The other day, I was in a meeting speaking with someone who does not know me very well.

“I’ll have to come over sometime and meet your partner and your dog,” she said. Three things occurred to me:

First, I winced at the word, partner — the sterile and conservative-sounding noun that most often connotes entities doing business together. (I once got into a long conversation with my mom where I defended the term and thought it appropriate, but I’ve since changed my mind.)

B: My partner and my dog?

And number three: Why would you feel like you have to come over when you haven’t ever been invited over?

“You mean my girlfriend and my two dogs and my kid,” I said.

“You have a child?” She gasped.

What? Do I look so much like someone who would not have a child? But I didn’t say that. Instead, I said: “Well, she’s my girlfriend’s daughter, but yes, I claim her as well. Let’s say she’s my step child.”

Before I even finished this sentence, overlapping with the last two words, she said, “I hate children.” I physically leaned back.

“You. Hate? Children?” I was stunned. Who hates children (what a strong word!)? And, how awkward that you would say that in response to someone telling you that she has a child. Making it even more awkward, she said, “I’m sure I wouldn’t hate your step child.”

I stared at her, probably with my mouth open. I had no words. Also, I wanted her to feel the full brunt of her social ineptitude.

And she did. She turned pale, looked away then back at me then away. Just then, my friend came stage right and asked me if I knew so and so, who walked up beside her. Thus distracted, I let the blunderer slip away quietly.

About a week ago, my ‘partner’ and I got into a spontaneous conversation about nouns used to refer to one another. She said, “you don’t ever introduce me as your lover, do you?” I don’t, and admitted as much, because ‘lover’ implies sex. Doesn’t it? “I might as well introduce you as my sex partner,” I said and we laughed. What followed was a series of pretend scenarios where we introduce one another to strangers: “Hi, I’m Elizabeth and this is my sex partner, Lucy.” We giggled like little kids and tried not to fall down on the ice while picking out each footstep carefully over the snow-glutted sidewalk.

And we get to be like little kids a lot, which I love. Maybe it’s because of who we are, both of us lovers of laughter. But certainly it has a lot to do with the little kid we’re so privileged to have in our lives.

Just this morning, I went into her room to wake her up. The lights have a dimmer, so I faded them up gradually while singing, “good morning my sunshine.” I saw her little eyes flutter open and I approached her bed. She gave me a big smile and said, “good morning, Kiddo!” I laughed and she laughed. Then came the process of picking out her outfit for the day, which is usually a challenge because, already at three, she has strong opinions about what she wears. It has to be a dress and has to have purple (or be solidly purple). She was wearing her purple butterfly outfit (she’d slept in it) — a stretchy tank top attached to a gauzy tutu with velcro strips on the back where purple wings attach. It’s difficult to get her to wear anything else these days, and of course she wanted to keep on wearing it to school today, so I raised the stakes. I pulled out her favorite dress: a light purple dress with dark purple stars on the sleeves and skirt and dark purple stripes on the top. She squealed with delight and happily pulled off her butterfly outfit.

So this girl at the meeting the other day who said she hates children while I’m telling her I have one at home — she’s a head-scratcher. Not because her social skills are that badly damaged (not unusual in such settings), but because the delightfulness that is little children — with their wonder and their magic and their powerful imaginations — is something I cannot fathom hating.

Now that I think of it, when I first met this girl, she asked me what I do. I said, “I’m a writer,” and she said, “I hate reading.” There’s a pattern here. If I were to tell her I’m an environmentalist, she’d tell me she hates breathing. Maybe she has a disease that makes her say the opposite of what she intends to say. That’s the only thing that could explain a person saying such blatantly inappropriate and arrestingly awkward responses to someone in conversation.

Also last week, I beheld for the first time in my life, Jeanette Winterson. In person. On a stage. Reading from her most recent book and riffing about what was on her mind. One of her most passionate missives was about reading. She talked about the importance of it and the singularity of it in terms of experience: scientific studies have revealed that reading engages the entire brain, every last bit of it, whereas watching television or listening to a story engages only a small portion. This is the case, I will venture, with childlike play as well. Engaging fully with a child in make believe games or dancing or singing or all of the above — any activity that requires complete, un-self conscious investment of the adult mind to the point of self forgetting — it lights up the whole brain and therefore the whole world.

Because perception is reality.

But reality is reality. The objective fact is that when I see that little girl smile or hear her laugh, involuntarily, I smile.

And belief is reality. So even if, in the depths of your soul, in your purest core, down underneath all the grumpiness and jadedness and self-castigation, you actually are evil enough to hate something as wonderful and life-affirming as a child, or something as necessary and lovely as breathing, I mean reading, even then, why would you state it as fact?

Because, as Henry Ford so wisely said, “whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”