i watch the kid go up the slide. Not the stairs to the slide. i watch her go up the steep, flat slide as if it were as natural as stairs. i watch her and i wonder at all of the adult breath wasted on the idea that there’s only one way to go up, or down, a slide.

This has been on my mind a lot: the decision so many adults seem to make that because they are in a position of authority, there is only their singular way of doing a thing. There are a great many ways to do most things, even effectively.

Play is the primary mode of learning socialization and cultural norms. i have a lot of questions about the unnecessary policing of play. (Of course i have a lot of questions about policing in general but y’know, not now.) i have a lot of questions about how we might treat kids more fairly; how we can offer the safety to foster their most brilliant, truest selves. It’s definitely not by telling them to be themselves and then criticizing.

i have these questions because i was a playful, nonbinary, mixed race, queer child, forced into the tiny box that my elders saw as “girlhood”. This erased almost all of me but my physical body, which i have almost always preferred to clothe from the boys’ section. As i write now, i can casually recall some well-meant but generally awful corrections of the way my foot fell when i walked, my skin, my hair, my emotions, my ideas, and somehow the most painful of all, my laugh. i remember my repeated, maybe violent, protests against being forced to wear shirts instead of going topless although i was years and years away from having breasts. Being taken off the baseball team as a pre-teen and shoved into softball, where the clique was already solidly formed. i remember my protests with pride. i also remember being bullied, disbelieved, and undefended but by my mother until i made new friends in Taiwan around my twenty-second birthday (the reigning champion among birthday celebrations until my thirtieth). In recent years Viv reflected solemnly that yeah, Kiah was pretty angry growing up.

i’m nauseous. i hate that we do this to children, never mind each other. i hate that it happened to me; that i was forced to allow an emotionally abusive aunt with no physical boundaries access to me until i was well into my twenties.

i promise i’m not just whining. i mostly really need to get this down, and out for good. For several years now i have been excavating this pain. For most of my adulthood, actually, but several years with determination. i half-assed the last steps once or twice. It’s done now though, and i am proud to write that there will be many fewer triggers in my future.

i watch the kid swing as high as she can so she can leap. So the fuck what if she hurts herself? i watch her figure it out. i let her make both of us awkward in public. i ask her opinion on most things while we’re together. i text to tell her i’m watching her favorite show. i treat her exactly the same way i do everyone else.

A lot of people i love are parents now. i’ve adopted the moniker Uncle Kiah because it sounds cool and also fuck everyone who wanna tell me what to do. i want the very first thing these kids know about me to be that i am ready to break useless rules. i want them to know this so they will feel free, and safe, with me. Indeed, that’s what i want to give everyone.

As i finished editing this, my brilliant charge was mediating a complaint among two others with whom she has become playmates this past half hour. i showed my trust in her when i caught her eye to mouth the question, “Okay?” She nodded with authority, and a confidence i cannot recall from my own childhood. Childcare is not a job, i recognize now, it’s my life’s work.