My Lonely City

Last night I dreamed – wait, let me back up. Last year I was a counselor at a kids’ summer camp called Royal Family Kids’ Camp. Great experience. I don’t think I got around to telling you about it, but yeah. It was great. And I’m going to do it again this year.

So last night, for whatever reason – probably because I stayed up until 5:00 finishing a truly gruesome and alarming book by Sherri S. Tepper – I had a gruesome and alarming dream. Upon waking and after lunch, however, it seems slightly more humorous. I dreamed that we were having Zombie Drills at RFKC. Yeah, like a tornado drill or bomb drill. I don’t know. And most of the other counselors weren’t really taking it very seriously, so it was pretty crazy when the actual zombies showed up. (They weren’t as entertaining as the college frat-boy zombies from another dream, though.) Somehow, however, I managed to make it through with the kids – and even most of the counselors – getting away in my car, with lots of interim barricading of doors and very-last-second escapes. Now, I drive the littlest version of Ford Focus (although mine’s red):

There are approximately sixty kids at camp, and a counselor for every two or at the most three. This many people could not even crowd closely enough around my car so they could even touch it, much less all fit inside. But anyway, we escaped the zombies (though where I got the shotgun from I’ll never know). And then I woke up, rather confused by a dream with a relatively hopeful ending.

Anyway, that has nothing to do with my topic for the day, which is: Baby gear that has designs on the babies inside it. This is most evident in exaggeratedly gender-specific baby clothing. And decor, but mostly clothing. You know the kind I mean; the pint-sized football and baseball jerseys with “please oh please oh please don’t end up gay” practically stitched into the seams; the dresses in every conceivable shade of pink fabric, whispering “act like a girly-girl because it’s cute and I won’t love you if you’re not cute” at the edges of all five hundred twenty-seven ruffles. I mean, these infants are basically concerned with sleep, food, and poop. Sleep, food, poop. Isn’t the complicated world of contemporary gender dynamics a bit much to cram into them at this point? Is it really necessary to drill into their heads from the moment those heads are out of our vaginas that there are boy colors and girl colors, boy shapes and girl ideas, and they don’t mix? That boys and girls are fundamentally different, indeed irreconcilable, even after they start wanting to get into each others’ pants (current estimated age: 7).

“Chicks Dig Me” tee shirt from Pokkadots, available in size 18-24 Months

Ruffled bikini from Dimples and Dandelions, avail. in sizes 2T, 3T, and 4T.

And it’s not just the gender issue, though that’s the one that most bothers me. But infant tees with political messages, brand logos, “Daddy’s Little Girl” or “Mommy’s Little Monster” or whatever emblazoned on them? I ask you.

Do they really need us to graft our own anxieties onto their tiny, vulnerable bodies?

I think my real beef with this is that these overtly-message-bearing garments say, is “this is who I expect you to be.” Now it is my opinion that when it comes to the garments on one’s actual body, the “I” in any statement they make should be the person wearing them.

But that’s problematic, too. First, of course, babies have to wear something, at least if we plan on taking them out in public, here in my particular corner of America. And those clothes are chosen by someone – generally a caretaker – and since (at least according to my philosophy) all created things have meaning, it is impossible to clothe one’s child without making some statement about the expectations you have of him or her.

And second, pretending to our children that the world into which we’ve brought them is not a place of complicated hierarchical structures and class-, gender-, etc. stratifications, or that they will not be judged and treated to a large extent based on things over which they have little if any control, is misleading at best.

So … is there any solution?

I think not.

Oh, well.