Girls

I am the second child of five, the eldest of three girls.  In my family, though, we have a long-standing joke that my mom has five sons instead of two because us girls just aren't very girly.  Having an older brother, I always wanted to be like him and do what he did.  As a result, I aggressively learned to read, longed to run around shirtless, and learned to hit a baseball as a lefty and throw a football like I (mostly) knew what I was doing.  To this day, I enjoy playing catch with ball and glove or tossing the football around, especially in the ocean, which always made leaping to make a catch so much more dramatic, right?  Fearlessly leaping forward, arms outstretched, water streaming from your body like a cape, your bangs strewn across your face.  You feel the thump of a water-logged Nerf football in your hands just before you crash into the surface of the ocean, and you feel like a huge fucking hero.

I was out on yard duty today and was surprised when I thought I saw "Jane" on the blacktop playing basketball with the boys.  I squinted my eyes and stared.  Just before I visually confirmed it wasn't Jane, I thought, "Jane would never be running around, SWEATING." And the truth of that statement kind of bummed me out.  But I looked over to the other playground in time to see another 5th grade girl, petite, in her cute outfit, hair just so, throw the shit out of a football to her friend thirty feet away.  It was so beautiful, I actually watched the arc of the ball in the sky as it left her fingers and spiraled smoothly into her friends open hands.  No one squealed in delight, no one woohoo-ed, no one jumped up and down.  It was just part of the scenery, another ho-hum Wednesday, these two lovely girls in lovely outfits, their pretty hair barely moving out of place, in the middle of the field, effortlessly tossing a football between the two of them.

The scene had me in awe for so many reasons.  People are still going outside to play and they're teaching their girls to do stereotypically boy things; girls are still wanting to learn to throw balls even while they maintain their girlish ideals of beauty;  stereotypes are being blasted out of the water!  I love it.