Some things about my tiny human creature haven't changed. She's still pretty girly. She loves pink and purple, dresses and skirts, curls in her hair, and fake sticker or clip on earrings. The idea of having holes punctured in her ears for real ones makes her cringe, presently. That's one of those things I still leave up to her as her choice. Some day she may decide she wants piercings. Or she might not ever. I'm fine with that. It's her body, and that's what's important for her to learn. Her body. Her choice.
There is one thing that caught me totally by surprise, however, and that's when she came home from school one day at the end of kindergarten with a certain paper. I thought it was a cute little project. On the paper the kids were to write ten things they'd like to learn to do. The shocking part, to me, was that my daughter had listed football.
It's funny, because we're not a sports household. We don't have cable TV, mostly because we decided it was a waste of money to have five billion channels devoted to the sports we don't ever follow. I was never a big fan of sports in my younger years and would often openly criticize them. It still doesn't make sense to me that we pay people billions of dollars to entertain us. That goes for the movie and television industry too, really. But I digress.
All summer long, all over Facebook, I kept seeing advertisements for sign ups for youth football. I think they might have even sent a flier home at the end of her kindergarten year. I took my time, continually asking her if she was sure she wanted to play football, and not do cheer leading. I tried very hard not to make it sound like I was pressuring her to do cheer leading instead, as was strictly enforced on girls when I was a child. I didn't want to influence her decision one way or the other, but I did want to be certain she knew what she was talking about and not going to change her mind on me halfway through the year like she does way too often.
So! The first chance I saw to sign my girl up for flag football, I did. I held my breath. I anxiously awaited the scathing email telling me that girls could not play football. After all, that's what I was told consistently, to my aggravation and lament, when I was a child.
Girls can't play football. Only boys can. Girls have to be cheer leaders. Girls are weaker than boys. They might get hurt. And: Girls can't play baseball. That's the boys version. You're a girl so you have to play softball.
Like boys don't ever get hurt playing football, but that's okay because boys can take it! My fellow sisters of the world, I hear you laughing and scoffing and sense you collectively rolling your eyes while you think, "Yeah, buddy, well I'd like to see you endure childbirth." I know, I know. Also: I hated softball mostly because the ball was bigger, and I have little hands. I thought it was logically easier for me to handle a baseball. It was also intuitively easier for me to overhand throw than that weird damage your rotator cuff underhand thing they do in softball. But what do I know! I'm a girl!
What I was not surprised to discover on the very first day of practice was that Your Future Overlord was the only girl on the team. Not only that... There were two flag football teams, and she was the only girl on either one. So far, she's the only girl I've seen on any of the flag football teams in a whatever mile radius in the "league" we play in.
I even prepared her, because I know my girl. For the longest time she was apprehensive about working with boys. When we first started Jiu Jitsu (yes she does that too - maybe I'll write another article about that), she cried whenever she was paired with a boy. It's something we struggled with for a long time. Expecting more emotional outbursts, I told her that it was likely she'd be the only girl, that mostly boys play football and it was likely the entire rest of the team would all be boys.
Well, I was right about that. To my tremendous relief, she took to playing with them right away without any issues. They're all around the same age as her, 5 to 6, and welcomed her as one of their own. The coaches have been great with her too. Either I prepared her with pep talks well, or she's gotten over her anti-boy tendencies. That's entirely possible. She has been making more and more boy friends along with her never-ending supply of girl friends. This girl just makes all the friends.
Another thing I noticed right away was the glimmer of pleasure in the eyes of all the moms when I introduced myself, saying, "I'm the mom of the only girl on the team." All these women, just like me, feeling the chains of oppression shatter. I could see it happening in their eyes, in their smiles. I was also pleased to hear how open they were about how more widely accepted girls playing football is now was as opposed to how it was then. Pleased, but also sad. My inner child from years gone by resurfaced to sob at me about how unjust the world was to her.
The hardest part in all this hasn't been fighting for my daughter's rights, or having to bludgeon someone for the first sexist remark made, as I had imagined, but instead reliving my own past where opportunities were prohibited me on account of my sex. (Not gender. We all know that's another matter entirely.) She and her little sister have asked me if I played football when I was a kid, and I've painfully had to tell them no. Even harder is explaining why. They don't understand.
"Well, when Mommy was a little girl, girls just weren't allowed to play football."
"Why?" I tell them all the time that boys and girls can do the same things, so why was it different for Mommy?
I want to tell them, "Because the world is a stupid place." That's the first thing that comes to mind. That and some pretty scathing opinions about world religions and their philosophies on gender roles which have shaped society to where we are today, but we'll not get into that right now.
Let's focus, instead, on the small victories. Like this one here:
Baby girl, you can do whatever you want to do. (Within reasonable legal limits of course.) I won't let anyone ever tell you, as they did me, time and time again, that girls can't.
People ask me if I'm going to let her play football again next year. I hate that question. Why wouldn't I let her? Because she might get hurt? Break a bone? Oh no! If I worried about my kids sustaining an injury, I'd never let them out of the house, and I'd make sure their environment was made solely of cushions. No sharp edges anywhere! No access to the kitchen! They are their own people. The only way for them to learn and grow is to experience life on their own terms, even if that means getting a little scrape every now and then. If she wants to play football again next year, she can. I'll fight tooth and nail anyone who tells me otherwise.
However, now that she's seen the cheer leaders in action she's expressed an interest in doing that next year instead. I like cheer leading even less than I do football, but... I'll support her in anything she wants to do, and try my damnedest to keep my opinions to myself. Or, at least, strictly ramble about them here on this blog which she won't discover until several years from now. By then she's likely to understand the real answers to the question Why? a lot better anyway.
