My granddaughter and I followed a small parade of three-year-old girls into the community center. A man walking past asked, “What’s with all the pink tights?”
Basketball practice, I said with a grin.

Nope, it was a class called play ballet, more about jumping around than grand jete. Will there be boys, my granddaughter had asked. Hopefully, I said, though I anticipated the all girly-girl crowd. It did, however, give me an opportunity to advance my feminist agenda and talk about how both men and women make wonderful ballet dancers.

Lately the granddaughter has been dividing her world into what boys do and what girls do. Boys play dinosaur, girls play dress-up, she recently explained. I could have gotten into a big philosophical discussion on that one because I happen to know that little boys do play dress up. Did she not recall that one of her best friends, a three-year-old boy, dressed up as a dancing construction worker for Halloween, wearing both a tutu and a tool belt?

But I didn’t want to burst her pink bubble on this day. She kept saying, “this is so exciting,” as she pushed her feet into magic slippers the color of seashells and joined the others in a gallop around the room.

For the last few weeks the granddaughter’s go-to-color has been pink.

I know the thrill. When I was a little girl I took ballet class. I dropped out because I was afraid of the teacher who carried a big ruler, but I was in it long enough to twirl and bow on a stage in something pink covered with sequins.

Many mothers of my generation, in an attempt to eradicate restrictive gender stereotypes, continued to offer our little girls ballet but also added soccer. We dressed them in overalls and gave them tool kits and said it was fine to get messy. It’s surprising to now be a grandmother and see how some stereotypes defy eradication.

For the last few weeks the granddaughter’s go-to-color has been pink. When she was born her mother encouraged a rainbow of fashion choices and asked well-wishers to please cool it on the pink. The three-year-old has a varied wardrobe, but now that she’s dressing herself she often looks like a cupcake in sneakers.

Still and all, she knows how to throw a ball, not like a girl or a boy, but like a kid from a family of ball-throwers. She pounds nails and makes things at a kids workshop put on by the neighborhood building supply store. She plays with dolls and she knows what to do with a soccer ball and a wiffle ball. She has a play kitchen for creating play menus. And a softball glove — a pink one. She also has a new baby brother whom I’m thinking might be a great addition to the play ballet troupe in another three years.

Parents and grandparents were asked to wait outside until the last five minutes of dance class. We got to watch the teacher invite each girl to choose a long, billowy scarf for the final fling around the room.

The first little girl said pink. The second little girl said pink. My ballerina thought for a moment and said orange. I gave her a private power salute.

Dear reader: I don’t know where you are in this retirement experience – enjoying it, dreading it, denying you’re in it, can’t wait for it? But if you’re like me you definitely find it puzzling. Which is what I’ll be writing about from time to time under this post My So-Called Retirement. I hope you weigh in because as always, when it comes to change and challenge, we need each other.

The word retirement definitely has image problems. Google “retirement” or look it up in the dictionary and you’ll see a basic definition: withdrawal from one’s position or occupation.

It follows, then, that to be retired is to be withdrawn, in retreat, backed off, removed. On the outside. Synonyms for retire include: to stop, adjourn and to dispose of, as in, “She retired her white zip-up boots.” Then there is “retire” referring to a type of behavior - meaning overly modest, often linked by the adjective “shy,” as in, “He yearned for the days of shy, retiring women.”

Look, too, at what the media does with the word. In a story about Harrison Ford’s movie career still going strong at age 67 the headline read: “Ford says he’s not retiring, still feels useful on set.” So what does that say about being retired? That you are no longer useful?

So far, my favorite alternative is “jubilada,” the Spanish word for retired.

Other synonyms for retirement include: ending, termination, seclusion, hibernation, rustication, solitude, obscurity. When connected with a graphic image, there is often a picture of a hammock suspended between palm trees.

The hammock is a nice time-out image, but do you want to spend the rest of your life in one? Feeling terminated, rusticated and obscure? Of course, that might seem perfectly glorious to people. But for me and I suspect for many the word retired and its stereotypes don’t fit.

And so we make efforts to tweak the R-word. Martha, a minister emeritus, tells people she is on a “re-adventure.” When I asked on Facebook for alternative words for retired, I got suggestions like: rewired, released, renewed, rejuvenated, revised, remodeled, recycled. There’s also recalculated, like what your GPS does when sensing a detour.

If you look for books on retirement you’ll recognize attempts to gloss up the image by referring to retirement as “the third age,” or “the encore years.”

So far my favorite alternative is jubilada, the Spanish word for retired. It sounds like well, …jubilant. Euphoric, elated, giddy with freedom.

And some people are.

My very smart sister-in-law retired last year from teaching elementary and middle school and is delighted to be done. She took her car to get serviced and sat next to a woman with a fat stack of papers she was grading. “I don’t miss that,” she said.

I met a woman who used to be with the FBI and adores retirement. The image, the word, all of it. She spent her working years being refined, she said. “But now I get to be outrageous.”

But then I asked a friend, who retired to Mexico how she was enjoying her new freedom.
“I spent all my life thinking only about wanting free time. I must have thought I had a million things to accomplish. Now I’m not sure what they were.”

But yes, she does prefer to call herself “jubilada” rather than retired.

With awards season upon us there are so many movies I vowed to see and they didn’t include “Precious.”

I had all the usual excuses for not going to a film about an illiterate, pregnant abused teenage girl. I knew from reading reviews that it was raw and relentless. And isn’t the news hard enough to endure without adding in extra cinematic suffering?
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We all have our limits on what we pay money to see. I avoid movies that involve torture, rape and sexual violence. I hate watching bodies being blown up and I don’t like war movies. I can’t stand to see people abusing children and sadistic killers.

Same with books. If a book starts out with the body of a murdered woman or a kidnapped child I usually stop right there. I even have a hard time with those nature movies where the grizzly bear stalks the baby buffalo and eats it, even though I know this is the natural way.

I would pass on “Precious,” I said. I didn’t want to spend time with that poor hopeless kid.

Then I sucked it up and went, mostly because I had two movie companions who know about the cruelty heaped on children – a friend who survived her own violent childhood and another woman I know professionally who directs a parenting program that works with abused kids.

If they could handle real life, I could handle a movie.

No one wants to watch abuse and suffering. In one of the more shocking scenes in “Precious” I threw my coat over my head. But maybe we need to see these things because if they don’t happen to us, they happen to others. It’s the same reason to see one more movie about the Holocaust, to not simply sit there and groan “how can people do this to each other,” but to bear witness so maybe those horrors won’t happen again.

Maybe after you watch a movie about a teenager who has every reason to scrawl “Why me?” on a piece of paper, you end up donating money to a safe house. Or you become a Big Brother or Big Sister, or work to keep social service programs alive. But you don’t leave untouched.

Let me back up to what I said about Precious being this poor hopeless kid. She isn’t hopeless.

I saw the movie when the Haiti earthquake disaster was in its second week. I heard a pediatrician cry on the radio about the children she watched die because medical help came too late. But I saw a man find his wife under a building, alive after days without water, food or daylight. And there were triumphant rescue workers on the TV, crawling out of the rubble with a 15-day old baby.

There’s hope in Haiti and there is more than a spark of life in Precious, even in that fierce face, scrunched up against a world which seems to deliver only misery.

Tough important movies are best watched in a matinee which gives you time to shut down the awful images before you sleep. We went to the movie on a wet afternoon when rain pounded the roof and thunder rattled the theater. When it was over we went for tea. We all needed to talk.

We talked about unloved children and the importance of intervention when families can’t do it themselves. We talked about the unlikely places people find friends. And praised the kind determination of overworked teachers. We talked about the need to keep art museums open and children writing.

No surprise, the woman who runs the parenting program said stories about children like Precious are not unique to Harlem. They happen right here in beautiful Wine Country.

Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol. You can also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is susan@juicytomatoes.com

Photo courtesy of ingridspeak.wordpress.com