When I was a little girl playing in my backyard, seven years old or so, a little boy moved in to the house on the corner, two houses away from me. He was very young, so young that the first day I saw him playing in his backyard, beyond two cyclone fences, he pointed at me and asked "Boy?"
"No," I tried to tell him. "Girl." But "boy" meant for him something different. He was an only child so the world was divided into three categories: Mom, Dad and Boy. I was clearly not tall enough to be in the Mom or Dad camp, so I had to be a Boy like him.
His name was Jeff and he was four years younger than me. He was such a tiny thing that my brother could take a baseball glove, sit Jeff in it, and pick him up with one hand. For reasons only he understands, a friend of my brother's decided my name was Fritz and Jeff's name was Johann, and he hailed us by these names every time he saw us together, which was often. I was over at Jeff's to watch movies, play Voltron, splash in his pool. He came to my house and played with the Tinkertoy set that was as big as we were. I set us the task of being unicorns, fairies, genies, witches and warlocks.
I taught him about the Bubble Door. When you blow soap bubbles, sometimes they'll pop near the ground, and where once there was a bubble you'll see a tiny white shroud, like a bit of cobweb. That's the bubble's soul, I told Jeff. If the bubble floats up, up, until you cannot distinguish it from the blue sky, it has not died at all but gone through a blue sky portal into the bubble idea of heaven. So we would not blow bubbles to pop them, we would blow bubbles and wave our arms or blow gently, trying to waft them upward.
Once Jeff found a plastic jewel in the alley behind our houses. If you looked down at its face, it was all blue sparkles. If you held it to the light, it was golden. Look at it from its side, and you saw it was double layered, yellow above, amber beneath.
I coveted it.
Some time later girls at school brought in pyrite, fool's gold; they let me have a glittery chunk. I knew it was worthless, but Jeff didn't know. I hid the pyrite in the alley and drew up a pirate map, presenting it to him later excitedly, as though it was something I had just found. We searched the alley with great care--particular care was taken on my part to ensure Jeff was the one who first put his hand on the treasure. And he did! In the great excitement of discovery it was easy to convince him that, since we'd both worked on finding the pyrite but there was no way of sharing it, he should have this treasure in exchange for letting me keep the marvelous plastic jewel.
I was proud for years to have devised such an elegant plan for getting what I wanted. It did not occur to me that what I had done was manipulative in any way. That is because child-law is different from the code I try to follow now. Child-law is jungle-ferocious, often arbitrary, designed by the older to be binding on the younger. An older child is happy to do the thinking for the younger child. I must have thought of myself as a benevolent despot.