When We Were Free to Be: Looking Back at a Children’s Classic and the Difference It Made

The Price of Freedom

245 The Price of Freedom Tayloe McDonald I recently spent some time stomping around the woods, reflecting on how Free to Be . . . You and Me has influenced my life. I felt oddly troubled by this opportunity, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Somewhere between the dirt road and the marsh, the answer came to me. It’s because living authentically in such a way that my outward behavior matches my deepest inner values has always come with a price; it has never been free. In no particular order, deciding to be true to myself has cost me nights of sleep, friendships, family relationships , church membership, my marriage, and my house. The poems and songs of Free to Be . . . You and Me were lighthearted and funny, but they planted the seed of the serious idea that everyone has the right to be fully human, to make their own choices, and to live out those choices with dignity. This seed eventually grew into a strong belief that has caused me all sorts of trouble. I can be whatever I like, as long as I’m willing to pay. I grew up in the Bible Belt of the South in the 1980s, where the ethos of privilege and martyrdom lived together like odd housemates. Hypothetically , a woman could do whatever she wanted to do, but what woman would want to become a doctor or a business executive when it was the will of the Lord himself that she find her deepest satisfaction in a life of servitude to her husband and children? All the mothers I knew “stayed at home” and, despite their privileged position, seemed busy and irritable. Moms played tennis at the country club and ran errands . Dads went to work in the morning and drank scotch and soda when they came home. Girls cleared the table from the meal mom cooked every night. Boys took out the garbage once a week. It was into this context that the message of Free to Be . . . You and Me sang out to me when I was a child. My mom and I belted out its soundtrack every morning on the way to school as it played from the stereo of her blue Dodge Maxivan. “A person should wear what he wants to/And not just what other folks say./A person should do what she likes to/A person’s a person that way.” Though evidence for this kind of freedom was scarce, something about reciting these confident, 246 Tayloe McDonald rhyming words made my second-grade self feel stronger. I may have forgotten the message for a while, but it never left me: I get to be a person. Not someone else’s idea of what kind of a person I should be, but a person who thinks for herself and does what she likes. There is a cost for such a life, but its alternative—to let others do my thinking for me—always costs me more. My college experience offered many opportunities for learning this lesson. In 1993, while at the University of Florida, I broke family tradition and decided to—horrors!—drop out of my sorority. My grande dame of a grandmother insisted that my choice was “the worst decision of my life.” I tried to help her understand that I wasn’t interested in paying for membership in an organization so that I could have friends. There are many ways to pay for friends, though, and sorority dues were the least of them. I had just joined the church my older brother introduced me to as a freshman. Sunday morning guilt at church for Saturday night fun was what was really intolerable about sorority life. In hindsight, I see that what my grandmother wanted for me was to have the protection of a tribe that could offer enduring friendships through college and beyond. Her belief that a sorority was the best source for this kind of support was far more feminist than my own thinking at the time. The fear of disappointing God was stronger than the fear of disappointing my grandmother, so I left the sorority and became more deeply involved with church life. At that church I was taught that the Bible held all the answers for how to be close to God. Who wouldn’t want to be close to God? Also, I didn’t want to piss him off.The Evangelical Free Church I attended focused on the exegetical study of...