Boys and girls

Mateo got his first social rejection last night, although he doesn't know it (and won't until he reads this in about 15 years or so).  There's a family going through some stuff at his preschool and the director had sent out an email awhile back saying that extra playdates for their little girl would help take some stress off at home.  So, I emailed the mom and said that I didn't know if our two kids knew each other very well, but that we'd be more than happy to set up a time for them to play together.  I didn't hear anything for awhile and totally forgot about it until last night, when I got an email back from the mom, saying thanks but that her daughter "isn't ready for playdates with boys yet." 

First of all, I was surprised by how totally enraged this made me.  I recognize that the family is going through hard times and the mom probably just dashed off the message without thinking about how it would sound, but still, it apparently brought out my mama bear instincts.  Mateo is so sweet, so loving, so imaginative, and to see him dismissed as friend material because of his boyness just dismayed me. 

Now, don't get me wrong.  I don't buy into the whole thing about how boys are getting overlooked in school and how schools are really geared toward girls and all that stuff.  If that's really true, why are men still earning more than women?  So, I'm not at all implying that Mateo was facing gender discrimination.  I was just sad that somehow him being a boy disqualified him from being considered.  And we don't even know them; we were just trying to help.   Sigh.

Sacha and I were talking about it as we went to bed and we got to talking about how a three-year-old would not be ready for a playdate with a kid of the opposite sex.  Our kids both have friends of both sexes and it has never, and I mean NEVER, been an issue.  They've had one-on-one playdates with kids of the opposite sex and group playdates and (obviously) Mateo's preschool has both boys and girls in it.  I wonder what kind of messages that little girl is getting about girls and boys and who should play with whom.  Or, if the mom herself was uncomfortable with her daughter playing with a boy alone, although why that would be the case at their ages is beyond me, and had unconsciously or consciously passed that on to her kid. 

In any case, if that's the way they think about things, we probably don't want to hang out with them anyway, but it still made me really mad.  I almost wrote about it last night, but then I thought I should probably get over wanting to punch something before I committed words to paper, or, in this case, the screen.

**********************

Speaking of girls:  as you know, we are lesbians.  There is a lesbian moms group in Portland that has many families on a listserve and some families that come to monthly gatherings at various places.  We attended many of these gatherings when Mateo was a baby, and even after Talia was born, but haven't had much luck making friends through the group.  This has been really surprising to us, because you would think it would be a friend gold mine.  It's not like we haven't made any friends, just not as many as we thought we would.  We probably have three families that we met through this group that we're close with, which is wonderful.  We love them!  We just expected to connect with more people throgh the group over the course of four years.

(In fact, as an aside, we had an absolutely lovely playdate with one of these families yesterday afternoon.  They have a son who is also named Mateo and we went to the library together and our Mateos hit it off fabulously!  I normally get together with them and these friends, who we also met through the lesbian moms group, every week, but it's while Te Te is in preschool, so the two Mateos hadn't seen each other since babyhood.  Anyway, we had a really great time and coincidentally ended up at the same burger place for dinner afterward, so we had an impromptu meal together, too.  It was awesome.)

So, with the exception of a few families, it turns out that it is easier to meet lesbian parents on the street than at a designated group.  Literally.  A couple of weeks ago, I was putting Natalia in the car to take her to the hardware store (which has popcorn, which is like crack to our kids) when it started to rain hard and a woman and her baby were walking by in a stroller.  The stroller didn't have a rain cover and the baby was pretty little.  Before I knew it, the mom was asking if we could give them a ride home, as we had an extra car seat (because Mateo was at preschool) and they lived just a few blocks down our same street. 

She seemed nice and not scary, so I said sure, and we had a great little chat on the way to her house.  After establishing that we were both lesbian stay-at-home moms, we talked about a bunch of stuff and ended up exchanging numbers.  Then, she and her partner and their adorable baby (can you tell that I have baby fever?) came over to hang out today.  I think more playdates are in our future.  I'm so excited to have made some new friends, especially of this particular variety!   And, in the future, if you see me trolling the streets looking for androgynous women with strollers, now you'll know why.