I'd wanted to think that this was just a phase for Sam, but I was beginning to understand that it was not. My son wanted to wear a dress—for real, not for dress-up. He wanted to show the other children in his life, in preschool—the place where he expresses himself publicly—his true self. The pink-sundress-wearing self. And I was going to have to figure out what to do.
I am a woman who rarely puts on a skirt or heels, and I was a kid who preferred overalls to frills. The part of me that thinks outside of the gender box looks at Sam and thinks he should wear whatever makes him feel most comfortable and beautiful. And yet ... I am his mother, and my fiercest urge is to protect him. I know that boys who look and act like girls get tormented, beaten up, and beaten down. A dress on a boy feels like an invitation to mockery.
My husband and I didn't know whether Sam was ready to wear a dress to school—or if we were ready for him to. We wondered if learning to fit in with the other boys was more important than expressing the real Sam. Yet we knew that our attempts to steer him toward the masculine were not working, and that he was becoming increasingly resistant to wearing boy clothes in general. More important, we knew that denying his desire to look the way he wants would quash a part of him and make him unhappy, probably in a more fundamental way than we even understood.
So I bought him a dress, a $10 pink embroidered sundress from Old Navy. I did not decide if it would be okay for him to wear it to school, because I was not ready to decide. I figured he could try it out at home and see how he felt. How we felt.
Sam's declaration that he would wear the dress to school saved us, in a way, from having to make a decision. He had already made up his mind. I warned Sam carefully that if he wore it, he would probably get teased. He was undeterred, adamant about wearing the dress; clearly, avoiding teasing was a lower priority for Sam than simply being himself. I could see that standing up for his choices in a relatively safe and supportive environment was a useful life lesson. And it occurred to me that having confidence—being proud of who he is, even if he's different from other kids—is the best defense against the inevitable ridicule.
Next Page: Handling Teasing
