last month I took my son to his first ever pride event. He came out to us as a trans boy recently (he had identified as nonbinary since he was 6 years old, so we've known he was trans already, but this was a new shift and he's excited and nervous about the change) and is finally old enough to not scamper into oblivion during large, public events, so I hiked up my chronic illness pants and agreed to take him to a small independent book fair event near our community. I didn't have the energy available to bring him to a whole-ass pride parade, so we compromised with this event on the condition that I take him to another, larger event in the fall. It was delightful. It was also so clear how charmed all of the vendors were to see this kid--four and a half feet of incandescent queer enthusiasm, glitter makeup all over his face, wrapped in a nonbinary flag as a cape, with every pride accessory he has cobbled together clipped somewhere on his person like he himself was a flea market of rainbows. He skipped about to every stall, talking to anybody who would listen. It was incredibly precious. I was following at a distance, weighing my own purchasing decisions and telling everybody how proud I was of my son. "You should be," one vendor replied, "he's incredible." I know. I know he is. And it felt like I was being told that not just because it's true, but because too many parents of LGBTQIA+ children have no idea what an incredible blessing they are holding in their hands. Too many see it as another weird kid thing to indulge instead of a celebration of the beautiful humans their kids are becoming. I wondered, in a selfish moment, what that vendor thought of me--a pudgy Midwestern person in a t-shirt and dinosaur leggings, passing as nothing so readily as a soccer mom, following quietly behind and buying books.