Honestly Boring

I remember the first time I ever heard the word homosexual. I was in the first grade, and my mother and I were sitting in the living room watching “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” as we did each day when I’d come home from school.

In response to a comment one of her guests had made about their marriage, Rosie made an impromptu joke about not wanting a husband.The audience laughed uproariously in that way that grown-ups always did when they had an inside-joke amongst themselves that they thought kids wouldn’t understand. My ears perked up.

“Why doesn’t Rosie O’Donnell want a husband?” I asked. My mom sat on the couch behind me, carefully applying a coat of mauve nail polish.

“Because she’s a homosexual, and she already has a partner.” She didn’t look up.

“What’s homo sexual?”

“It means she’s gay,” She lifted her gaze to the television, “It means she’s a lady, but instead of a boyfriend or a husband, she has a girlfriend.” I laughed, thinking that meant one of them had to pretend to be the boy, and wear fake mustaches like a spy. I said as much.

“I don’t think either of them have to pretend to be a boy. They’re just women who want other women to be their girlfriends and wives.” She shrugged.

I thought about it for a moment, then I shrugged, too.

I thought about my friend Sarah, a girl I’d known since I was three years old. Sarah was a girl, but she dressed like a boy all the time. I remember grown-ups using the word “tomboy,” when they talked about her, but even in the first grade I knew Sarah was different from a tomboy.

Sarah seemed like she would rather be a boy, which surprisingly made a lot of sense to me at the time. Sarah was the best soccer player I had ever met, and all the boys in the neighborhood already treated her like a boy. She never cried when she scratched up her knees, even the times where she was bleeding a lot. Maybe Sarah would want a girlfriend, too? I made a mental note to ask her when I saw her again. That was the end of the discussion that day.

My mother always answered my questions with honesty, using as many real words as possible. She didn’t believe in baby talk, or using nicknames to describe otherwise real things. In her own words, “They’re not called a pee-pee, or a wee-wee. Why would I teach you to talk like a baby, when I could just teach you to speak like an adult?” (Cue the infamous story involving three-year-old me, riddled with chickenpox, taking off all of my clothes while screaming “They’re even on my vagina!!!” Which, in my defense, they really were.)

I remember finding out how babies are made while riding in the car on the way to a birthday party. It somehow came up in conversation, I asked my mom about it, and she told me in very matter-of-fact detail. I was immediately grossed out. Not because my mother made it seem gross, or tried to make me feel weird about asking, but because she told me the truth. And the truth, in my opinion, was gross, and also boring. So I quickly lost interest. I’d forgotten about the whole thing by the time we arrived at the birthday party.

I’ve always been perplexed by the seemingly-common decision amongst adults to avoid educating the youth on words or topics that, many times, their children are already hearing on a regular basis. It has always seemed backwards to me that children are told about things like religion, being born a sinner and asking God for forgiveness to avoid going to Hell, before they learn about periods, death or how stranger danger isn’t the only (or even the most statistically probable) kind of danger. Pretending things don’t exist doesn’t keep them from existing, nor should it.

On an even more fundamental level, everyone knows that the best way to ensure a child obsesses over something is to tell them that they are not allowed to. (Ask me how I ended up watching the first “Saw” movie from behind the living room sofa.)

During the height of lockdown in 2020, I worked in a public elementary school. One morning, I was serving as the cafeteria monitor while dozens of children ate their breakfast. As I stood near a table of four children, one of the boys sighed heavily, then declared:

“I’m never getting married!”

Curious, I asked him why, assuming the answer would have something to do with cooties.

“Because girls are all gold diggers.” The boy looked at me as he said this, proud of himself.

The other three children at the table fell silent. They all knew he’d said a forbidden thing. I realized I had a couple of options for how to handle the situation, and I needed to choose wisely. This particular child was notorious at this school. He’d catch onto certain topics or words and, once establishing that they were taboo or made grown-ups mad, would repeat them as often as he could, sometimes for days at a time, until he’d worn out the shock.

“Do you know what a gold digger is?” I asked, casually.

“My brother says it’s a girl who just likes you for your money.” He grinned.

“I see. Well, why are you concerned about gold-diggers?”

“Because! Who wants to give all their money to some lady who wants to spend it all? Duh.”

“I mean why are you worried about them? Aren’t you in third grade?”

“Yeah.”

“So you don’t have any of your own money, right?”

“My dad gives me money sometimes.”

“But you don’t have any of your own money, right? Or a job?”

“No.” He eyed me suspiciously.

“So if you had a girlfriend right now, she couldn’t be a ‘gold digger,’ because you don’t have any gold to dig.” The other children at the table began to giggle.

“… Right…”

“Well, how about this? Why not focus more on figuring out how you’re going to get any gold in the first place, before worrying about girls who you think want to dig for gold?”

The boy sat there for a few moments, thinking.

“Also, you’ll have much better luck getting a girlfriend you really like if you use nice words to talk to them, instead of calling them names like gold digger.”

“You’re right!” He declared, a yogurt spoon held high in the air, “I’m going to start planning on how to get rich!”

The other children at the table started chattering excitedly about how they planned to become the richest people in the world. Meanwhile, this young boy never mentioned the term ‘gold digger’ again for the rest of the year.

I think back on these moments and wonder what my life might have been like had my mom refused to explain to me what the words ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ meant. Would I have thought they were bad? Would I have treated gay people differently, or avoided them? Would I have asked older kids about it, and believed whatever rumors I’d heard from them? If she’d inexplicably felt the need to ‘shield’ me from learning anything about them, how would I view the community as a whole? And what about sex?

By answering my questions as honestly and unceremoniously as possible, my mom had normalized all of these topics, and she had done so in a way that helped them remain normal for the rest of my life. She, essentially, made them boring.

The same thing applies when it comes to words and terms that we think are inherently unpleasant, like the term ‘gold digger.’ I’m assuming this wasn’t a topic his parents had chosen to educate their child on that day, but he’d heard about it anyway. Not only had he heard about it, but based on the reactions he had gotten when he used it the first time, he’d then chosen to use the word at school the next day in hopes that he’d glean some form of negative attention or clout.

However, by engaging him in a conversation about the term, what it meant, and how, frankly, it didn’t even apply to him, the taboo nature had been once removed from the topic. His need for negative attention was left wholly unfulfilled. I’d made it boring.

If your kid wants to know what ‘gay’ or ‘trans’ means, tell them.

If your kid wants to know what a drag queen is, tell them.

If your kid learns words or phrases in school, open up a dialogue about where certain terms come from, or why they could be harmful. Keeping your kids in the dark about information you might deem them “too young” to know about will only keep you in the dark about what they’re being told. By teaching your kids about the world in an environment where they feel safe to ask questions, you’re teaching them about the truth.