On the Job of Raising a Feminist Son

     

In trying to figure out this identity as a full-time mom, partner, and homemaker, I've found it difficult to fully embrace it as the incredibly difficult, exhausting, mentally challenging "real" job that it is. 

I still sometimes find myself working too hard to prove to others that I am not some uninteresting, barely educated, oppressed woman. I focus on the fact that I'm now more productive as a poet and editor than I've ever been before, or that I'm working on prepping to go into a PhD program once Emerson goes to school. Sometimes it is the actual assumptions of others I'm working against, but often it's just my own internalized crap.

What's so hard to get across is that I'm not just doing the normal day-to-day of cooking meals, cleaning messes and wiping a tiny ass--it often feels like that's all I do. But, in all reality, my very awesome, very eccentric, very expensive education is being put to excellent use EVERY.SINGLE.DAY--from linguistic theory, to botany, to yogic philosophy...all the way to Oulipian procedures. And, obviously 15 years of critical theory has done something to my parenting, for better or for worse...

Part of what I keep coming to in parsing out what it is I really do^ is that I am at the beginning of a multi-year project in raising a feminist son who is also comfortable in his own power as a (I assume) masculine being. Everything that I do, every rule/habit/tradition my partner and I negotiate into our family, every aspect of how our home runs impacts Emerson's experience of work, worth, gender, and consumerism. 

I have the opportunity to help raise not only a feminist man of strong character, but a feminist man who is also well-educated, white, and of a privileged economic class. This is no light responsibility.  

In a world where our young men--one could easily argue--are a bit in crisis, where there is a fresh round of culture war on women being waged by those who run our government, and where patriarchal systems are evolving into trixier new incarnations....Yes, I think it is safe to say that raising a child in a conscious, compassionate, deliberate, feminist manner is a lot of work, regardless of their sex. 

So....I'm working on not just knowing that being a homemaker and mom is a real job and a potential site   for world-changing work, but also feeling that this is all true. Really grokking it.

^ The murkiness, the shiftiness of this term in our culture is so obnoxious. For years now, when meeting new people, I've opted to asked the question, "What do you do with your time?" 

When Kids Play Across Gender Lines -- Emanuella Grinberg on CNN.com


...I love the idea around this toy store rearrangement.  Much more useful.

2 Major Pet-Peeves

1) When people refer to a baby's gender when they obviously mean sex.

Sex = male/female...this is chromosome based. When you encounter someone with a baby bump, and you want to know what kind of genitals their baby has, you are wondering about the baby's sex. When someone of the gestational persuasion heads to a 20 week sonogram in hopes of finding out what colors to paint the nursery...the sonogram shows sex.

Gender = the cultural expression of femininity/masculinity. Pink bows, cupcake onesies, princess shit...these are typical symbols of feminine gendering. Baseball onesies, army men, blue dinosaur decor...these are typical symbols of masculine gendering. Parents impose gender on their infants, and slowly, over the course of the next few years, kids start to drive their own gender expression. It has nothing to do with their in-womb status.


2) Inaccurate animal groupings.

Recently, I was perusing the bedding section at a baby store. There was a crib set with matching mobile that was all woodland creatures (owls, deer, hedgehogs, etc.)...plus a FUCKING GIRAFFE.

I get that Sophie the Giraffe is a big deal, but that doesn't mean it's ok to stick an animal that predominantly lives in grasslands--ONLY on the African continent--into any ol' mix. I was so outraged, I had to tell the sales associate how terrible this was. She was, understandably, not sure what to do with me.

It would have been fine if they were animals all from different environments...let's say a dolphin, a python, a penguin, and a horse. But to have a group that is cohesive except for ONE. Totally not ok.

One of these things is not like the others...and it makes my skin crawl!