Sleeping off a bender, I awoke to our mother hollering, “Time for school, find something pink to wear!” Like they wouldn’t anyway. Ninety percent of Misses P and V’s wardrobe is pink, but the exhortation to dress for anti-bullying day got them moving, which was Mum’s cynical intention. Usually she has to beg the kids a dozen times to don clothes for school, but in this case she could invoke novelty—or at least the idea of novelty.
For boy children, dressing in pink might have been novel. Most boys don’t have a stitch of pink in their closets, either because they learn early that pink is a “girl’s color” or worse—because their parents shun pink on their behalf, fearing its possible potential to confer homosexuality on their male offspring. But bring on Anti-Bullying Day, and boys are expected to strut their pink threads.
My mum was relieved she didn’t have to purchase pink duds for a male child and/or bully said son into wearing them. Yes, Anti-Bullying Day is an excellent idea, but its execution is inevitably imperfect.
Girls typically wear pink; boys typically don’t. Therefore a “wear pink” campaign puts only boys out of their comfort zone. But of course that’s not the point—pink wasn’t chosen to single out boys. It wasn’t even chosen arbitrarily; it was prompted by an incident in which a male ninth grade student was bullied for wearing a pink shirt during the first day of school. The point isn’t to make kids uncomfortable; it’s to make them think. Which is great.
But whereas it’s not much of a stretch for girls to put on a pink shirt, just ask any parents who tried to wrestle their boys into pink this morning without success, and it’s a whole other story. As one of them commented to my mum, “My boys aren’t bullies. Most kids aren’t bullies. Wearing pink feels like a punishment to them.”
Okay, so bad on society for gendering the color pink. That’s something to chip away at, for sure. And over the years, Anti-Bullying Day may well help with that. But for now, many boys—especially young ones—don’t “get” Pink Shirt Day. All their lives they’ve learned that pink is for girls. (One day we even witnessed a dad in Toys R Us heatedly refusing to allow his two-year-old son to try a pink bike.)
Moreover, those pink shirts parents bought their sons for Anti-Bullying Day won’t see the light of day until next year, reinforcing the notion that pink is not ordinarily for boys.
“How many boys in your class wore pink today?” I asked P after she’d trussed me up in a pink dress for the occasion.
“Um, zero,” she said. “But J wore a pink armband and W clipped a piece of pink paper to his shirt.”
“Good for them.”
If anything this illustrates the nascence of Anti-Bullying Day. Inaugurated in BC in 2008, the event has only just recently locked into February 27 as its official day. Depending on the proactivity of schools and teachers, it could well gain traction over the next years and decades. For now it’s in its awkward infancy, still seeking across-the-board buy-in.
Bullying is bad. This sort of thing really shouldn’t happen.
But again, if wearing pink is the signature outward emblem of participation in Anti-Bullying Day—ignoring for the moment how stupidly arbitrary it is to equate pink with femininity—are we not asking more from boys than from girls when we urge “all” kids to wear a pink shirt? P and V most likely would have done so anyway, but their male cohort would not have, which makes the exercise unfair—at least until we actually do chip away at the pink-for-girls and blue-for-boys stereotypes that underpin the bullying incident that kicked the whole idea off.
Lastly, we shouldn’t forget that bullying is not the sole domain of boys. Small percentages of both genders dish out intimidation and physical violence (just ask V, who has a female five-year-old tormenter). If wearing pink demands no effort of girls and considerable effort of boys, is the underlying message that girls are exempt from bullying?
Obviously the answer is no—it’s not the intentional message. But it is a message that could accidentally be inferred. Although schools do a good job of explaining Anti-Bullying Day and emphasizing that no one gender has a monopoly on abusive behavior, the anti-bullying message is riding on a raft of socially constructed implications—much the way gay-rights issues sometimes get swept along with rainbow themes that don’t necessarily resonate with all gay people. Hitching your wagon to a color or spectrum of colors is a great way to get attention and promote a cause, but in our society colors are laden with value assumptions that sometimes muddy the message.
Bottom line at LBHQ: We don’t mind pink; three-quarters of the humans wear it all the time. When P draped me in my pink frock today I did get the impression she was trying to make me look prettier. Or maybe she was making a political statement—who knows?
The real bottom line is that Anti-Bullying Day, no matter how it’s observed, is important. It’s important enough to warrant a “theme drink” such as this mouth-watering Pink Lady. But then of course we’d have to worry about what such a drink implied.
Oh damn it, let’s just buy the gin anyway and make one.
It’s normal (for us anyway) to put away more booze than usual during the holiday season. But a realization dawned on us throughout this last week—that our drinking was a bit more debauched than usual. Naturally we pushed this realization back, rationalizing it as a concern about excessive liquor spending. When Nana and Papa offered to keep the kids on the island for an extra week and we went home without them, we had friends over and drank every drop of alcohol in the house, rationalization was no longer possible. We weren’t just drinking. We were medicating.
Why?
It was a stressful year. Work has been demanding, commuting sucks, and there are always expenses. But these are manageable stressors. Even if you can’t predict a client will renege on a contract or your dishwasher will flood the kitchen, you can predict that this sort of shit happens, and you cope with it.
News items like Sandy Hook are another matter. The massacre threw out our equilibrium—the sense that you can rely on unthinkably horrific things not happening. The idea of sending your children to school every day at 8:30 and collecting them safely at 2:30 felt unshakably secure before December 14.
It’s not that we think a similar event will happen in our neighborhood. In almost no sense is our personal sense of safety compromised by what happened in Connecticut.
And it’s not that we expect something that cold-bloodedly horrific to happen in the US again any time soon. The odds are vanishingly small, the event devastatingly random. Who would think of targeting small children?
It’s that it did happen—anywhere, at all. It’s that nothing in this world can make it not have happened. That 26 families have experienced an inconceivable loss. That nothing can make it right. That nothing can explain it.
It’s the unbearable empathy tied up in thinking about the massacre. Just as it’s difficult to hear a child crying in a playground, it’s orders of magnitude harder to think of a little girl or boy being shot to death. It’s unbearable.
As parents there’s so much to fear already. Parents worry that their children will get injured or abducted, that they’ll get leukemia, that they’ll commit suicide in their teens. Just thinking about them being unhappy is excruciating—but to think of them being gone is incomprehensible. There are so many things parents fear—and the Sandy Hook shooting is one that probably didn’t cross a single mind as they dropped their kids off at school that day.
I’m ashamed to have been wallowing in the grief of these families. I’m ashamed of the sick fascination with which I watched CNN’s coverage, then scoured YouTube for information on the shooter, devouring every item including vids from Second Amendment nutjobs positing that the massacre was a “false flag” event staged by the Obama government to put gun control on the agenda, and conspiracy theorists drawing a tangential “Batman” connection. I’m ashamed of having ingested every morbid fact and messed-up theory I could about the shooting. I thought it would help me purge the dreadful and overwhelming sense of empathy with the families—as though I could ever know what they’re going through.
I can’t sleep at night. Not because of fear—I don’t fear this happening to our family. I just can’t sleep knowing that it happened to other people. I can’t stop wondering what they are feeling, and wishing this whole thing could be undone.
I find myself compulsively playing “Would you rather?” with myself. “Would you rather lose something precious—say, the ability to walk—for the chance to reverse what happened?” “Would you give up all your money to make this not have occurred?”
To these fucked-up hypothetical questions I would say—from the safe position of knowing no one will demand I fulfill the promise—I would have to say yes. If, through some bizarre magic, I could choose, I would feel morally compelled. Until, late at night, this question occurs:
“Would you rather give up one of your own children to make this not have happened?”
No.
I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. And no one would expect me to. And that’s what makes the massacre so painful to think about.
 ♦
Apologies, friends—this blog is obviously the wrong venue for obsessing about Sandy Hook. This is a site for booze reviews, and I am surrounded by drained bottles to describe in future posts. But—as it occurred to me suddenly and recently—if anything, this site is about the intersection of alcohol and parenting, and it’s not facile to say those subjects have collided for us lately.
Liquorstore Bear 