Out take

Photo: Cinzia Reale-Castello

Not so very long ago, I found myself at the playground, standing among a group of mothers watching our kids collect leaves. My four-year-old daughter and a little boy dressed as a sailor were under a tree poking sticks in the dirt.

“Look at them: They’re flirting!” the mother of the young lad announced joyfully.

I’d become used to this sort of talk. Not because my daughter was some sort of slattern, but because that kind of cutesy banter seemed to have become de rigueur among parents.

“Flirting?” I asked. “Um, no—I think he simply hit her with his bucket.”

“They can be boyfriend and girlfriend,” the mother squealed. “They can date!”

Date? I couldn’t help myself. “I don’t think so,” I said. “My daughter is a lesbian.”

I admit it: I have a horror of parents who try to play matchmaker—even in jest—for their small children.

It’s not that I can’t enjoy watching a spirited game of kiss ’n’ chase—girls tackling boys, boys tackling girls. It’s good fun, like watching puppies wrestle—if you like that sort of thing. My nose-wrinkling is at the parents who feel the need to ascribe romantic motives to two children of different sexes happily playing together. I have yet to hear any parent quip, “Jeffrey and your son are sharing that boat beautifully—maybe one day they can get married and have a house in the Pines!”

I wonder if, in the same way that parents find all sorts of meaning in their children’s nonsensical babbling (“I know he’s only 18 months old, but it really sounds like he’s reciting a line from Goethe!”), maybe projecting romantic lives onto their small children is a way for parents to humanize their not-always communicative offspring. Okay, now on top of knowing that your son loves bananas, you also know that he shares your weakness for bossy women who love ladybugs! It’s a way to attribute feelings and emotions to a tiny child who may otherwise be a cipher.

Or maybe we’re trying to erase our own sad and sordid childhood memories of empty Valentine’s Day mailboxes and ill-fated crushes. Maybe we just want our kids to be successful in love before they can be hurt by it. “You don’t remember it now,” we can tell our sons someday, “but when you were four you dated the Cabot girl!”

Clearly, the time during which we can control our children’s social lives and sexual exploration is limited, as it should be. So perhaps some of us are just engineering it while we still can. It’s true, too, that while the rest of the world may see our child as a belligerent, belly-slapping, pint-size Charles Bukowski, we see him as divine. Who knows? Maybe some of us just want to give our kids what we desire most, and perhaps feel deprived of since becoming parents: flirtation, excitement and that delicious thrill of the chase.

I hope that when my children grow up they’ll have full, lovely, rollicking sex lives. And perhaps they will be bedding sailors, or people they meet while poking at the dirt with sharp sticks, or even someone who hits them with a bucket. And I hope I say, “Bully for you, sweetheart. That’s your call, not mommy’s.”

Elissa Schappell is the author of the novel Use Me, and editor-at-large of the literary magazine Tin House. She lives in Brooklyn.