As Miles is growing to be more little kid than toddler, I find myself using more gender stereotypes than I’m strictly comfortable with. Gender-neutral parenting isn’t necessarily my goal; it’s not that I don’t think it matters, but rather that I try to focus on not having expectations based on what he is rather than who he is.

Take today, for instance. The weather has been lovely the past couple days, and after spending all day being a butt about it, I finally took Miles outside to play with the other kids. He was staring out the windows pining after them as they ran around the parking lot, and I felt like a monster for not going out sooner.

For an hour and a half he climbed, he ran, he defiantly nearly got run over once — definitely my child, with that stubborn lack of danger sense. When we finally brought him in, kicking and screaming, he was coated in dirt. I got him ushered into the bath, scrubbed the dirt of his skinned knees and elbows, and laughed at the dirty hand prints he was leaving on the shower wall.

It was so poignant of childhood. I used to fall and skin my palms. I remembered by mom cleaning my scrapes with hydrogen peroxide. My feet used to get just as dirty. And yet I thought to myself, “That’s so like a little boy.”

After a moment I reeled and considered what had just happened in my head. It’s not like I look at girls and think, “Ew, little girls shouldn’t be dirty.” I love seeing children — all children – messy after playing hard. Skinned knees and muddy noses are part of their job.

Nor was I really raised with the idea that little girls should look a certain way. I was of the generation of girls raised to believe that we can do absolutely anything — and I love that. The link I made as a teenager between my looks and my femininity had nothing to do with my childhood; I never felt primped or guided unduly. I had so many crew cuts as a child, because my father really wanted a boy. (I can’t decide if this is funny or strange, but I also used to have super long hair and I was otherwise an extremely “girly” child.)

Despite this, it happens more often than I care to admit. It’s little things, small things that I don’t realize in the larger scale. I can’t even place exact moments, but suddenly that thought will cross my mind: he is such a boy or it’s a boy thing. As though little girls aren’t rambunctious. As if little boys aren’t gentle. As though children have to embody traits based on their gender.

I recognize that a lot of it is simply cultural expectation — we’re told little boys are loud, physically aggressive, and excitable. And I’d even say that in some cases that’s true; my brother, despite being around women pretty exclusively until he was three, had to be moved to a new daycare when our provider told my mom, “I love y’all, but he’s the only little boy and he’s too rough with the little girls.”

What I don’t know is if we somehow instill this in our toddlers. Like how the guy with the horse who could do math was unwittingly indicating for his horse to stop at the right number. I don’t want to subconsciously cue my son to be anything other than what he wants to be, but more importantly I don’t want to subconsciously cue him into judging what other kids shouldn’t be. I don’t want to invent a line there. It shouldn’t be about being a boy or being a girl, but being a child.

I’m clearly going to be a work in progress that I didn’t expect. I’m going to have to remind myself that a child who likes tutus and dolls isn’t always a girl, a child who likes trucks and mud isn’t always a boy, and that there’s no set of childhood interests that aren’t allowed to touch.