i know very well how i got my name

I’ve worked with kids since I got my first job in high school and from there I spent the last five summers at an overnight camp for nine weeks being a counselor. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting countless kids from diverse backgrounds and many of them have taught me things. One girl in particular stuck out while I was reading this book, her name is Bianca and when I met her she was 8 and in one my cabins for the week. Her mom was the one to drop her off and I remember because she asked to talk to one of the counselors when she got there. Bianca wanted to be in a boys cabin really bad and wanted to see what we could do. It was worked out that during the day she could stay with a boys cabin and just sleep in the girls at night. It was a special situation, which is why I remember it. I never gave it a ton of thought until reading this book and relating it to this sweet girl I once knew. As a counselor there’s too many kids to keep track of all their names if you don’t see them regularly throughout the week. Something that is common is going for “sweetie” if it’s a girl and “bud/buddy” if it’s a boy. With Bianca everyone would go with buddy first and then correct it to sweetie when they learned her name, which gave away her sex. Something that she always said after was “its okay you can call me buddy.”

I chose to write about Bianca for this blog post because I think this book offered me a way to understand how societal norms likely played out for her. In the chapter “cafeteria catholic’s” one line in particular stuck out to me. It was about how the narrator dressed when she went to church, wearing a floral skirt for her mom’s sake. It was the “for my mom’s sake” part that resonated with me. Everything this narrator did that went against what she wanted was for someone else’s sake. This would be a particularly difficult and sad way to live life in my opinion. I also liked the parts in the novella that shaped how the narrator came to understand what being gay was. I remember it being told to me in a way that was simple and someone was just born the way they were and everyone’s different. The narrator saw it as something that doomed you to a sad life and this was how being gay was perceived from then on for them. Overall I really liked the first half of the novella, I didn’t think I was going to be able to relate to it when I started but I’m glad I was able to.