“A Letter to My Children” (2023)
Albert John Belmont
Oil on Canvas
“Mom, don’t call me she!” my six-year-old shrieked as we stood in the Plaza of Funtown.
“You called me she!” they yelled again, over the bass pouring from speakers nestled deep within the rainbow-colored brick floral arrangements. Everything is awesome, everything is cool when you’re part of a team….
Welcome to LEGOLAND California.
This was our first big family vacation—our first vacation, period, since COVID—and I felt like an unraveling ball of yarn. For months, I had been saying, “Nobody gets sick! Not until after LEGOLAND!” A constant, exhausting refrain. In my defense, the vacation package had a very unforgiving cancellation policy. But through my obsessive Lysoling, canceling playdates, even skipping my nephew’s birthday party, we had made it. We were here in the promised land of plastic blocks. We were going to have a good time, enjoy ourselves, and make some damn memories.
In the Plaza of Funtown, we watched adults dressed as lumps of plastic breakdance for the growing crowd. Somewhere in the distance, a baby wailed. The boy next to us coughed wetly, open-mouthed. I stood there holding my child’s hand amid the pirouetting mascots and overstimulated kids, and bawled my eyes out.
It had been a few weeks since Lenore decided they no longer wanted to use the pronoun “she.” Either “they” or “he” were acceptable—anything besides she.
This was no earthshattering revelation. Since Lenore was three, I’d been teaching them about gender identity, about being a girl in the world. Things I wished my mother had taught me. We read library books on how there are many different ways to be a girl, or a boy, or neither or both. We talked about history, how some people used to think there were things women couldn’t do, that women were treated differently than men, and sometimes still are, and that ultimately gender is a silly way to distinguish people from one another.
So, when they requested new pronouns, I was unconcerned. In fact, I was probably feeling proud (though I don’t remember, busy as I was worrying about every little sneeze). Who wouldn’t want to slough off the skin of the feminine, at least for a while? And since gender is a construct anyway, who cares? My husband, it turned out. It was sad, he said, that Lenore perceived girls as less-than. If being a girl was just as good as being a boy, if it was all neutral, why shouldn’t she want to be a girl? And what if, by accommodating the shift in pronouns, we were only enforcing a societal preference for the masculine? But, ultimately, he agreed that the best course of action was support.
I thought very little about pronouns as I prepared for our trip. While I hadn’t perfectly adjusted to Lenore’s new preference, I was getting by. But once at LEGOLAND, I started to slip. At first, I blamed it on the stress of travel. Lenore was moody and overtired from the plane ride—we all were—and here we were on the threshold of the most stimulating place on the planet. I was preoccupied with the snacks I forgot to pack, the reservations I never made, the trip research I didn’t get around to. At the park, my nerves were grated from the constant cries of children amidst the close quarters of ride queues. The toddler that threw a fistful of sand in Lenore’s eyes at the fossil dig station. And don’t get me started on the pits of Legos dotting every corner of the park. How, I wondered, did they keep these clean? Too late, Lenore was swimming in one.
“Does she seem more tired than usual?” I asked my husband, as Lenore languished in one of the vats. Beside us, two boys were comparing the sizes of the Lego guns they’d built. “You don’t think she’s getting sick or—”
“Don’t call me she,” Lenore yelled, extracting themself from the sticky pit. “$9.50.” We had come to an arrangement: a quarter for every misgendering. I was already at $9.50, which meant thirty-eight shes or hers in less than twenty-four hours.
“Sorry….” I bit my lip in frustration. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember not to call them she—even though I wanted to, I promise I did. Shes came pouring out my mouth at every opportunity: She needs her water bottle, she wants to go to Pirate Reef, she she she she.
Meanwhile, my husband—who never bothered to check one gender identity book out of the library—took to the new pronouns like a natural. He didn’t miss a beat, artfully replacing shes with theys at every opportunity. Which was annoying, and made me look bad. I was the butt of the joke: the mom who couldn’t keep up with all these newfangled pronouns. Lenore constantly yelling, “Don’t call me she,” in that infuriatingly singsong voice—like this was a game, and I was losing. And I would apologize and laugh along at my incompetence, while silently berating myself and questioning what my problem was.
Why, I wondered, had I thought this was a good idea? Why had I chosen LEGOLAND as the site of my future breakdown? We avoided Disneyland—weren’t here for princesses, their small waists, or rides that had to be revamped once exposed as racist. LEGOLAND was supposed to be neutral. What’s more unisex than hunks of plastic? It didn’t take long to see the error of my thinking. I realized it before we reached the front gate. So many dads explaining things to their sons! So many sons wielding plastic katanas! (Our visit unfortunately fell during Ninjago weekend, and the elemental masters of Spinjitzu had arrived in full force).[1]
And don’t get me started on the Lego Friends. Marketed in pinks and bubbly scripts, Lego Friends are slimmer-waisted mini-dolls, whose main interests are sleepovers, hanging out, and—of course—friends. The Friends, apparently, used to have their own dedicated region of LEGOLAND (Heartlake City), but this had been recently converted to Lego Movie World. All that remained was a lone brick statue of the girls sitting demurely together on a pink bench.
While wandering the halls of the LEGOLAND hotel, I had stumbled into a wing of rooms dedicated to Lego Friends. This was a change of pace from the adventure-themed room we’d chosen, with scarabs, bull-whips, and chests of gold taking over the entire fourth and fifth floors. The Friends hallway was lined with scenes of their own “adventures”—baking cupcakes, talking on the phone, giving each other makeovers on a frilly bed. Hugs upon hugs upon hugs. As I walked the gauntlet, I felt a surge of anger. Who is falling for this?[2]
Maybe I should have suspected as much. I rarely played with Legos as a kid. My brother regularly received them as gifts from my aunt and uncle, who always got me Barbies. It became something of a running joke: I was not a “Barbie girl,” I had never liked Barbies. But that was the 1990s. There were no Lego Friends back then to bridge the gap—to show well-meaning relatives that girls could like building too. I had assumed that, in the intervening thirty years, things had changed. Boy, was I wrong.
By our second day at the park, I was downright testy. Lenore seemed to be barely staving off a cold, and their leading source of joy had become correcting my near-constant misgenderings. We visited Imagination Zone, a building station where you make a car out of Legos and race it on various tracks. Lenore dove in. As I sifted through the pieces, a boy approached me. He was maybe ten years old. “I can help you!” he declared as he dug around eagerly. He attached two sets of wheels to a gray rectangle, handed it to me, then proceeded to give me detailed instructions for building the fastest Lego car ever.
I stretched a tight smile across my face. The kid was sweet, he really was, this little mansplainer-in-training. Lenore kept on building their jagged little car, and I was grateful they remained engrossed in the project at hand. I nodded emptily at the boy, didn’t trust myself to say anything constructive. Eventually, he seemed to take the hint and wandered away. I looked over to see my husband watching me, side-eyed, amused.
Later, as Lenore scaled yet another play structure, my husband and I watched from the sidelines in silence. The playground was crowded, like everything else, absolutely overflowing with kids. It took all my energy to keep my sights on Lenore, to follow their flitting from one contraption to the next. When a dad obliviously plopped himself in front of me, blocking my view, I felt my entire body tense in retaliation. I held my breath as I watched this man inch backwards closer and closer, like he couldn’t fathom that there was someone standing behind him, another parent occupying space in this crowded amusement park playground. Soon, his back was mere inches from my face, poised to make contact. I coughed obnoxiously and he scampered away, startled and apologetic. He was in my personal space, I reasoned—but I felt unhinged. I am a quiet person. I don’t normally hack aggressively at strangers.
My husband looked over at me. “Men,” he said, shaking his head. “Like that kid with the racecar. You just couldn’t with him. You just couldn’t.” He was teasing, but there was something in the way he said it, a glibness that read as dismissal. Was I being unreasonable? Was it me?
“We should go,” I said to my husband. “She wants to go to the dance party at 1.”
“Mom, don’t call me she!” Lenore screamed as they ran from across the playground. The ears on that one. I took their hand, and we started along the pavement, past a rollercoaster and a life-size model of a Lego mariachi band. Somewhere along the way, my husband broke off to pick up lunch from Everything Is Ramen. We arrived at Funtown. It was just me and her. Just me and them.
Why was this so difficult? It hit me like a ton of plastic bricks: maybe it was me. Had I done a bad job modeling womanhood? My life is not exactly glamourous. I am a stay-at-home mom, whose writing career could just as easily pass as a nifty hobby. When my daughter was younger, they would sometimes see their dad in Zoom meetings, working at his computer, and then look over at me across a table cluttered with glue sticks and construction paper and say, “Mom, you don’t really do anything.” Was their rejection of she a rejection of me? And, if I’m being honest, could I blame them? What’s so good about being a woman anyway? Some days, it feels like nothing but unsolicited advice and invasions of personal space. And yet I can’t shake this feeling that we are in dangerous territory, on the verge of some terrible concession.
That’s when I had to admit that everything was not, in fact, awesome. That’s when I broke down.
I broke down under the weight of all that I didn’t know. I didn’t know if I’d done the right thing, quitting my day job to stay home with my daughter. Whether Lenore’s new choice of pronouns signaled a shift in gender identity or a response to their perceived limitations of girlhood. I still don’t know whether to hate or love Lego Friends. I don’t know if what I’m doing is enough.
This vacation sucks, I thought, as I stood there in the plaza with my daughter, continuing to cry, continuing to misgender them even as I let go of their hand, watched them approach the edge of the crowd and begin to dance. They flung their arms and spun around wildly, their small body whirling in rapid, expanding circles. I watched them and wondered: where did they learn to dance like that? Who is this person?
I thought about how much of my experience as a mother is defined by this not-knowing. Motherhood is a journey you will always be ill-prepared for. Motherhood is a trip; motherhood is a wild ride; motherhood is no vacation. Motherhood is all the metaphors falling short. A simile with no referent. It is like a pronoun: a measly two or three letter word to encompass the whole of you. Language can’t quite reach it. All I can do is keep spitting out words and hope they get close.
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Brittany Micka-Foos is an autistic writer from the Pacific Northwest. She writes poetry, plays, and prose about mental health, motherhood, and identity crises. Her debut short story collection, It’s No Fun Anymore, will be published by Apprentice House Press in June 2025. Online: brittanymickafoos.com, Instagram @brittanymickafoos.