Nephew, I don’t want you to know a world made up in shades of one color. Blue like sadness, like masculinity, like rigid gender norms and small minds. Really, I do not want you to grow up to be an a------.
Sure, I want you to be a man, but that means anything you want. It doesn’t mean the baseball bat your dad might give you, the truck-shaped bed they lay you in before they kiss your cheek and wish you good dreams. It means being human.
I will teach you about makeup if you want. Anything you want to learn is within your right. I will take you to free museums and the park where your mom cut her leg. I will give you all the knowledge I have.
I will not know how to respond when you say, “Those people. Those people think they can have anything.” Because I will have no hand in raising a bigot.
My heart will clench and the narrator in my head will whisper, “You know, you little s---, your grandma who refuses to be called grandma is an immigrant too. And she doesn’t have a college education, no. But she bullied your mom when she was a little s---, too, to finish school so she could put food in your mouth while you sit at a table and maybe say, ‘Make America great again.’”
Whether someone uses Gigi or Glamma or any other stupid name you will be forced to use because someone doesn’t see the value of age, he or she still had a grandma. Maybe his or her grandma was born here, or maybe not, but it is important to me that you know that fact is a scene in her history, not her personality.
Nephew, I want to be there for you. I want to make you into a wonderful thinker, a kind human being and a lover of life.
I fear more than anything that you won’t be these things, that you won’t look at the world outside your block and hunger to understand it. I worry that you won’t have things like Gatorship to teach you inclusivity.
How can I help you? How can I come to terms with the idea that maybe you won’t want to be a defender of justice? A part of me being there for you is letting you be you, but what if I don’t like who that is?
Nephew, I thought a lot about you — about your choices.
The ones you will and will not make. Will you be the kind of man who chooses to lock his door when a black man walks by? Will you see a girl cornered on a night out and keep walking, because you want to get to the bar before the margarita deal ends?
Will you be one of those men who, by choosing nothing, chooses to hurt women like me? I want to love you. Not because you’re mine, you’re smart or your sprint time is Olympic-worthy. I want to love you for the individuality you cultivate in yourself.
An individual who isn’t worried about what others
think of his or her life partner. I have thought about this more than I have thought about my own coming out. I know that’s odd, but I am sad that you might have to think about coming out at all. I’m sad that they already painted your room that suffocating blue, with a tiny baseball wrapped in Marlins colors.
Will you cry to me? Nephew, I want you to not be afraid of your emotions. You will make decisions worth crying over, worth sobbing and laughing, and that is no shame to you.
Nephew, you will be faced with choice after choice, and so will I.
For those of us with the chance to be around in the future, what will we say? We have the opportunity to make future Gators better than us. When we bring children into the world the same way we were brought in, what are we really doing? Mistakes get repeated so easily when we choose not to be critical.
This Thanksgiving I will have another family member to welcome. I will not make the same mistakes with him. I will struggle with my desire to make him a decent person, and the need to give him space to grow, but there will always be choice in my house. There will be dialogue and respect.
Nephew, I hope that’s enough.
Brooke Henderson is a UF journalism and international studies sophomore. Her column appears on Mondays.
