Wading Around

This is going to be one of those months when I go weeks without finishing a book and then finish five of them in three days. I'm dancing back and forth between Charmed Thirds and Maisie Dobbs, and I'm enjoying both so much I can barely decide which one to read from minute to minute. I have this feeling that someday I'm going to come down to the point where both books are open in front of me and I'm switching off page by page. It speaks well of what I'm reading, but I don't think that would be healthy.

I'm worried that I won't have as much time to read when school starts. It seems obvious that I won't be able to keep up the pace I've been keeping--though is it? I read the same number of books while working a full time job. I know school is a big commitment, but we're talking about 6 hours per week of classes. Could that really be much more than 35 hours a week of work?

You may have noticed me worrying about school.

I was reading a conversation online this morning about gender identity and books for kids. It was a bunch of parents discussing good books about or containing gay or bisexual characters. People were posting lists of books introducing the idea of straight, gay, and bisexual to toddlers and little kids, and dealing with those issues more thoroughly for older kids and teens. One thing they were lamenting, though, is the lack of books for little kids that have these ideas in the background, without being all about them. So you can buy a book to introduce the idea of having two mommies to a little kid, but you can't find a book that's about something else in which the character just happens to have two mommies. This is also true of other nontraditional family constructions, like families with different racial makeups, adoptions, or multiple parent constructs; it's possible to find a book to help you teach kids about these ideas, but not a book about, say a little girl having a fight with her friend (or a lost baby polar bear, or whatever) in which the nontraditional family is just there and taken as a matter of course.

This is a shame. My someday-kids are going to be raised to a white mom and dad, and I hate the idea that, while I can explain all I want that not everyone is like that, the fact of white hetero families will be the default of the world they live in, both in real life and in the media.

This isn't something I lament every day, because I have the luxury of not having to think about it. But right now I have a real itch to go out and write a kids book about an adopted black kid with two white moms and a biodad. Or something. I don't know enough to address this intelligently, but it's out there, in my head, floating around. I'll have to think more about this somewhere up the line, I suppose, when someday-kids appear on the horizon.