According to one of her teachers, Emma is a born director. When she’s in the “Dramatic-Play Area” of her classroom ( now a spaceship, until this week a skating-rink), Emma takes charge of making up the story and assigning roles for the other kids to play. When her friend Oliver came over this week, she was already planning their game of Pirate-Monkeys, and met Oliver at the door with the pirate-hat she’d picked for him. Pirate-Monkeys is their favourite game, so Oliver put down his new toy plane and rushed up the stairs . When I passed her room an hour later, I was pulled in and told it was my job to find them. Since Oliver and Emma still hide in plain sight, finding them meant looking everywhere but where they were, exclaiming, “ where could those prirate-monkeys be?” I hadn’t played out my part until I’d crawled after them into a very narrow toy tunnel after them and tickled them until they fled.
Parents, brothers, boy-buds, little girls boss the ones they love. They’re looking out for us, making sure we do it right. I think that’s what people want them to be; opinionated, powerful queens of their own tiny worlds. In the 1990s, people were being warned that girls in high-school seemed intimidated in class, some doubting their own abilities with regard to math and science. So, what happens? I wish I knew.
I’d planned to write about how girls and young women are portrayed in movies and television programs of which kids are the intended audience. I will right about these because I do have a lot to say. You will just have to wait.
I’d like you to know what Emma did today as soon as she entered her classroom. She made straight for the dramatic-play spaceship, pulling me along behind her. “Look, we have space-boots,” she exclaimed as she outfitted herself. “We have helmets, we have lab-coats!” She sat me down and offered me the food they had found on distant planets. As I left, she said she was gathering up a crew andheading out to see what she could find on other planets. That’s my girl, get out there! And that lab-coat?; please keep wearing that
