If You Want to be Bryce's Friend...

About a year ago Bryce comes home and asks a question I wasn't quite ready for. He asks me if "gay" is a bad word. He is in first grade and the kids at school are using it. I tell him no and ask why and where he heard it. He said his friends were calling Justin Beiber gay. I'm a little caught off guard and then give him the best explanation on how I feel. It went similar to this:
Gay is not a bad word at all. Mostly a man likes a woman and a woman likes a man. Sometimes though, a man will like a man or a woman will like a woman. This is called gay. Like our uncles.

He shakes his head and says, "OH! I get it. But, is Justin Beiber gay?"

I tell him no. That a lot of times people will use the word gay in place of the word stupid and gives it a bad meaning. I then tell him I don't EVER want to hear him calling anything gay in the bad way because we love our uncles and that would hurt their feelings to hear that. And we don't want to hurt our family by using the word badly. I tell him hurting family is like hurting ourselves. So it was best to use gay only in the right way and not in place of calling something "bad."

He agrees he would never want to hurt some one's feelings and asks how come people are gay. I explain that God makes people all different ways.

At the end of the his second grade year, about a year after this conversation, he gets in the car and we are talking about his day. Leah mentions how he shouldn't play with this kid, Carlos because he isn't always nice. Bryce then said something that, as a parent, makes you tear up. I am proud that he gets "it" in the way I want him to.

He said, "Carlos is actually good now. I made him promise to stop saying gay and retarded in a bad way if he wanted to be my friend. And guess what? He promised he wouldn't say them."

I asked, "You said that?!?!"

He says, "Yeah mom, because Kyle is my friend (our friend with autism) and if they say that in a bad way, it will hurt him and because my uncles are gay, if they say that in a bad way it would hurt them. And I told him if you hurt my family and friends, you hurt me and I can't be your friend. And he agreed, so now he doesn't say those words."

I told him how proud of him I was for standing up for what is right and for what he believes in and there is nothing in this world that makes me more happy than him doing that. He just smiled and shrugged his shoulders. No big deal to him, but a major milestone to me!