Children are Gifts

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When my oldest daughter was born I had never paid a great deal of attention to babies, especially to how people dressed them. So I dressed her mainly in those little sleeper things that babies wear. She had a few dresses, but she was born in the winter time and when I saw baby girls with dresses on I always thought their legs looked cold. I tended more toward the practical, simple type of clothing. By the time my oldest daughter was two, though, she began to assert her own preferences. The frillier, the pinker, the better. That was kind of fun and as long as it didn't violate my practical rule, she was frilly--prissy, her little sister and I would call her. When Prissy had a little sister it was like she and I had a new doll to dress up so we went all out with the frilly, pink stuff. But when little sister was two, she asked Santa for some blue jeans--blue jeans and an alligator. Santa brought her some Miss Piggy overalls and a stuffed alligator. I learned from this experience that I didn't really create my children. I couldn't make them in my image. God did that. Children are gifts, all of them. It's our job to accept and appreciate and love this gift God has given us. Both of my daughters later had two little girls of their own. Prissy's two daughters were just two years apart and she took great pride in dressing them. I was sometimes invited to go shopping with them to pick out their Easter dresses. I remember standing with her and her husband watching their two little girls walking around together at an Easter egg hunt in their beautiful, identical dresses. "Look at them walking around out there together," I heard her say to her husband, her pride so evident in her voice. So she took up photography to capture this love she was feeling. In their bedroom now she has a picture of her youngest daughter walking away from her in one of those beautiful dresses as she's pulling it over her head, trying to come out of it. Sadie doesn't like dresses. Sadie wants to dress like a boy. Sadie wants her hair cut like a boy's. Most people who see her think she is a boy. In the first conversation I had with Sadie's parents about this development I told them what I had learned many years earlier: that children are gifts; we don't create them; our calling is to love them the way God created them. We have all learned a lot about children like Sadie over the past several years. I shared the story of Sadie with a close friend of mine who is very conservative. She did not respond negatively to my story, but asked me what I thought about the controversy at that time about bathroom use. "I don't know," I told her, "but I'll fight you for Sadie's right to use any bathroom she wants to." She laughed. This friend later shared with me that one of her nephews was what she called a "cross-dresser". He had been rejected by his family and they had no contact with him. Sadie is loved. She is well-adjusted. She is happy and she is accepted, at home and at school. We don't know what her future holds, but we know, and she knows, that she will be loved for who she is.