Snails, Size, and Sexual Identity

About a year and a half ago, when we moved into the Farmhouse, I was in the garden hunting for snails with 2-year old Max. We didn’t have to hunt far. Our front garden seems to have some kind of magnetic snail-drawing force. (And from the number of ancient snail shells I’ve found stacked up in the corners of the barns, it seems this isn’t just a recent phenomenon.)

So on our snail-hunting expedition, Max had many examples of snails to observe, and to my great surprise (and rapidly mounting chagrin) he began categorizing each of them by sex according to their size.

Example: three snails are sliming along together on the rock wall. Max points to the biggest one and says, “Daddy”, the medium-sized one and says, “Mommy”, and the smallest one and says, “Baby”. This shook me up a bit, for reasons I couldn’t quite identify in the moment, but he seemed so proud of himself that I decided to play along with his game. Using different rules.

I pointed to a big snail and said, “Mommy”, but Max wasn’t buying it. “Daddy”, he insisted, and then, pointing to a slightly smaller snail, he identified it as the mommy. I pointed to a big, medium and small group-of-three and said, “Mommy”, “Mommy”, “Baby”, and my toddler son turned and looked at me like I was nuts.

I sat back in the grass, a bit stunned, while Max continued with his slightly disturbing snail-stereotyping and thought, “Now where in the world did he get that?” Neither Laurent nor I would have thought to show him that kind of thing, and since his nounou was always too busy cleaning her house to interact with the children she “cared for”, it couldn’t have come from her.

I figured Max must have picked it up from observation. Laurent is taller than me, and my son obviously noticed the size difference between himself and the adult family members. His grandpa is taller than his grandma. His nounou’s husband is taller than she. And if you want to get down to the nitty gritty, in the animal world, most males of a species are larger than the females (not to mention better-looking, in many cases). So maybe he was just showing off his observational skills and using deductive reasoning.

But why did it bother me so much? I could think of several reasons.

• There are the social reasons...

I have several friends who are single moms: some who chose that arrangement, some who did not. Do I want my son to wonder where the daddy is in each of these equations, or just accept their families as whole-but-different-than-his? None of my gay friends have kids, but if and when they do, I would sure as hell hope that my son wouldn’t insist on calling the taller woman “daddy” or the shorter man “mommy”.

• Then there are the personal reasons...

I was always taller than the boys in school and, because of the overabundance of girls, was chosen to stand-in as a boy in dance class because of my height. Why wasn’t cute, tiny Melissa Blake chosen to be the cross-dancer? It wasn't fair. I pretended to be sick the next few weeks on dance-class day until the month-long trial was over and I could once again pass the school day in the gender I was used to.

There was the French shoe salesman who laughed at my big feet and said I would have to buy my tennis shoes in the men’s department. There was the fact that I wore flat shoes with many of my boyfriends until I finally got height-liberated in my thirties and began wearing 4-inch heels, whether or not it made me teeter over most of the men in the room. (Which is something that I, now, actually love.)

And then there were all of the chauvinistic injustices I was brought up with: just because boys (as Mr. Rogers would say) are “special on the outside”, why did that give them later curfews, make them the one “responsible for me” on dates (as my dad pointed out to prospective suitors), and exclude them from wearing full-length bathrobes over their bathing suits to the swimming-hole at Bible camp?

And, as adults, why did those dangly appendages automatically make them the wearer of the pants, qualify them for the most important leadership positions in the church, and – most annoyingly to me – pinpoint them as the person the rest of the family had to obey in order to stay within the protection of God’s law and out of the danger of Satanic attacks. (This last point was made easier to remember by the “Umbrella of Protection” chart that hung on our refrigerator, in case any of us - Mom included - got out of line.)*

And as I watched my son label groups of snails with family hierarchies, maybe, just maybe, it was all of those past injustices of growing up in a patriarchal society, when the women I knew were actually much more capable than the men, that were still burning me.

A few months later, while I was reading Max his bedtime books, he began the labeling again. In one of my childhood books there is a photograph of a little boy holding his little brother’s hand as they walk away from the camera. Max pointed to the older brother and said, “moi” and then the little brother and said, “Lucia”. “Fair enough”, I thought. “Lucia is shorter, not to mention practically bald.”

But then in the next book, which portrayed a family, he identified the father on one page as “Daddy” and on the next page the mother, who was wearing jeans, shown from the back (no visible boobs), and had short hair as another “Daddy”. I was intrigued. “Are there two daddies?” I asked. “Are you sure this isn’t a mommy?” Max inspected the pages carefully, and stuck with his first impression: “Daddy” on the first page, another “Daddy” on the second. He wasn't able to observe them standing next to each other, so without the contrast of heights, he using the haircut to identify gender. "Again, fair enough," I thought: I have long hair and Laurent's is short. We’re his examples.

And then it dawned on me. We’re his examples.

Max wasn’t making judgments on the strength, intelligence, capability, worth, or level of social status of the animals and people he was labeling. He was just tracing their outlines… commenting on their physical shape: height, hair length, body mass. It was up to me and Laurent to fill in the blanks for him of what constituted a person: male, female, mommy, daddy, whatever.

I know that in this task we’re up against the influence of the society around us, especially in the conservative, old-fashioned countryside village we live in. But, at least for the moment while our kids are still young, don’t we as parents wield the most influence?

For me, this seems to be a chance at redemption. For righting some wrongs. For starting with a blank slate, and trying my best to make sure that instead of bigotry and chauvinism, that slate is filled with love and beauty. What a responsibility. And what a gift.

*For those of you who didn’t have the pleasure of
encountering Bill Gothard back in the day, the father
is at the top of the chart, right under God,
the mother under him, the kids a bit further
down, and so on and so forth until the algae
living in the fishbowl knows who it answers to.