I.

The first time I play the game Dutch Blitz I am eleven years old and I wish I were a boy—a feeling that has been present throughout my life, sometimes suppressed and sometimes raging. The two longest periods that I remember suppressing that desire were during my fitting-in-obsessed teenage years and during the years I was pregnant and breast feeding my son.

II.

There are four suits in Dutch Blitz—the plows, buggies, pumps, and buckets. When I play with my family, I am always the plows, my explanation being that this is the most proletariat of all the suits. Each suit has ten blue cards, ten red cards, ten yellow cards, and ten green cards. The blue and red cards feature a little Amish boy and the green and yellow cards feature a little Amish girl. Each color is numbered one through ten.

The tagline on the packaging of Dutch Blitz is A Vonderful Goot Game, a not so subtle nod to its Pennsylvania Dutch origins. As I search online for information about the game, I find it frequently described as ‘family-oriented.’ What about this game makes it more family-oriented than any other card game? It is not that much different than euchre or rummy, neither of which seem like games that would be anti-family.

III.

As an adult I play the game reluctantly. I love to play; my brain thrives on following the play, but there is a part of me resisting. After dessert and a glass of wine for the adults, my son asks if we can play Dutch Blitz, so we clear the food and plates off the table and begin to shuffle the decks.

This is how the game is played: after shuffling, place four cards face up in front of you; these are your post piles; then you lay down ten cards in the blitz pile; the object of the game is to play the cards in the blitz pile. Play begins with players turning over every third card in the remaining pile; a card numbered 1 can begin play in the middle. The cards in the middle are played according to color. You can play any suit on like colors as long as you have the next number.

IV.

All of this, like any card game, is much easier to understand if you watch a game. My son, age nine, plays well enough, but does occasionally need reminders to play the cards in his post and blitz piles. One of the marks of a good player of Dutch Blitz—in my personal opinion—is that they pay attention not only to their own hand and piles, but also to all of the other player’s post piles so that they can anticipate play.

V.

The one rule I haven’t mentioned yet—and this is important—is that the post piles can be used to free up other cards for play. You can put cards from your hand or from the blitz pile on the post piles, ideally just temporarily before moving them to the piles in the center of the table. The only catch with the post piles is that instead of playing cards by color, the post piles are played by the gender of the cards. So the red and blue cards featuring the Amish boy can only be played on the green and yellow cards—the ones featuring the Amish girl.

VI.

Another way to play, my family tells me, is with giant cards in a large space. Each suit has a team of several players who run the cards out to the center of the space for play. All other rules remain constant. I imagine the number of players per suit could fluctuate slightly, but you need at least one runner and one person to turn the cards and manage the post and blitz piles.

My family plays the giant version of Dutch Blitz at a spiritual retreat that I skip to throw a party with my high school friends. During the party I drink double-digit tequila shots while playing chess. The next morning, after I have convinced the friends who stayed the night to help clean the mess, my friend Tony sets off the fire extinguisher, which I don’t notice until after my parents return from their spiritual retreat. Surprisingly, I don’t get into trouble.

VII.

Religious people (I count my Calvinist parents in that group) are fond of saying, what would we tell the children? This is really nothing more than an admonition to stay in the closet. But is telling your children about homosexuality any more difficult than constantly defending heterosexuality to your children?

The first time my father hears me say I want to be a boy, I am sitting in the living room with the neighbor girls, one of whom looks at me and asks, so you want to get girls pregnant? The thought of getting anyone pregnant has never occurred to me. My father says nothing. I am nine.

VIII.

In a long, futile attempt to be a straight woman, I end up getting pregnant with my son at twenty. As if my relationship with gender and sexuality isn’t difficult enough, I add the problem of motherhood to the mix. My son suffers along with me through a couple of bad heterosexual relationships before I start finally dating women.

I always identified as bisexual, even before I have sex with anyone, and once I start sleeping with men I tell my boyfriends I am bi, which they either ignore or encourage. I kiss a lot of women, go on dates with women, but don’t actually sleep with a woman until I am twenty-eight. It isn’t a shock to me that I am dating women, because I have wanted them for so long. It is a little bit of a shock when I realize maybe I am not bi, and it is a shock when my son very nonchalantly announces to my parents, mom has a girlfriend. This time it is my mother who says nothing, and my father just says, oh really. Yes, I say, and no one says anything else.

IX.

It is also a shock to me after I start dating women that being gay doesn’t change my discomfort with gender. Loving women feels really right but being identified as a woman still feels wrong.

X.

We go for a walk with my parents. My son is talking non-stop about the ducks we saw while we were out for a bike ride, just me and him. He tells my parents we saw lesbian ducks. My parents say nothing. I blushingly mutter something about how there were none of the green-headed ducks in the pond. My son is not uncomfortable. Lesbian ducks exist in his world, just like lesbian moms.

XI.

Playing Dutch Blitz with my parents, my son says that the cards played in the middle, played by color and not gender, are the gay cards, while the post piles, where the cards are played by gender—boys on girls, are the straight cards. I say that the game is sort of heterosexist, a term I am not even sure my parents are familiar with. My son wonders if he could make a version of Dutch Blitz with more than two genders. I watch him clumsily shuffle his cards and think that I would like to live outside of those two genders. I look at my parents, worried, because I want to live with them in my world.

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