A portmanteau word, they call it. You blend two words to express a new (or new to you) idea. Docudrama contains elements of both documentary and scripted drama. A spork is part spoon, part fork. So it is with Maddy.
I first came across this portmanteau of Mommy and Daddy in Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There. Boylan transitioned at a time when she and her wife had young kids. Suddenly the vocabulary of the binary was no longer adequate to the task of parenting. So one of her kids suggested Maddy as a solution.
My Maddy, without being preachy, puts forth a simple argument. Every day, in bajillions of ways, we make peace with the notion that nothing is truly binary. Seasons do not change instantaneously; we linger nightly in the liminal space between awake and asleep. Why, then can we not accept this about gender?
The narrator explains that her Maddy "is neither a boy nor a girl." And this is an accurate reflection of the world she lives in. To paraphrase the ancient Stoics, if it is in accord with nature, it is natural, and natural = good. Our narrator is comforted and inspired by this non-binary world. Someone who loves you, reads you stories at bedtime, and fixes you snacks (which are neither breakfast, lunch, nor dinner, yet nonetheless essential and yummy) is to be loved, not labelled.
The artwork in My Maddy works on more than one level. The foreground images are vibrant: large faces, abundant smiles. Very charming. But each page also contains a hidden world of imagination and inner life. Rendered in white, we see that everything in our narrator's world has emotional resonance.
The cartoonist's emphasis lines around a bagged lunch, the smell lines from Maddy's coffee, the critters in the potted tree. Sensory perceptions and emotional reactions are as important as the tangible. To ignore these less quantifiable realities would eliminate half the story of a life.
As a trans-woman, I initially assumed Maddy was transitioning MTF, especially when the narrator says Maddy's kisses "feel like sandpaper against my skin." WRONG! The Notes To Readers appendix identifies Maddy as intersex. How wonderful when a children's book can hold a mirror up to our mistaken assumptions and point the way to a better understanding.
p.s.
I have no research to back this up, but Violet Tobacco might be the coolest name ever.
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