Help Wanted

As I read the help wanted ad for a Newborn Photographer, something unexpected came into focus.  I pictured a hospital nursery where a delicate new human being lay in a bassinette swaddled by a soft blanket, a tiny camera around its neck and a press badge for an identification card. I wondered:  with career trajectory assured, would this be the beginning of a life of heavenly ease or one of hellish adversity?

What if our children came into the world and were immediately labeled not by their genders but by their future occupations?  Gone would be the tiny blue and pink caps.  In their places would be symbols of their work:  cameras and hammers, rolling pins and guns.  If we could see into their professional futures, how would we relate to our children?  Would it change the way we feel about them?  Would they belong to us or to the marketplace?  What would our responsibility be as parents in shaping them for a future already assigned at birth, possibly a career that we know nothing about or one that frightens us? Would we embrace some labels and resist others trying to bargain with God to give us the outcome WE dreamed of?  And what if the birth certificate said, “Career Criminal,” and the State Department of Vital Statistics said no changes to assignments made at birth will be allowed? 

Being assigned a career at birth would spare every child that often-asked question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” At points of uncertainty and struggle in my own life, I have envied those people who seemed born knowing what they were meant to do with their lives-- that child of a firefighter who followed her parent to the firehouse, or the computer software developer who found a career with an operating system that echoed that of his own mind.  In such imaginings, I envied the freedom from the weight of so many choices, protection from costly missteps, and the opportunity to give the lifetime of focused attention needed to become a young master.  Years of life, hours of self-doubt, and thousands of dollars could be saved by making the life choices compatible with our callings.

But then I wonder, would such an assignment have freed me or become its own prison?  Without trial and error, what would I have given up? What would I have learned about life?  Not learned?  Who would I not have met? What places might I not have visited or lived? Would the people I consider my dearest, life-long friends still be in the picture as I grow old?   And what would I have missed in the struggle that made me who I am? Who I was meant to be?

When I project into the future of that Newborn Photographer I try to imagine them creating snapshots of other peoples’ lives and adventures and realizing that they don’t want to take pictures.  They want to dance or create delicious food or fly airplanes.  With a birth certificate that says “photographer” will they be able to get a different job?  Travel freely about the world?  Will they become a rebel?  A failure?  A social outcast?  What pain would there be for them living out their days as a photographer when their heart whispers, “I was born for something else?”  And what if though assigned, they are not very good at it?  What about the self-doubt and self-hatred, the frustration for a lifetime?

This leads me to the question:  is identity something we are given or something we make?  Something we make by association with others and their identities? And why it is acceptable, encouraged even, to lie about some aspects of our identity such as age?  To be flattered by misleading others about how long we have lived? Long ago we accepted plastic surgery and youth-promoting products and services – it is okay to lie about your age and surgically transform your appearance if you don’t want to look old or feel old.  We applaud the talent and the technology that makes that possible.  And yet we consider it a “lie” or wrong if someone is uncomfortable with the gender assigned at birth.  We have confused gender‘s social expression with chromosomes and see gender as something given and permanent as opposed to something learned and contrived by society to create a certain order.  Surely, the chromosomes don’t change, but what about their expression?  Humans created all the rules that define gender expression. Why can’t the rules change as they have for the expression of aging?

We feel the most comfortable, the most competent, in the presence of the things we understand.  But the world changes and some discomfort is the price of change in order to reap its benefits.  It can mean learning a new vocabulary.  This can cause resentment in people who feel awkward when they don’t know the jargon, the social courtesies, the rules of engagement and inclusion.  It is easier to belittle and dismiss those whose choices make us uncomfortable.  Those choices can challenge our own sense of self and identity.  These social changes can shake something we thought we knew with certainty about ourselves and the way the world works, but people have always been created this way; they were just prohibited from expressing it.  In addition, the world is facing a climate disaster and shrinking habitable environments.  Wouldn’t it make sense that Mother Nature would shrink the size of her family to preserve resources for the survival of those born?  And what about industry’s impact on gender?  The hormone-disrupting chemicals that enter our bodies through the air, the soil, the food supply, the products we rub into our skin and wear on our backs that are changing our biology and, perhaps, adding some  confusion in our biological development?

There have been so many other social changes in my lifetime, changes that sent shock waves through our culture, changes we now accept as the norm.  Among them are organ transplants, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, IVF, single parenthood, divorce, and extended adolescence, men who are gentle and caring. Remember when it was a radical practice for a woman to keep her own name when marrying? Preserve her own identification with the family from which she came?  Now she will need her birth name to prove she is a citizen!

In nature, we don’t always recognize the gender of God’s creatures, but we admire them still for their beauty, the sound of their song, their graceful movements, and their part in a creation that is wild, mysterious, and magical.  Can we not stand back and appreciate the qualities that make us human over those that identify our genders?

Through fairy tales like the Ugly Duckling or the Little Mermaid, The Chicken and the Eagle, and pauper kings, we send children a mixed message about identity.  We tell these stories to encourage them to “be all they can be,” until it disrupts our view of “normal.”

Isn’t pride something we all want to feel about who we are and where we come from?  Pride is not earned by taking it from someone else.  Sure, it is complicated.  We cannot tap our phones and find an answer.  It requires education, struggle, living with discomfort, and ultimately, it requires conversation to reach not just an understanding, but an appreciation, of who we are individually and collectively. For me, now, when hate and cruelty are becoming the social norm, I am more concerned about a person’s expression of character than I am about their expression of gender.  Perhaps we do need a newborn photographer, one who is destined to capture us in a better light.