We are Painting

We are painting, my girl and I. Her color choices are eclectic and imaginative, mine predictable. She wanders every once in a while from her child-sized Dora table, to our dining room table and gingerly swipes her brush down the leg along the wood's grain leaving in its wake the latest color. This is done so very quietly, her eyes shifting secretively sideways to meet my gaze.
"Paint paper not furniture," I direct. She looks at me long and hard. I'm not sure what she feels. Embarrassment at being caught? Annoyance at being stopped? Determination to disobey? But she breaks her stern gaze and sheepishly returns to her wildly colorful piece at the Dora table.

We continue this routine for twenty, thirty minutes. Her concentration at keeping a steady hand and choosing chromatically pleasing tones is intense until that criminal shiftiness returns in her expression. The muscles around her soft eyes tighten, the gentleness of her young face becomes angular and rigid. Quietly, she raises and glides to
the dining table, dripping paintbrush in hand. She is an obstinate one, that daughter of mine. Obstinate and sometimes devious. We repeat the routine. I reprimand her action and she goes back to her paper. Dab. Dab. Swipe.

"I will be a boy." Her voice is calm and even. She continues dabbing her brush, first in the water, then in a color or two, then on the paper. Dab. Dab. Swipe. Swipe. Her lines are short and thick, sometimes so short they appear to be the thumbprints of a giant.

I don't know where her mild declaration of impending maleness came from, so I mumble "good luck with that." She probably doesn't hear me, but then maybe she does because she repeats the announcement.

"I will be a boy."

She is only three. Her experience so far has been pretty similar to that of her brothers. That's why I say I don't know where the idea of being a boy came from. Someday I imagine she will realize that she is stuck in her female body and maybe she will at times wish otherwise. Someday she will confront the realities of femalenes and my heart hurts for her to make some of those realizations.

The painting continues. She moves from her free form line painting to a page from her coloring book. It's a scene of a fox standing in the foreground waving to the passengers of a train passing behind him. The picture has already been attacked by Auby with a stack of crayons. She picks up where the crayons left off. Her paintbrush has been collecting new colors without the relief of a water bath, so the fox she is painting is turning a murky grayish brown color.

"Mama," she says. "You will be a boy, too."