Lipstick Feminism (for Kids!)

“Is daddy going to be mad you didn't ask permission to buy me Twinkle Toes?” my daughter asked as we left the mall, sparkly-flowery-rainbow sneakers on her feet.

She knew her dad was going to hate her new shoes, just like she knows he hates princess stuff. I knew he was going to hate those shoes. I hated those shoes. But her worry that he would be upset with her caught me off-guard. Not to mention… exactly how did we get to this moment in her young life when she thinks I need his approval to buy her sneakers?

Twinkle Toes—for those without a seven-year-old girl—look like a glitter store and a bow factory threw up on perfectly normal sneakers. Plus, they light-up, because why stop there? In other words, they’re as easy to ridicule as anything else little girls love.

I try to let weather be my only objection to how my kids dress. So, why did I hate those shoes so much? It started to feel sexist—my strong reaction to over-the-top girly-ness.

When my daughter was still a baby, wearing a plain brown hoodie over her bald little head, someone said to me, “There’s nothing cuter than a girl who isn’t dressed in pink!” 

I know that some people look at my daughter and other girls, with their pink and purple, sequined, flouncy ensembles, and feel… annoyed. I know because I used to think like that, too—before I had a daughter who loves nothing more than being fancy. Girls who don’t dress that way—what used to be called tomboys—are admired, while girly girls are dismissed.

So, basically, I was doing my feminist duty when I bought my daughter the most girly-girl shoes in the entire mall. When we got home and my husband saw the shoes, I think his jaw dropped.

“Are you mad, daddy?” she asked.

“Daddy’s not mad. He just needs a minute,” I interrupted with a look that said: You. Say. Nothing. “She thought I needed your permission to buy her these sneakers…Which is crazy, isn’t it?” I said slowly, enunciating each word. Translation: “Unless you want our daughter to think you’re the boss of me, you will keep any objections to your.own.damn.self.”

I love the way my daughter dresses—she’s a tiny version of who I’d be if I had never heard the words “supposed to” or “that clashes.” I love that she’s so much more free than me, not just expressive, but confident in her fabulousness. I am extremely boring with clothes. Most days, I choose the least smelly item from the wrinkled rainbow of black, gray and dark gray clothes laying on my bedroom floor.  

The Twinkle Toes really only made it out of the store because wearing ballet flats and slippery boots was impeding her on the playground—she needed sneakers she would actually wear. And then, I thought about shoes I loved as a little girl. I wasn’t especially girly, but both pairs I remember were so very pink—moccasins with beads and fringe, and faux leather lace-up booties with tiny perforated holes all over the sides.

When she put them on and instantly started running laps around the store, I thought: She’s going to remember these shoes. I could see the wiring in her little kid brain changing in front of my eyes, making a permanent memory of this. Once I’m channeling my little girl self, my 40-year-old mom-self doesn’t stand a chance.

Another way to describe Twinkle Toes is that they look like what would happen if someone gave a little girl white sneakers and a bunch of art supplies. Especially if they included a Bedazzler. They are everything my girly-girl could want—rhinestones, sparkle, neon colors…

I realize there’s not a straight line between my daughter’s creativity and what some company decided girls would go for. Except… Except, if I try to rein her in, what message does that send about self-expression? Am I telling her that what she likes is unacceptable, out-of-bounds, ugly? That hyper-girly things are unacceptable, out-of-bounds, ugly?

When she was 2, my daughter was the first one at her preschool to don the inevitable tutu and crown. My daughter—with her black hoodie, blue “D is for Dizzy” (Gillespie) t-shirt, and anything else gray and “gender-neutral” we could find—was the one who wanted the tulle and glitter!

Around that time, I read with concern about a study that purported to show that boys are more active than girls on the playground—until I got to where they explained their methodology. Apparently, researchers counted the number of days that the girls were wearing dresses and assumed that they must not be running and jumping and climbing…in dresses! Because… girls?

Well, she’s not headed for professional sports, but my daughter’s best day playing soccer was when I was so pregnant I didn’t notice she was wearing a tutu when I put her in the car, and couldn’t handle the fight to get her out of it when we arrived. She ran around that day like girly-ness was her superpower.

With gratitude to all of the parents who fought for our daughters’ right to play soccer, maybe it’s time for us to support their right to wear tutus while they do it. Symbolically speaking. It’s not the same now as when my mother was forced to wear only dresses with knee socks to school, even in winter. Girls today can wear whatever they want… but not without condescension.

We never know what our kids are going to turn us into. I bought “boy” clothes and trucks and balls for my little girl, and still… She has turned me into the kind of feminist who needs to learn how to unapologetically allow her to be unapologetically a girl.

The day after we bought the Twinkle Toes, we took a walk, and she literally hopped and jumped and ran the whole way. Just like a little kid should. No limitations. No inhibitions. Nothing to stop her now.

Also, I now know there’s an off-switch, at least for the flashing lights.

Talking Donald Trump & Hillary Clinton with My 7-yr-old Daughter

The first time I ever tried to talk politics with my daughter, she was about three and a half. Somehow things went very quickly from talking about the presidential “vote” at her preschool (complete with ballot initiatives—ah, preschool in DC!) to a history of women’s suffrage. I could tell I lost her about halfway into it, but couldn’t figure out how to stop talking. My favorite part was when she asked if her (white, male, land-owning) dad was allowed to vote.

I believe in talking to my kids about politics the way some might about God or the birds and the bees—early and often. But I have no control whatsoever over what they actually hear as the words are coming out of my mouth. It’s always interesting to see what’s retained, what’s lost.

Kind of like with the whole God thing, my husband and I don’t always agree. Which I think is great for them to see. My husband wants them to learn phrases like “evil capitalist” and “workers of the world unite.” I try my best to balance the desire to indoctrinate my kids into my value system with a desire for them to know that reasonable people can disagree.

Yesterday, I was driving four kids in a carpool home from school through the no-chain store main street of our postage-stamp-size downtown in uber-liberal land. Conversations during carpool are never exactly high-minded—usually the words “fart” and “butt” dominate between outbursts of loud laughter. This particular afternoon, they were discussing ways to dispose of Donald Trump.

“Attack him with cement!” seemed to carry the day as the favorite choice. If I was a mafia mama, I might have been proud.

One of the girls was apparently horrified when her parents told her that Donald Trump told another grown-up to shut-up. They all agreed, that was pretty terrible. “Oh, honey, he’s said a lot worse things than that…”

Another little kid I know thinks Trump stole the birdbath from his front yard. All politics is local, right?

Later that evening, my daughter was overflowing with questions about Trump—

Why did his parents let him be so mean? (Well, they probably weren’t very nice people either.)

Why isn’t he in jail if he’s a bad person? (He’s not a criminal, he just has a lot of bad ideas.)

What kind of bad ideas? (People from a whole entire religion shouldn’t be allowed in our country. We should build a wall to keep Mexicans from coming into our country…)

That is bad!

During the last presidential election cycle, when she wasn’t yet four, I tried to teach her about the issues that made me not want to vote for Mitt Romney. I told her things like, “He doesn’t trust women to make their own decisions about whether or not they want to have babies,” and “He doesn’t think that all people deserve to be able to go to a doctor when they’re sick.” All she remembered—and repeated—was, “Mitt Romney doesn’t like women.” I tried to correct her, but nuance isn’t big with the preschool set.

How was she to understand the difference between “like” and “trust” when she was still learning that her parents love her even when they’re upset with her?

This time around, it is a very big deal to me to be able to talk to her about a woman running for president. Huge, to use the parlance of this election cycle. I want a female president for her even more than I want one for myself or for the country.

Much as it made about as much sense to her that her dad wouldn’t be able to vote as that her mom would once not have been able to vote… Much as she thinks it’s just the same that two women could get married as that marriage is somehow meant for different genders only… Much as it will never seem anything but ordinary to her to see a black president… She doesn’t seem to really understand why it’s so significant that Hillary Clinton is as close to winning the presidency as any woman has ever been.

Hope for the future yet, on the one hand. On the other, she needs to know her history. There is too much ugly to risk repeating by letting her believe that things have always been this way.

These days, we tell our girls that they can do anything. I heard it all my life—at least up until my brothers were able to go places I wasn’t allowed alone because it was safer for them than for my teenage girl body. But our daughters, even more than us, have seen women who are astronauts and business owners and pretty much anything else they could ever want to be. Except president.

My parents’ generation grew up believing that not being a racist meant being colorblind. We know now that even babies as young as six-months old notice differences in skin color. And we know that they form ideas about race from what surrounds them, that not talking about race doesn’t lead to equality. We celebrate diversity. We understand the importance of diversity. We tell them different is beautiful.

We wouldn’t think to try to raise our kids in a colorblind world. But when it comes to gender, I feel like we are trying to raise our kids in a gender-blind world. “We’re all the same!” Kids aren’t stupid—and for whatever reason, they begin to divide roughly along gender lines between about three and four. As liberals, we feel panicked when this happens, like we’re failing some feminist parenting test. We’re not.

Girls and boys are different. Of course, any one boy could be as different from “boys” as most “girls” are, and vice versa. We try to make room for that. But while we tell our girls that they can do anything boys can do, we often fail to tell our boys that they can do anything girls can do. We tell girls they can be anything, and then we encourage them to do boy things. Trucks, dinosaurs, astronauts! And so things that girly girls do—wear pink, like princesses, play with dolls, whatever—become less-than. We want all of our children to play the games that little boys play.

Well, I want more for my daughter. And my son. Until we accept that there are gender differences, and stop trying to make everyone fit into the male mold, we won’t know equality. Until boys can do what girls can do, girls who play the boy games are only equal in so far as they play the boy games.

A woman running for president today has to do it like a man. And then get ripped apart for doing it like a man. And then be told that their voice is no different than a man’s voice, so they are not needed. Don’t worry—the boys got this one. Again.

If we can accept that it means something to African-Americans to see a black president—as we should, why is it unacceptable that seeing a female president would mean something to women and to girls? This seems to me the ultimate acceptance that gender-neutral is male. If we want to be equal, we’d better start accepting that a man’s point-of-view is the same as a woman’s? That’s not the kind of equality I believe in.

I believe in a voices-at-the-table kind of equality. I believe that women live different lives than men. I believe we see things and experience things that they just don’t. We can accept that any single person may not fit into the expectations of their chosen or un-chosen gender, but that doesn’t mean we have achieved gender-equality. No matter how good a feminist a man might be, it’s not the same as being a woman. Of course, women can be bad feminists—there’s certainly equality in that. Many of the women who rise to the top of their chosen field have disappointed women—I’m looking at you, Marissa Mayer.

I do not expect perfection in a presidential candidate, or a president. Not from a man or from a woman. A certain sort of person is attracted to such a path in life. They make decisions about things I can’t fathom being responsible for. We should ask a lot of questions of anyone wanting that job.

But I do expect to see a woman president in my lifetime—and to vote for her.

Hillary Clinton is not Margaret Thatcher. She’s not Carly Fiorina or Sarah Palin. She may not be Elizabeth Warren, but I’d like to see what would happen if Warren tried to walk the path that Clinton is walking. Maybe the third woman president will be a frumpy, Jewish, democratic socialist Brooklynite. But I doubt it.

Backwards and in high heels, I’m voting for Ginger Rogers. And I’m going to tell my daughter—and my son—all about it. We'll see what they take from it.

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How Second Kids Humble Their Parents

My first kid was sleeping through the night at two months old. Other new moms weren’t exactly thrilled for me. I tried to be humble, but I confess I was pretty sure I was doing an awesome job.

Until she stopped sleeping through the night five months later. Then I felt like I was doing a shitty job. When she got back on track after a month or two, so did my good-mom-identity. I was good at teaching a baby how to sleep. I was good at being a mom.

Then I had a second child. At eight months, he was still waking up six times a night. Because it turns out that I am not in fact a sleep expert or a perfect parent. I just got lucky the first time around.

My first was so easy (being a mom was hard, but she was easy). I could take her anywhere. She napped in the car. She crawled early. She walked when we expected. She talked up a storm, with actual little sentences by her first birthday.

So, I confess: I was pretty proud. She was a great kid, so obviously I was an all-star mom. 

When other parents—whose babies weren’t doing what they were supposedly supposed to do (sleep or walk or talk or whatever it was) when they were supposedly supposed to be doing it—would ask me how I did it, I actually answered them. It’s cringeworthy looking back at it now. “Well, I talk to her all the time” or “We do a lot of tummy time” or “You just have to put them down in the crib really slowly.” I actually thought I had answers.

Second kids are really, really good at one thing: humbling their parents.

Apparently, I wasn’t a sleep guru, didn’t have anything to do with my daughter crawling and was not at all responsible for her early talking. My son did everything on his own timetable, because kids are not blank slates we get to draw and they are not even tiny copies of ourselves. They are each their own little individual selves, with brains and bodies that have their own ideas. It has nothing to do with us.

My second kid was really great in helping me figure this out. With my first, I had a lot of “I’ll never…” One of which was: I’ll never give my kid a pacifier. Well, baby number two got one on day two. He needed it. That I never gave one to my first may have been more a product of her temperament than my principles.

The other side of this lesson is that the second kid also teaches you that the first one isn’t perfect either. When my son came along, I looked at him and realized he was good at and easy about different things. Which had a way of shining a light on the more challenging things about my daughter. She, like me, can talk incessantly. My son is quieter. Which is nice. He also hardly ever falls—he seems to have a more intuitive sense of where his body is in the world. My daughter sort of floats around and—no exaggeration—can fall down when she’s just standing still or off a chair she’s sitting in.

With two kids, I think we learn that we don’t know what we’d do if we had a different kids. We don’t know what we’d do if we had someone else’s kid. It’s a lot harder to judge someone else’s parenting when you realize how much it’s a combustible mixture of who your kid is and who you are and how you were raised and a million other things.

I don’t know how I would parent anyone else’s kids but my own. Even that’s an ever-evolving experiment. 

Knowing how much I’ve learned from having a second kid, I can only imagine how much parents of three or four kids learn. Though I think I’ll stick to asking them for their wisdom over first-hand, hands-on learning on that one!

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What If I’m Happy With My Small Mom Life?

Would you rather be a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond?

As long as I can remember, I’ve had this question in the back of my head, as if every decision—where to live, where to work, when to have kids—could somehow be made with this in mind.

Maybe it’s because of the American way we grow up thinking we could be President, if only we wanted to. So, if you don’t want to be President, it must be because you have some other fabulous plan. In part, it’s generational. Our parents were more likely to think about jobs as stable things that provide pensions, not identities.

But those of us coming up on midlife these days expected something different—a job that would say something about who we are as a person. We focused on meaning, not benefits (which is really another way of saying the parts of the job that allow for a life outside of work, like getting sick or taking a vacation or having a family).

It’s as much idealism as it is egoism—we want to do something that matters because we want to matter.

I don’t remember ever thinking I could “have it all.” For as long as I can remember, it seemed like a choice—being a mother or being something else. What is your legacy? How will you leave your mark on this world? Will you leave behind children or will you leave behind some kind of accomplishment?

I was either walking in the direction of something—being a writer, traveling the world, having an impressive job—or walking way from that, retreating to some idea of family life. Publish a book or have a kid. Both do something to extend your presence in the world, the impact of your existence. Something that will be here when you’re gone.

This bilateral thinking solidified when I got pregnant in the middle of college. I would either have kids or graduate college. If I wanted to be a writer, the right choice was an abortion. Once I had kids, it would all be done, choice made, only the living of the life remaining.

So I went about my way, trying to be a writer. Not being a mother. And then, somewhere along the way, between working long hours and going out for drinks, I got older and I had kids.

I think a lot of women have a bit of a post-kid identity crisis. (I don’t know if it’s the same for men.) Who are we now that we’re mothers? What happened to our old self? How can we hold onto that old self? Or how can we break that identity apart to make enough room for this mom thing to fit in, too? It takes a long time to let go of who you were before you had kids and it’s not an easy, fluid thing. It’s lumpy, bumpy, fits and starts and maybe never ends.

Lately—something about turning 40, I think—I’ve been in some kind of mid-life crisis thinking mode, which can best be described like this: Big fish? Small fish? Too bad: you’re not a fish! You’re a drop of water in the ocean. A drop of water in a vast ocean on a tiny planet. Stardust in infinite space.

It’s not easy to feel that small and temporary. If you sit with the idea of your death for long enough, it’s hard to get going again. But holding that fact in one hand and the life you’re living in the other, the acknowledgement that we are going to be gone one day can actually make you feel more alive.

How you live your days is how you live your life, right?

Somewhere I can’t remember, I picked up this little bit of writing attributed to Kurt Vonnegut—“Notice when you're happy.” And another little bit of unattributed wisdom that has also been caught in my fish net brain—Find a happy place and continue walking in that direction.

I just keep thinking, “It's so small. I am so small.” My writing, my days, my kids, my family. I spent so much time thinking about being a big fish or a small fish, trying to be some kind of fish, but mostly just flopping around in some pond not being able to feel how big or little it was, how big or little I was.

Maybe it’s what happens after forty years of flopping around, but lately I’ve been wondering something…What if I am happy? Fish or drop of water or stardust… What if it is enough? Not big or little, just enough. My kids, my family, my writing, my community. It’s a life. It’s not always happy or easy, but it’s mine. It’s right where I belong.

When I was younger, I think I thought I would get to a place like this and feel like life was over. Turns out, it’s actually a pretty amazing place to be—only the living of the life remaining. Not drudgery—although there is plenty of that. It’s not like the laundry is going anywhere. It’s more like belonging, or settling in, or arriving somewhere I didn’t even know I was going.

If this is it, I’m good with that. This is my life and I am living it. I’m sure there are plenty of days ahead of feeling like I’m not enough. The feeling that you do enough, have enough, are enough is a slippery little tricky thing. Hard to hold onto.

But still somehow, it’s like an existential crisis has ended. Or at least come to a resting place. And my kids are four and seven, so I could really use some rest about now. 

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Why We Parent the Hard Way

Our local parent ed organization has the slogan, “Take a class . . . because loving your child is instinctive, but parenting is learned.”

It seems to me that you don’t have to read very deeply to come across an article or even a whole book decrying the amount of thought people put into parenting these days. The basic idea behind the complaint is that people have been parenting for ages and not thinking about it, so we're doing it wrong if we dwell.

Truth is, the world is a pretty f'ed up place full of unreflective parents who think their kids will be fine no matter what they do. Abuse is far too common and horrifying and makes all of our lives a worse place to live. And yelling constantly at your kids, and thinking they'll be fine as long as you also hug them when it's over, is walking through the world not paying attention to how you impact those around you. There are plenty of people like that. I think they could do with a little more self-reflection.

When people talk about the good old days when people didn’t think about parenting, I think about how much the family structure has changed since then. It’s not so long ago that the family was a vertical chain of command, with husbands on top, wives below and children at rock bottom. That’s just not how we do it anymore. And the logic that put men on top and kids at the bottom was a pretty ugly philosophy that had broad reaching ugly consequences.

Parenting through fear, back when people put less thought into being a parent, was not the good old days. People unapologetically taking out their frustration on children was not the good old days. There is less acceptance of child abuse of all sorts today, and we are all better for it. From the impact on an individual abused child to the impact such violence has on society as a whole, we are better for it.

Studies have shown that—while child abuse continues to be an intractable problem we need to face together as parent communities—it is on a downward trend that can’t be explained away by any single factor. We are simply less tolerant of violence toward children than previous generations.

Domestic violence of all sorts is no longer a joke you can make in advertising, which has actually been true in the past. Spanking is still a highly charged debate that ignites from time to time, but I think there is less social acceptance of that, too. Just imagine watching someone spank a child in public. Not a lot of people will be standing by thinking, “Yup, that’s what we do with kids who step out of line.”

From yelling to spanking to ongoing verbal and physical and sexual abuse, the idea of a husband or a mother ruling their household by threatened or actual violence is no longer acceptable in our society. I'm sure there was something "easier" about scaring your kids—and probably your wife, too—into "behaving." Children afraid of physical and emotional violence may be easier to keep in line than children who need to be spoken to and reasoned with and convinced to cooperate.

Anyone in the current grandparent generation will tell you that the way we parent is a lot harder than it used to be. Parent wasn’t even a verb back then. Children were seen and not heard.

We do put more thought into it and do make it harder for ourselves. I think we do things the harder way—we have time-outs that don’t always work, time-ins where we’re not quite sure we’re saying the right thing, we bribe inconsistently, we try to talk it out, we have consequences. And I think the hard way, rocky road as it is, is a better way.

We work our butts off trying to do the right thing. Trying to be good parents. Trying not to yell. And sometimes, I can admit, when we are at the absolute end of our ropes, even trying not to spank or shove or grab with hands that are too strong and too tight. But we work hard to build up our parenting toolbox with all kinds of tricks so we don’t go to that bad place. And mostly, the place where we fail is with yelling. And we continue to work on that.

To build up this toolbox, of tools to pull out when things aren’t going right, you have to talk about parenting. Hitting when you’re mad is instinct. Yelling at your kids comes easily. Learning how to be a better parent? That requires thought.

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Dry Cleaning, Car Seats & Other Reasons I Yell At My Kids

Do you yell at your kids? Apparently, we all do. From toddlers to teenagers, the number one complaint our kids have about our parenting is that we yell too much (according to studies I read about in All Joy and No Fun).

When I started writing this blog post, I couldn’t think of any fresh anecdotes about yelling. Well, all it took was picking up the kids from school and trying to drop off dry cleaning for that no longer to be true. (Oh, how I hate dropping off dry cleaning! So thankless! Such a high ratio of buckling and unbuckling to length of errand!)

There we were, the three of us, trying to cross the street to the cleaners, when a driver stopped to let us pass. This, my son decided, was just the time to pause in the middle of the road for the sole purpose of biting his sister. Apparently, she’d committed the crime of not wanting to hold his hand. Punishment: one bite. So, as the patient driver looked on, I yelled. Expletives were involved. I’m sure it was ugly to watch.

It happens. I hate to admit that I yell, but I also know that this isn’t the sort of shocking confession for which anyone is likely to be criticized. No one’s throwing stones at glass houses on that one. But I still think it’s important that I hate to say it and that I really do hate that I do it. Even if we all do it.

When we stop feeling bad about those times when we really, really yell at our kids, we open the door a little too much to social acceptance of yelling at children. And on the other side of that door is a place I'd rather not live with my kids.

I share this because I think it's important to share what a normal bad parenting day looks and feels like. So, I do think we should talk about yelling—why we yell, when we yell, what we do that works to stop the yelling.

It’s important to talk about this, because there’s yelling, and then there’s yelling. If we don’t talk out loud about the kind of yelling that is human imperfection, we risk it being equated with the kind of yelling that is as damaging as physical abuse. And I think there is a distinction—a know-it-when-you-see-it difference.

There is a huge difference between occasional, bad day yelling and unapologetic, unreflective, constant yelling. It’s the feeling bad about it and the trying to do better that is the difference. It’s the ability to learn from a bad day so you can have more good days that makes the difference. It’s finding more patience and more love so that, when your kids behave in age-appropriate but not situationally-appropriate ways, you can set boundaries and be their teacher.

There’s one scene I picture in my mind whenever I think of yelling at my kids. Putting my kids in their car seats. Some days I put my son in his car seat and I’m sweet with him, maybe even give him a kiss. And other days, going through the exact same motions, I’m putting him in his car seat and yelling at him, “Get in your seat! You’re not paying attention! Focus! Where’s the strap? This shouldn’t take so long!” I think it must seem so crazy to him, how sometimes he gets yelled at and sometimes he gets kissed.

He doesn’t know how crazy being late makes me feel. But I do. And I need it not to be a reason I yell at my kids. That and dry cleaning. 

PS. If you feel like you yell too much, you definitely need to know about the Orange Rhino lady.  She has said more smart things about yelling that I ever could.

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Kill Sibling Rivalry Dead

My mom was crystal clear, “You will be friends with your siblings.” As she saw it, other friends would come and go in your life, but your siblings will always be there, and you’re going to want them to be your friend. We moved a lot as kids and there were four of us, so all of those things were very true.

Kids can’t understand how big that will feel later. Being friends with your siblings is a gift. One of the biggest gifts my parents gave to us, and one of the most important things I want to do for my kids.

Since not everyone in my family is dead and I don’t have unlimited, worldwide rights to their dirty laundry, I won’t name names. So, let’s just say the “you will be friends” model isn’t universal in my life experience. I’ve seen plenty of pain caused by the kind of alienation you can only experience with family.

For some parents, it seems odd to think of siblings as friends. There's more of a, "Why would they be friends?" kind of framework through which they view the inevitable battles of brother- or sisterhood (because of course they will fight, as any friends would). They're not friends with their own siblings, so why would their kids be friends with each other? Siblings just aren't like that in many families, and it can be passed down like an unlucky inheritance for generations.

We’ve had dozens of family friends and I’ve had more than one boyfriend who has been inspired by the closeness I have with my siblings to at least attempt reconciliation with theirs. I’m not bragging and I’m not saying all four of us lock arms and sing “Kumbaya” every day of every year. I’m just saying that we were raised under with the assumption that we would be friends and we are.

As a parent, I’ve learned that this is not common as an underlying understanding of the way the world works. Siblings rivalry is expected and assumed to be the default relationship between kids who share parents. It’s assumed that they won’t get along, that when they do it’s loaves and fishes and that it’s not a problem when they don’t. It’s normal.

The other day, we had two sisters over for a play date. In the car ride to our house, the girls started working out what they were going to play, and it was clearly not meant to include my son, even though one of the girls is closer to his age than to my daughter's. To their surprise, I think, I made it clear that he was to be included.

Don’t get me wrong—girls can and should have alone time. And siblings should be allowed one on one time with their friends. And if my son is being disruptive or the older girls are playing in a way that’s beyond him, I will swoop in any carry him off to do some “work” with me (which is usually what he’d rather do anyway).

But the default is inclusion.

A sibling is a built-in-friend. As far as I’m concerned, they’re a built-in best friend. I wanted to have two kids so they would have each other. No one else for the rest of their lives will understand them in quite the same way as they understand each other. No one but a spouse will ever have that I-know-who-you-are-everyday kind of closeness with them.

I’m feeling really lucky right now. My kids love each other. They love to play together. They kiss and hold hands and giggle and want to be together. Maybe I'm getting cocky. I don't expect a smooth ride forever--or even today. And I don’t know if my desire to make-it-true will come-to-be in the same way that my parent’s insistence came to be for me and my sibs. But it’s a place to start.

At my kids’ preschool, they teach the kids to approach other kids with the question, “What are you playing?” They don’t want them to ask, “Can I play?” Because that question has a possible “No” answer, and that’s not an option. The assumption is they will all play together.

And that’s how it should be with brothers and sisters. The default is to be together. The default is to love each other. The default is not sibling rivalry.

Or it doesn’t have to be.

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