Ruby

Thursday, May 6, 2021

I am sitting at Theo’s soccer game when I hear a mother’s voice. It says: “There’s no such thing as girl toys or boy toys. You just like what you like.” She was talking to her young daughter, a spirited little girl with blonde hair. Her name is Ruby. Ruby’s mother’s words have stayed with me.

I am reading Educated by Tara Westover again. It is even better in the second reading. I am not abused, beaten and harassed by my father and older brother, like she was hers, but I see myself in her character and her story. I recognize the ways in which she was told what and who she could be, and who she could not, and the confusion and turmoil that created. I recognize the pious, always talking men who claimed to “hear from the Lord” or declare that “it was God’s will” that we, the girls, submit, be quiet, cover our arms and not wear a purse across our chests, lest it “stir up” desire in the boys because, boys will be boys, right? I recognize her family’s refusal to live in reality. I recognize the women in the kitchen, always. The women in the shadows doing all that needs doing—feeding, cleaning, wiping, sweeping, singing, working, healing, peacemaking; all while the men talk and talk and talk and talk.

Westover writes:

From the moment I had first understood that my brother Richard was a boy and I was a girl, I had wanted to exchange his future for mine. My future was motherhood; his, fatherhood. They sounded similar but they were not. To be one was to be a decider. To preside. To call the family to order. To be the other was to be among those called. (p 259)

She goes on to talk about her discovery of feminism as a positive idea rather than the dismissive ways in which she had heard it referred to in her childhood. She writes:

There was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations…Never had I found such comfort in a void, in the black absence of knowledge. It seemed to say: whatever you are, you are woman. (p 259)

I am struck by that phrase: whatever you are, you are woman. I have underlined, circled, and drawn a heart near those words in my copy of Educated. They are life giving words and full of possibility to my slowly awakening ears.

I am thinking about how we say things like: “He’s a typical boy! He loves the color blue and he can’t sit still.” But maybe he only loves the color blue because his bedroom has been cloaked in it since he came home from the hospital. Maybe he won’t sit still because he hears us saying that he can’t sit still.

I am thinking about social constructs—what they are and why they are, generally, so readily accepted without question. Part of this is necessary for a functioning society, there needs to be some sort of structure and agreement on how we are going to live and exist together in order to avoid chaos. But still, a dollar bill is, in reality, just cotton, linen, and ink. It only means something because we’ve decided it means something.

I am sitting with Sophie and Evelyn at another one of Theo’s soccer games. The sun is setting behind our backs, I can look at the field without squinting. They are playing a team with yellow jerseys, the parents of whom are loud and annoying. A girl approaches our blanket, and it’s clear she is looking for a playmate. She is curious and lively. I ask her if she’d like to play with Sophie, to which she nods yes, but before they run off, she turns to me and asks: “Do you know my name?”

“Yes,” I replied, “your name is Ruby.”