to promote breast examination and medical intervention. In the 1940s and 1950s physicians and popular health magazines used imagery of women “blowing their brains out” to represent the seriousness of their responsibility to examine their breasts. At the same time, the words are misleading and/or inaccurate.

Early detection is a common and overused phrase that gives the impression that mammograms unequivocally find cancers early, so early in fact that if they are found on a mammogram and then treated, you will not die from breast cancer. Not true.

• Some breast cancers are slow growing and unlikely to spread.
• Other breast cancers grow and spread quickly.
• The most important factor related to whether a person’s breast cancer is likely to cause death is related to tumor biology.
• Stage zero breast conditions such as DCIS are not in themselves life threatening. They are called precancers or risk factors for invasive breast cancer.
• People found to have stage zero conditions may develop an invasive breast cancer later in their lives, but most won’t.
• People diagnosed across stages I, II or III have a recurrence in 20 to 30 percent of cases. The longer someone lives without having a recurrence, the greater the chance that there won’t be one.
• Clinical trials show that population screening reduces the mortality rate by 15 to 30 percent.

In reality, the detection of a cancer on a mammogram before it has become symptomatic has been translated into the phrase early detection. Although routine screening sometimes leads to a reduction in mortality from breast cancer, as stated above, improved treatment for breast cancer is more likely to account for known reductions in mortality. Still, somewhere around 40 to 41 thousand women and men die each year from metastatic breast cancer regardless of whether or not their cancer was detected on a mammogram.

The ad does not include any of this information. Instead it states that mammograms the “one thing” that matters to “prevent and diagnose” breast cancer in the first place. Mammograms do not prevent breast cancer, and they identify (with varied degrees of accuracy) cancers that are already there. The National Cancer Institute reports that screening mammograms “miss up to 20 percent of breast cancers that are present at the time of screening.”

To show how much their mammography services are needed, the ad provides a 2010 incidence statistic of 207,090, and claims that “a mammogram detects 90 percent of all breast cancers.” I don’t know where that statistic comes from. The ad includes no information about how many results are inconclusive, false-positives, or false-negatives. It does not give the number of deaths.

Beneath the hours of operation and contact information for CENTRA’s mammography centers, the box reads: “Why risk it? Be proactive!”Playing on both the fear and uncertainty of breast cancer as well as the general social expectation that individuals should be responsible and proactive medical consumers, the ad reinforces its earlier message that preventing breast cancer is completely within women’s power. Should a woman learn at some point in her life that she has breast cancer but did not take the action recommended in the ad, the outcome must be due to her failure to act as warned. The exclamation point emphasizes the importance of the directive.

If the ad were just an ad it could be taken at face value, but it is not just an ad. It is yet another cultural message within a sea of messages in the name of breast cancer awareness that plays on fear of breast cancer, hope for the future, and the goodness of jumping on a pink bandwagon. At the same time, these types of ads and campaigns are almost always accompanied with some type of “legitimizing” evidence. The information sounds right. It rings true to the reader but without telling the whole story. Of course, the ultimate appeal is to get consumers to buy the product.

Should women get screened for breast cancer? It’s clearly not a simple answer. It requires deep thought about the strengths, limitations, risks, and benefits of this diagnostic tool. Some women will benefit from it. Others will not. The conditions vary. Yet the “just do it” tide in breast cancer awareness floods advertisements, campaigns, and product placements.

Thank you, CENTRA Mammography Services, for telling me what to do for my own good, but I can think for myself! [That's an exclamation point to indicate strong feeling.]

–

- Bravo, Gayle, for putting it all so clearly. I recommend Gayle's blog: GayleSulik.com, and her book "Pink Ribbon Blues."

Anger

I thought I had pretty much skipped over Anger.

Denial, yes. It was brief, but it was there, in my “let me give it a week, and if it’s still there, I’ll call the doctor.” Depression, Bargaining, Acceptance – oh yes. Been there, done all of those. But I couldn’t really summon up any anger… who or what is to blame? How can I feel anger, when I have no place for it to go?

I will own up to a heightened state of irritation - particularly towards well-meaning individuals who offer unsolicited advice. “I hear a good attitude is really important,” says one, patting me gently on the arm. “Make sure you stay away from sugar (soy, caffeine, aluminum-based deodorant, plastic bottles, etc.). It feeds cancer cells,” says another. My favorite advice was the email from my ex-husband, who forwarded a newsletter from Johns Hopkins entitled “Cancer Update.” I can’t bring myself to include the whole thing, but here are a few particular gems:

1. Every person has cancer cells in the body. These cancer cells do not show up in the standard tests until they have multiplied to a few billion. When doctors tell cancer patients that there are no more cancer cells in their bodies after treatment, it just means the tests are unable to detect the cancer cells because they have not reached the detectable size. READ: WE’VE ALL GOT IT, AND NO ONE IS FUCKING EVER CURED!

6. Chemotherapy involves poisoning the rapidly-growing cancer cells and also destroys rapidly-growing healthy cells in the bone marrow, gastro-intestinal tract, etc, and can cause organ damage, like liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, etc. READ: THOSE DRUGS ARE ACTUALLY KILLING YOU OFF, PIECE BY PIECE!

7. Radiation, while destroying cancer cells also burns, scars and damages healthy cells, tissues and organs. READ: DITTO FOR RADIATION!

10. Surgery can also cause cancer cells to spread to other sites. READ: THAT LUMPECTOMY AND AXILLARY NODE DISSECTION YOU HAD JUST MADE THINGS WORSE!



11. An effective way to battle cancer is to starve the cancer cells by not feeding it with the foods it needs to multiply… Sugar is a cancer-feeder…. Sugar substitutes like NutraSweet, Equal, Spoonful, etc. are made with aspartame, and it is harmful…Table salt has a chemical added to make it white in color. …Milk causes the body to produce mucus, especially in the gastro-intestinal tract. Cancer feeds on mucus. … Meat also contains livestock antibiotics, growth hormones and parasites, which are all harmful, especially to people with cancer… Avoid coffee, tea, and chocolate, which have high caffeine…. Water - best to drink purified water, or filtered, to avoid known toxins and heavy metals in tap. READ: JUST DON’T FUCKING EAT OR DRINK EVER AGAIN AND YOU’LL BE OK!

and my absolute favorite….

15. Cancer is a disease of the mind, body, and spirit. A proactive and positive spirit will help the cancer warrior be a survivor. Anger, unforgiveness and bitterness put the body into a stressful and acidic environment. Learn to have a loving and forgiving spirit. Learn to relax and enjoy life.

If the letter weren’t so fucking ridiculous, and it didn’t come from my ex-husband, it would have made me angry. I’m guessing it made a lot of people who received it angry (even if their anger did “put the body into a stressful and acidic environment"). As it was, I just laughed (an irritated laugh, complete with eye-roll) but decided it wasn’t worth the gift of my anger. And then I put on my favorite T-shirt, which reads, “Unless you’ve found the cure for stupid, please don’t tell me about it.”

I’m always taken aback by how my feelings take me by surprise – how they truly seem to come from nowhere. One minute, I’m reading Tina Fey’s “A Prayer for my Daughter” out loud to Larry, and laughing. The next minute I can’t finish the last paragraph because I’m choking back tears. I find these moments unsettling, as they don’t mesh with my perception that I am calm, stolid and in control. Raising five children has toughened me: you don’t survive teenagers (or divorce) without developing a pretty thick skin. Even the brutal honesty of five year olds makes me laugh. Last night Rachael looked up at me and announced, “I don’t like Mommy because she doesn’t have any hair.” Chloe looked at me, horrified, and said, “Rachael, you’re hurting Mommy’s feelings!” Rachael looked surprised, but I smiled and said, “It’s okay,” because I know five year olds like I know the back of my hand, and I knew she meant that she didn’t like the way Mommy looked without hair. I don’t like it either.

Last week was particularly miserable: the sort of week that leaves you full of crappy feelings, and no place to let them out. I was coming off Round 4 of chemo, and the cumulative effects of that round and the three previous rounds had left me pretty darn uncomfortable. I was also saddled with a pile of extra-curricular activities a mile long. Two concerts, rehearsals, a talk, plus work and kids – all while battling low-grade nausea, mouth sores, headaches, a strong metallic taste, aching bones, insomnia and a bad cough. Let’s just say my irritation and my frustration were building. Big time.

Friday afternoon I finished work, picked up some groceries, Saturday’s breakfast at the bakery and fish for dinner at Captain Marden’s. I dragged the bags into the house, put things away, and looked at the clock only to realize that it was already time to meet the twins at the bus. So I called the dog, slid my steroid-puffy, aching feet into a pair of flip-flops, and headed up the street to the bus stop.

We live halfway down a steep hill, on a dead-end road with a cul-de-sac. The bus driver has to navigate a narrow bumpy road up the hill to the mouth of the dead-end, then make a sharp turn, and floor it to get up the next steep hill. In the winter she can’t make it, and we slip and slide up our dead-end road and all the way down the hill (no sidewalks) to meet her at the main road bus stop. But it is spring, now, and we have our bus stop back.

As I flip flopped my way up the dead end road to the stop, I saw orange cones blocking the hill road. From the top, I looked down the street to see what was happening. It was difficult to see down the street because of new construction at the bottom: for several weeks the workers have been parking their badass trucks with the massive wheels carelessly in the road, making it difficult for cars to get by. But I could see orange cones on the clear side, and realized that the road was blocked at both ends, and the workers were connecting a water line.

My chemo brain works slowly these days (Item 6 in the Cancer Update – my whole body is being poisoned!), but it dawned on me that because of the dead end, there would be no way for the bus to detour and come up the hill a different route – it would not be able to turn around or get back down. In a growing panic, I began running down the hill - flip flop flip flop - with Satchel in tow, in the hope that I could reach the main stop before the bus did.

As I ran past the construction workers at the bottom I turned and yelled at them in frustration. “There’s a bus stop here – you’ve blocked the bus – how the hell is she supposed to get up the street?” They looked at me half curiously (ah yes, strange pale puffy woman with scarf on head), then to a one, shrugged and turned away. I kept running.

I got to the bus stop too late – the bus was gone, and Rachael and Chloe were still on it. I stood there, panting from my run, frantic and frustrated, wondering what to do. Would she come back? Take them back to school? Should I run home, or stay put?

And there it was, the anger - as sudden and overwhelming and surprising as my recent tears over Tina Fey. It wasn’t pure, this anger, but diluted with guilt (why didn’t I anticipate a roadblock, and leave earlier?), and frustration at my inability to solve the problem immediately. I imagined both girls sitting on the bus, looking out the window, searching the road, wondering why Mommy hadn’t come. They are unusually anxious these days, asking daily questions about where I’ll be, and who’s going to babysit them when I go to the doctor, and if I am going to die. What were they thinking as the bus drove away in the wrong direction, with no Mommy to pick them up? I.just.have.to.be.there.

I stayed there, huddled, blinking back tears, taking deep breaths, trying to think calmly. The twins’ bus driver is a sweetheart. She knows them by name and gives them candy on Fridays. She asks me how I’m feeling, and once gave Larry her phone number in case we ever need extra help. She would figure out where I was, and bring them back. I should stay put.

It was a long fifteen minutes, but the bus came back. Lisa looked relieved to see me and rolled down her window. “I didn’t know what to do with the road closed,” she shouted. “I waited up at another stop, then thought to check down here.” Rachael and Chloe looked relieved to see me, and to see familiar territory, hopping down the steps and coming over for kisses. I thanked the bus driver, apologized for missing the drop off, and took the girls’ hands to start our walk home.

But as we turned the corner and started back up the hill, my anger suddenly came flooding back. It burbled and roiled, mixed with exhaustion, anxiety, and guilt – whatever was brewing came together in a potent stew, fueled by the careless indifference of the construction workers; their shrugs and rolled eyes. As we closed in on the site, I began screaming like a fishwife.

I can’t remember what I said (though I’m sure it will come back to haunt me through the mouths of five year olds), but it involved many fucks, fuckings, fucktards and assholes. I ranted and raved about Lack of Consideration and Lack of Communication and the Safety of Small Children. I went on and on, while the majority of the men kept their heads bent over their digging and hammering, and those that watched exuded a particularly male brand of unconcern and deafness. Meanwhile, Rachael and Chloe and the dog, all excited and confused by Mommy’s theatrical performance, danced around me in increasingly wider circles.

And then, just as suddenly, I was done. I grabbed both girls’ hands, and fueled by the adrenaline rush from all that anger, was able to make it back up the hill, flip flop, flip flop.

We reached the top of the road, and there were the five cones – and a large metal DETOUR sign lying on the ground. With a final, childish flash of fury, I said, “Come on, girls, we have a job to do.” I grabbed two cones and threw them in the woods at the side of the road. Rachael and Chloe each grabbed one of the remaining cones, and the three of us quickly dispensed with all the cones and the sign before continuing on home.

Denial? Check. Anger? Check. Depression? Check. Bargaining? Check. Acceptance? Check.

So tell me, what comes next?

The Big, GodAwfulPink, Elephant...

I've got writer's block. Noting the date of my last post, it's been going on for a while.

I can't write about breast cancer, and I can't write about anything else.

I read a particularly mediocre book the other day - it was called The Middle Place - and was a memoir (I use the term loosely) written by a women with breast cancer whose father was subsequently diagnosed with bladder cancer. It was a classic example of the kind of memoir that gives the genre a bad name: a generic "telling" of events and feelings. I suppose most memoirs tell generic stories... a good memoir is all about the telling, after all. But if the author meant to convey what it's like to be a patient, a parent and a daughter in the midst of all these nasty proliferating cells, she didn't quite get it across.

It's early days, but there are no moments, as of yet, that have been unusual in my story. I'm not the first mother with five children to deal with this shit. I'm not the first teacher to explain to her young students about bad cells and bald heads. I'm not the first cellist who can't play because her arm is too fucking sore. I'm probably not even the first woman more concerned with losing her hair than a boob. ("I'm not shaving my head in solidarity, Mom," says the 17-year old. "Not with my profile.") We don't run voluptuous in this family, but we all have thick, curly hair that we're pretty vain about. And I'm not the first woman with breast cancer who finally found her soulmate, only to have the length of her marriage threatened way too soon.

I don't know if all five year-olds are as curious as mine, but I do enjoy their "hands-on" approach to the situation. At first, pre-surgery, it was "Can I feel the bump, Mom? Can I feel it again? Is it bigger today? Does it hurt?" Post-surgery, they developed a fascination with my suction drain, which pulls all the undesirable fluids out from under my arm. "What color is it today? Is there still blood in it? It looks like apple juice!" Pretty soon, once I'm in the throes of chemo, they will want to rub my bald head. And down the road, to see my radiation tats. (Mental note: hide the Sharpies.) I imagine a future Monday morning Kindergarten Show-'n-Tell: "My Mommy threw up FIFTEEN TIMES this weekend!"

Maybe I'll post pictures of the hats I'm going to knit.

We'll see.

Laundry As Digestion

The trough is fed: stuffed, crammed, overfull.
Swallowed by the esophageal stairs
Momentarily stuck between two flights (an air pocket),
Then moving forward
in
fits
and
starts.

In the belly of the basement it is separated into parts -
dropped piece by piece into the cavernous tub, where it is
bubbled and bathed in fluids
scrub
spin
rinse
spin.

Alas - constipation…

The next day, a bloated and moldy load
waits to be propelled (sluggishly) to the final cistern.
Liquids siphoned off mysteriously,
Lint left clinging to the insides
Each piece spun, flipped and steamed into submission.

A loud buzz signals the time for elimination.

The finished products are eyed with satisfaction,
Then returned from whence they came -

flushed forth in an endless cycle.

(Barring the occasional disruptive colonoscopy -
“Where is my black leotard!”
The laundry then roiled and rooted from end to beginning,
wreaking havoc and reflux.
The leotard is vomited up:
wrinkled
dirty
recognizable.)

Haiku

Not yellow, not green
Indefinable unseen
Sought: one peerless bunch

10,000 Dresses

Chloe: “Hi!”

Rachael: “Hi!”

Chloe: “I’m a baby!”

Rachael: “Well, whaddya think I am – a loaf of bread?” (Stereo shrieks of five-year old laughter.)

One of the twins’ favorite playacting scenarios at the moment is from “Free to Be You and Me,” a hippyish children’s album from the early 1970s. “Free to Be You and Me” was eventually turned into a visual special of sorts, which I borrow periodically from our local library, tucking the DVD in surreptitiously with the twins’ weekly requests for Angelina Ballerina, Charlie and Lola and any Disney movie they can get their hands on. Call it Mom’s subtle effort to mix it up a little on the gender front: stories that challenge gender roles for both girls and boys can be hard to find.

For those who didn’t grow up with it, “Free to Be You and Me” is heavily loaded with social messages about individuality, tolerance, and gender stereotypes. It has a star-studded cast, including such treats as a young Michael Jackson singing the duet “When We Grow Up” with Roberta Flack, Rosie Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry,” and my personal favorite: an animated skit about an annoyingly prissy little girl - a “tender sweet young thing” - who comes to a most satisfactory end when she is eaten by a tiger. But it’s the skit called Boy Meets Girl, that makes the biggest impression on Rachael and Chloe. Diaper changes, penises, and silly voices (Mel Brooks): good lord, what more could any self-respecting five year old ask for?

“Boy Meets Girl” touches on gender differences – both real and assumed - in a lighthearted way. Two newborns in a hospital are trying to figure out if each one is a girl, or a boy. They use standard assumptions about what boys and girls look like, and like to do, in order to find the answer. The only problem is, each baby discovers it doesn’t really fit the mold.

I have a special place in my heart for this skit – the subject of gender has always fascinated me, and twenty-three years of teaching young children and raising five of my own has only deepened my curiosity about the subject, and my respect for its complexity. Over time I’ve come to see gender less as a dichotomy, and more as a continuum. The big question I’ve come to ask as a teacher is, how do I create an environment within the classroom that actively supports children along the entire continuum, and encourages them to think about gender more fluidly?

I once found a paragraph written by author Amy Bloom that so resonated with my feelings about gender that I keep it on a sticky note on my computer desktop. It is from her book Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Cross-dressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, and reads:

“A great many people, sick of news from the margins, worn out by the sand shifting beneath their assumptions, like to imagine Nature as a sweet, simple voice: tulips in spring, Vermont’s leaves falling in autumn,” Bloom writes. “Nature is more like Aretha Franklin: vast, magnificent, capricious, occasionally hilarious, and infinitely varied.”

Each year, my co-teacher and I begin our PreKindergarten curriculum with a unit we call “Getting to know each other: Who am I and who are you?” We make gender awareness a big part of this theme: children this age sort and categorize each other based on concrete information and observations, and will assign each their fellow classmates a gender from the get go. We have had to search far and wide for good literature and fiction to inspire ideas and supplement our conversations: some of the best books about gender for children are now out of print. You try to find “Pugdog,” by Andrea U’Ren, or “What is a Girl, What is a Boy,” by Stephanie Waxman -- you’ll find yourself – as we did, ordering remains from used and out-of-print book catalogs. There are other books still in print that have value from a gender perspective; “William’s Doll,” by Charlotte Zolotow, “Oliver Button is a Sissy,” by Tomie dePaola, and “I Look Like a Girl,” by Sheila Hamanaka, but there are not enough of them, and not enough geared appropriately to varying ages.

A large piece of why I love teaching 4-5 year olds is because it is an age where you can still inspire children to think for themselves. You can open up a book filled with photographs of naked women, men and children, and they will talk freely about the differences in the bodies. A child might comment “Hey, that looks just like my mom!” or ask a question about body hair, but uncomfortable fidgeting and giggling are still a year or so in the future: the emotional “loading” of the subject is minimal, and most importantly, doesn’t inhibit the curiosity or the discussion.

One of the simplest and yet most powerful things we do each year during our “Getting to know you” unit is have our students generate lists of the differences between girls and boys. We split the class in half and do it in two separate lessons with smaller, more intimate discussions.

“What makes a girl a girl?” We ask the class. “What makes a boy a boy?”

Our students’ hands shoot up in the air.

Group One:
Girls stand still
Boys push
Boys have short hair
Girls have long hair
Girls wear flowers and hearts and rainbows on their shirts
Boys wear shark shirts
Girls wear tights
Boys don’t wear tights
Girls wear dresses
Girls wear roses
Boys wear brown shoes
Girls wear pink shoes
Boys like animals
Girls like Princesses and Barbies
Boys like cars
Girls like dolls
Girls wear skirts
Boys wear pants

Group Two:
Boys have short hair
Girls have long hair
Girls like pink
Boys like black
Boys like to play with boys
Girls like to play with girls
Girls wear dresses
Boys wear short or long pants
Boys like Star Wars
Girls like to play Barbies
Girls like girl movies like Cinderella
Boys like boy movies
Boys like scary movies
Girls like to wear jewelry
Girls like to dress up
Girls play princesses
Girls wear heart and flowers
Boys wear transformers

After the kids have shared all their ideas, we revisit each item individually. We ask, “Does anyone have a comment or observation they’d like to make about this idea?” Children are eager to provide examples and specifics of when the observation holds true, and when it doesn’t: “Wait a minute, I’m a boy and I don’t like sharks!” Or “Well, I’m a girl and I love to watch scary movies!” Once they get the hang of it, finding the exception becomes a delightful game. Boys freely confess that they too, occasionally like to play with Barbies, or dress up in a tutu at home, and girls point out that they like to dig in the sand and even build guns with Legos. It is easier for girls to travel the spectrum openly and freely, but at the ages of four and five, boys are willing to confess their own gender benders: a fondness for nail polish, and wearing the color pink. The children delight in saying, “Cross that out!” for each item with an exception. “Take it off the list!”

At the end of the lesson, our girl and boy lists are empty. It is a powerful thing: the large easel chart with every last observation struck through in colored markers. When we ask again if there is anything that should be on those lists - any differences they think hold true for all girls and all boys, the children volunteer two new items: boys have penises, and girls have vaginas. C’est tout.

Last year, a student at my older daughter’s high school ended his freshman year as a boy, and began her sophomore year as a girl, in a dress, with a new, more feminine name. I silently applauded our public high school’s low-key acceptance of it: the girl’s name was changed on class attendance forms, and she was moved to the girls’ gym locker room for P.E. class. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come.

As gender barriers like this begin (hopefully) to fall in our classrooms and schools, I think more about our responsibility as educators to acknowledge and explore children’s feelings about their own gender earlier in the learning process. We have only really scratched the social surface of gender: girls and boys can do and be anything they want to be. But what about girls who want to be boys? And vice versa? How does it feel to be a young boy in the dress up corner: wanting to dress up in heels, perhaps to be the mommy in a game? Living in Massachusetts, we have had the luxury of watching dramatic play in our classroom open up to involve male/male weddings and families having tea with “two mommies.” Honestly, I think we’ve done way better with educating children about sexual orientation than gender orientation. But how comfortable does the girl who wishes to be a boy, or vice versa, feel with expressing those feelings in play?

Last year I came upon a new children’s book, entitled 10,000 Dresses, by Marcus Ewert. 10,000 Dresses is about a child of initially ambiguous gender, “Bailey,” who imagines designing and wearing beautiful dresses. The pronoun used to refer to Bailey is “she,” and the cutout collage style illustrations of Bailey are deliberately gender neutral; Bailey has spiky short hair and a body short on details.

Bailey begins her story by describing in loving detail her dream world of dresses, with reverence for color, glitter and detail, and the imagined pleasure of wearing them. Eventually, she goes to ask her Mother if she would buy her the crystal dress she dreams of. Her mother responds, “Bailey, what are you talking about? You’re a boy. Boys don’t wear dresses!”

“But… I don’t feel like a boy,” says Bailey, and the story reveals its conflict: Bailey’s feelings, dreams and wishes are at odds with her biological gender, and her family’s expectations. Not until Bailey happens upon an older girl in the neighborhood who enjoys sewing dresses, and is happy to sit and dream up new fashion ideas with Bailey, regardless of her gender, does she find the connection she needs to express herself.

The first time I read this book to young children (I practice everything on the twins before trying it out on my class), Rachael and Chloe were confused – it took some discussion and a few read-throughs for them to get the gender situation straight. Once they’d developed an understanding that Bailey was a boy who wanted to be a girl, all was well. Chloe announced that sometimes, she wishes she could be a boy. Like Bailey, both Chloe and Rachael are inspired by beautiful dresses, and could happily share Bailey’s dream of a dress made of crystals with rainbows jumping out. I was struck – as I so often am when I discuss so-called “sensitive” topics with young children, that what is emotionally loaded for us, is not yet loaded for them. It simply is what it is.

The matter-of-fact acceptance of gender variegation shown by young children should be heartening, but the bummer is that it is short-lived. With each passing year, there will be more embarrassment, more giggles, more peer pressure, and more discomfort. Still, I want to believe that if we keep giving the subject of gender orientation (and in later years, sexual orientation as well) a bigger voice in the classroom, some of it will eventually stick. That underneath the whispers and looks and giggles of tweens and teens, will be hearts and minds that can allow for all the variegations, and accept all the possibilities.

May Flowers

I haven't recovered enough from report writing to write for fun. All those thousands of carefully chosen words about my students... which will go (largely) unappreciated by their parents.

But I did grab a camera this morning, and snap some pictures of my garden. Maybe I'll make it a tradition: pictures from the last day of each month of the year. Things are up and blooming so early this year because of the beautiful warm weather... it's been a combination of lattes, palomas and daily walks around the yard that has kept me sane!