When my kids were born, I had this great fantasy that I would raise them in a gender-neutral household, in which girls could play with Legos and boys could play with dolls, and that we would be the ultimate, nurture over nature family.
The news from Cleveland last week was sickening on so many levels. My heart breaks for those three women, not only for what they endured these last ten years, but for what they lost, as well.
My daughter is turning eleven next week. Let me just say that again, because I’m not really sure that I wrote that right. My daughter is turning ELEVEN next week.
There are some boys who come out of the womb wearing a sports jersey and holding a beer mug. These boys love sports - watching them, playing them, talking about them, thinking about them.
The refrain around my house for the last week or so has been the usual stuff of mid-May: what do you want for Mother’s Day?
It started as a casual question, then became more urgent as the week went on, finally hitting a crescendo by Saturday afternoon.
I’ve generally been pretty good about monitoring the appropriateness of what my children watch. I always check with Common Sense Media before I take them to see a PG-13 movie, and when my daughter wants to watch shows like Glee or Modern Family, I screen them first to make sure there’s nothing she can’t handle.
Depending on how long you’ve been reading this blog, you may or may not know that I’m an author. My first book came out in 2005, titled Notes From the Underbelly, which was a fictionalized account of my own experience with pregnancy, followed by the sequel,
Eight years ago, when my son was born, I made the decision to quit my job as a college counselor in order to dedicate myself to writing full time.
It sucks to be a second child.
Being a first child myself, I always kind of knew this, but it wasn’t until recently that I’ve really come to understand just how hard it is. When I was a kid, I used to torture my poor little brother. My favorite line to use on him was that I was bigger, faster, smarter and stronger, and it made no difference to me whatsoever that I was only conferred those advantages because I’d been born three and a half years before him. I didn’t care that one day he would most certainly be bigger, faster, stronger, and maybe even smarter than me. At the time, he wasn’t, and I let him know it whenever I got the chance.
It wasn’t until I took Psych 101 in college that I even thought about the damage I might have done to his self-esteem. But now that I’m the parent of a big sister/little brother, I’m really starting to see how awful it must have been.
I think we’ve all seen enough bromance movies by now to know that men follow a “Guy Code.” As in, they don’t talk about what happens at bachelor parties, they don’t date their best friend’s exes, and they don’t eat each others’ fries.
