Books for Kids: Boy Meets Boy
I bought the Bee a Nook for her birthday. She loves to read, and with the Nook iPad app, I can share books with her through a single account.
One of the e-books that I bought her was David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy. I downloaded it and read it recently myself, and I highly recommend it, for those of you with tweens or teens in the house, or folks who just like YA lit.
It’s an interesting idea, what it would be like to grow up gay in a world where everyone treated you just like everybody else. And I think the idea that gay teens would just get to make the same dumb mistakes that straight teens do is comforting, in a weird way.
update on the Bee
We did talk last night, but there wasn’t anything earth-shattering. I picked her up from field hockey practice, and she was bubbly and bright, and basically normal–complaining about another girl on the team for not trying very hard, telling me about her day, talking about their games this week. I asked her if she wanted to talk and she said yes, but that she wasn’t even sure what to talk about.
I think she’s just sad about the change to everything.
I can’t blame her, I’m sad too.
I was sitting at my computer in the dining room after dinner, and she came in and sat on my lap. She’s practically the same size as me now, so that was no easy feat. I think in some ways, we all want to go back to an easier time, and for her, it’s the time when she was a little kid.
We were looking at stuff on Facebook, and she was sort of teasing me about the lameness of my Facebook friends. She told me that I can’t friend her, when she gets a Facebook account of her own, and I said, “oh, don’t worry–I’ll just friend all your friends!” She giggled and said, “mommmm, you can’t do that!!!”
I know that for me, I do have this feeling of “when will this be over”—which mostly right now is manifesting itself in hoping that our mediator will finally send us the written mediation docs. At least the process of mediation itself would end, then.
I don’t think, though, that the feeling of wanting it to be over will end—for her or me.
“I can’t keep living a lie”
That’s what the Bee said to me, sobbing, at her birthday dinner.
It seems that she had only told 2 friends about the fact that landisdad and I have separated. And there were 3 girls coming to her birthday party—a sleepover—the next night who didn’t know about it.
She was worried that people would make fun of her. She said, “I’m supposed to be this perfect girl, and now they’ll know that I’m not perfect!”
Oh. Bee.
I told her, no one’s life is perfect. I told her that when I told people that landisdad and I were getting divorced, some were shocked, because it looked like we had the perfect life. I told her that she would see that her friends didn’t really care.
Mostly I held her while she sobbed.
12 is a hard age. I remember that.
As it turned out, I don’t think any of the girls noticed or cared when I left the party, around 9 pm. They did notice when I came back the next morning, because I was carrying a huge box of doughnuts—but I think it was the doughnuts that caught their eye, rather than me in street clothes, obviously showered.
After we ate breakfast and the girls went home, one by one, the Bee asked if she could come back to my apartment with me. She did her homework while I did some stuff on the computer for work. She hung out with a stray kitten the kids insisted I take in, that I haven’t found a home for yet. She looked at some of her presents.
We drove back to landisdad’s for dinner, and after we ate, I came back here. Around 10, she texted me that she couldn’t sleep, and that she wanted to talk to me–I offered to call her, but she said she didn’t want to talk on the phone. I told her to think about things that made her happy at the party, and that we’d see each other today.
I don’t know what’s going on inside her head. But I’m hoping she lets me in.
