There is a woman here who has become quite a good friend. Her sons play well with mine; that is where we began, sharing the vicissitudes of raising boys with non-standard wiring. She’s intelligent and curious and interested in everything, for all she has no more formal education than high school – unusual in my world among women my own age. Our life experiences couldn’t be more different, in a lot of ways – I with years of lawyering behind me and she being an over-the-road trucker until her kids came along, but each of us with experience in working in a profession that was and often still is dominated by men, hers even more so than mine. We laugh a lot together, provide each other with adult company, each trust our child or children with the other – a huge gift when we’ve each had the experience of turning our kids over to a caregiver who did not know how to handle them, or did not listen to us and made a situation that was already stressful for the kid infinitely worse.
And yet every so often I hit a pothole I didn’t know was there. My son’s been given a book to read for school. That’s nothing unusual; that’s how they’re handling reading this year, having them read actual books instead of stories written just for the reading book. I was looking over his homework when he was done, and some of the questions raised alarm bells, so I asked him for the book and read it through. My friend came to get her boys, found me reading it, and asked me why I looked disturbed. So I told her – it’s based on the Christmas Story and is not only overtly Christian, but has as its moral that coming to understand and accept Christianity is redemptive. “I have nothing against such literature” I told her “but it is for parents to choose, or church Sunday schools. It has no place in a public school. And I’m not looking forward to being the one who has to go in and be the bad guy, telling this overwhelmingly Christian community that I’m going to insist they be mindful of overtly religious messages in choosing their assigned reading.”
“Well, if they were handing my kids something I flat out didn’t want them taught, I’d be making a stink” she said, and I know she would; I’ve seen her, calm and articulate, speaking to an audience of upwards of 1000 people explaining why truck drivers wouldn’t use another toll road if it were built. “If someone were trying to teach my boys about evolution, you bet they’d be hearing from me.” I blinked. I knew she’d been raised Seventh Day Adventist; I knew that her family was very strict about their observances. But I truly had not expected that. I’ve been teaching her sons how to use the computer to research science questions that occur to them, introducing them to the NASA and NOAH websites and how to figure out what resources might be available. (We have heavy parental permission filters on the computer they’re allowed to use.) She’s delighted by that, by the fact that I have not only the inclination but the education to help her boys, where all she knows how to do is encourage their interest. And yet she tells me, in all seriousness, that she does not want them exposed to the idea of evolution.
We’ve been here before, when I asked her what kind of movies she was ok with her kids watching and she said I should not expose them to Harry Potter, because “magic is evil”. I’ve told her, kind of in passing, that while Evil as portrayed in the books does use magic, so does Good, and that what makes it one or the other is purpose and intent. I also told her, after I’d finished Deathly Hallows, that the defeat of Evil as personified by Voldemort was made possible by his own hubris – that essentially he set himself up for it. She was glad to know that, but still is very nervous about the books.
It is a surprise every time I fall into one of those potholes because in other things she is far from conservative. She is of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with same-sex relationships, and that in fact people in such relationships should be permitted to marry with all the legal rights that confers, should be permitted to adopt and raise children. “What counts for a kid is a loving home, not whether it’s a man and a woman, two women, or two men” she told me, talking about it one day. We are entirely agreed on that. We agree on equal rights issues, and that “equal” should include not only the right to do the same work and receive the same pay regardless of gender, but the right to choose to focus on parenting regardless of gender, that those decisions should be made between the partners solely. We agree on personal responsibility, on health care, on the current war(s), on any number of things. She giggled with me over a bumper sticker that asked that someone provide W. with oral gratification so we can impeach him. Our rules for our children are near to identical. She kept J. for a couple of days when I had surgery so that I could rest, and took in my husband and son when our power went out in a storm, when I was in Rockford in August. We are very similar in our thinking in many, many things. So it is always with a sense of shock at impact that I stumble into one of those invisible potholes, when I realize just how alien the background she comes from really is to me. I’m just grateful that one of the things we agree on is that we don’t have to agree on everything, we just need to be respectful each of the other. But then, if we didn’t agree on that, we wouldn’t be friends.