Yesterday, while trying to get the kids ready for school, I quickly exhausted the parenting techniques in my therapist arsenal and resorted to the age-old standbys: bribery and pleading. The bribery, this time in the form of a gummy bear, worked to help speed my three year old through the usually unsurmountable task of Putting Your Clothes On, but stalled out at that critical moment between Getting Into Your Carseat and actually assuming a position in which one can be buckled. Exasperated, I pleaded: “Logan, Mommy is going to be late to her meeting and get in trouble, you don’t want Mommy to get in trouble, do you?”

This was unexpectedly effective. He sat down, looked up at me with those curious blue eyes, and asked: “What will the man say, Mommy?”

Now, late or not, this was simply not a moment I could let pass by without comment. “The man won’t say anything, honey, because Mommy’s boss is a woman. Her name is Erica. And Mommy is a boss too, and Mommy is also a woman… lots of bosses are women.”

The Man has been popping up in our conversations with a baffling frequency these days. Given that Logan is the son of two feminist moms raising him in the progressive Bay Area where most of our friends fit the same description, we didn’t expect The Man’s appearance to be so early and so, well, stereotypical.

But society will have it’s ways of creeping up on you.

It started with a hilarious yet somewhat unsettling comment right after he began preschool: “I’m the man so I’m going to drive.”

It’s only progressed from there. While I was parking earlier this week, I muttered something about how I wasn’t going to make it into the spot and he piped up from the backseat with: “Do you need The Man to do it for you?” Another time, we got lost and he helpfully suggested: “Let’s ask The Man for help!” Any time he sees an empty construction site, he asks: “Why is The Man not doing Construction today?” Ditto for garbage trucks, tractors, etc.

When Logan was tiny, and by this I basically mean one or two and not three, so “tiny” is being used extremely relatively here, he had this incredible gender neutrality of which we were quite proud. He used “he” and “she” interchangably, and loved in absolutely equal proportions garbage trucks and necklaces, dolls and cars, the color pink and using his tools on everything. He was sweet, loving, cuddly, and sensitive while also rough and tumble, fearless, and confident. We were, admittedly, a little smug that we were raising him as a boy who could tap into and appreciate all the varied aspects of himself and his personality without the limits imposed by society.

Enter, The Man. With his ominous appearance, he is forcing us to face a few things sooner than we would have preferred. Things like how we will be only two voices that shape our son’s understanding of the world, and all the rest will be largely out of our control. Things like the incredible responsibility of raising Logan to be a wonderful man, when this is an area in which we have very little expertise.

The hard thing, the part we haven’t quite figured out yet, is how to balance our desire to foster his emerging male identity while also teaching our values on the subject. We want him to know that men and women drive, that men and women are bosses and construction workers. That I can park the car and figure out directions by myself, without asking for help, but that if I did need help it would be fine to ask for it, but I could ask a man or a woman, because both are helpful and know about these things. And furthermore, that not everyone identifies as a man or a woman, and that there are people in between, or who are born men but really are women, and visa versa, and that you don’t have to be defined by your gender, or that this definition may change and shift throughout one’s life, but that even if your own definition doesn’t shift, society’s certainly still has a lot of work left to do. Whew! See what I mean, it’s a complete rabbit hole, really. And he’s three, so there’s that.

Amazingly, the best tool we’ve found for the conversation so far is a Bernstein Bear book called “He Bear, She Bear” that my sister sent us from when her kids were little. I almost tossed it out as soon as I unwrapped it because I assumed it was ripe with gender stereotypes based on the title, the fact it was written in 1973, and the cover picture of a “she bear” in pink bows and a “he bear” in a blue shirt. But you know what? It’s actually pretty perfect for where he is at this exact moment.

It reads: “I see her, she sees me, we see that we are he and she. Every single bear we see is a he bear or a she (we add in “or a they”), every single bear we see, has lots of things to do and be. We could drive a dump truck, drive a crane, bulldoze roads, drive a train. We could fix a clock, paint a door, build a house, have a store… Be a doctor, make folks well, teach kids how to add and spell. Knit a sock, sew a dress, paint a picture, what a mess…. We’ll jump and dig and build and fly. There’s nothing that we cannot try. We can do all these things, you see, Whether we are he or she!”

It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s a start. Plus, there’s something about the fact that it was written in 1973 that I find oddly comforting. It reminds me that we’re not the first parents to try and raise children who will not be narrowly defined by the gender roles society sets out for them. Also, that any conversation is better than no conversation, because they are learning all the time anyway, and we better go ahead and throw our voice into the mix.

Then, last night, as I was putting Logan to bed after a particularly rough evening featuring the usual threenager line-up of yelling, tears, and hitting, Logan wrapped his arms around my neck and said: “I love you even when you’re mad and even when you’re sad. You’re a good boy, Mommy, and a big girl. But you can’t sit on my lap, or lean on me, because we might fall into the street together and that would be really, really ouchy!”

This made me think three things. One, that we must be doing something right, because here we have in front of us this incredible, sensitive, loving little human being who knows that we love him no matter what he is feeling or doing, but also understands that we should be thoughtful of the impact these things might have on others. Second, that there’s still clearly time for teaching on gender, because let’s face it, his thoughts aren’t quite fully formulated yet. And third, that we might finally, finally, be making some headway on teaching him to be aware of his body so that he does’t crush his baby sister, but hey, that one’s a topic for another day…

In the meantime, we do the best we can with what we have in front of us, and we try to teach him to do the same.