Blades Of Glory

15 Feb

If there was any doubt that my daughter is, indeed, Canadian, this should settle it: she has, at the age of two, decided that she wants to be a hockey player.

(She also wants to be a princess, which she does not see as posing any contradictions to her hockey aspirations. She will be, she informs us, Princess Hockey. That’s a whole ‘nother post.)

She has to learn to skate, first. We’re working on that. She’s picking it up pretty quickly, except for the part where she keeps insisting upon leaving the rink to find hockey sticks, and real hockey players:

Which I would probably find more interesting if I were patriotic enough to get enthusiastic about hockey and hockey players. But I’m not. My Canadian-ness stops somewhere between maple syrup and Broken Social Scene. So. The toddler-wants-to-be-a-hockey-princess thing? Only cool inasmuch at it represents an interesting implosion of gender expectations. And, perhaps, inasmuch as it compels my husband to don hockey skates and flex his butt-muscles. Otherwise, I’d have to say that I’d rather she take up violin. Which she could totally do in a hockey outfit. And I wouldn’t have to freeze my ass off and drink bad coffee at an ice rink.

I joke. I love that she wants to play hockey in a tutu. Subverting princess-ism and hockey machismo all in one go. Now if we could just get the boy, when he arrives, to aspire toward cowboy-violin artistry, or ballerina-firefighting, we’ll be a post-graduate gender studies seminar.

AWESOME.

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