And suddenly I’m a parent

On November 10, 2014November 10, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting7 Comments

Tonight I have to go to an open house for a local Montessori school. Want to? Am about to? I don’t know how to phrase it. Certainly no one is making me go; I think my main objection right now is that I don’t want to be old enough to have to be thinking about this right now. Pay no attention, by the way, to the fact that most parents my age are worrying about high school and not kindergarten. It’s not even that I want him to stay a baby forever or anything like that; as I’ve said on several occasions before, the older he gets the more I like him, so I suspect I’ll like kindergarten-kid more than I like three-year-old kid right now.

I will admit that I’m liking three. It’s a good age. It’s too bad that he had to go through the three years to get to three, where I liked him less, but three is okay.

So, yeah. Point is, I gotta go to an open house for a school I don’t know anything about, so that I can learn things about it, because maybe I’ll want to send my kid there soon, because he’s old enough that I need to worry about that. Blech.

So speaking of parenting: he noticed Halloween, right? We’ve talked about that. Which means he’s gonna notice Christmas this year for the first time, too. Which means that the wife and I have to make a decision about Santa Claus. I am, in general, against lying to my kid, and somewhat generically temperamentally against suggesting that he should adjust his behavior in order to receive rewards from supernatural beings.

I also don’t want to be the parent of the asshole kid who ruins Christmas for the other kids, and “let them believe what they want to believe and don’t worry about it” seems like kinda complicated advice for a three-year-old. My wife has suggested that we simply don’t bring it up and see what he brings to the table, and that seems like good advice.

An anecdote: We are at Meijer. We need to buy the boy a coat. As we pass the coat rack, an idle thought floats into my head: What if he decides he wants the pink one?

I, progressive Dad that I am, decide that I don’t really give a damn if he wants the pink coat. He picks out a dark blue one and tries it on and has a fit about the length of the sleeves. (Note: this is an ongoing thing. M’boy has issues with sleeves.) We try on an orange one. Same thing, only now the fit has a bit of a head of steam behind it and is getting a bit more obnoxious. We get him calmed down and my wife tries one more time to see if he’s interested in trying on a coat.

“The light blue one,” he says. I look. There’s a light blue one. With polka dots. It’s one of the girl coats.

You deserve this, I thought to myself. And the wife and I just sorta looked at each other. Looked at the coat. Neither of us really wanted to be the one to say no, because he’s fucking three, and who cares what coat he wears. At the same time, I noticed quickly that color wasn’t the only thing differentiating the coats. It turns out that girls’ winter coats from the exact same company– coats for three-year-olds, mind you– are actually cut different. They have froofy fur around the hoods, and– and this is the ridiculous part– they’re fitted. They have elastic on them, for the hips that three-year-old girls do not have. Which I suspect actually makes them less effective as winter coats.

Color? Wear whatever you want. My parental liberalism apparently ends at the point where my son wants to wear a coat that is fitted to show off his hips. I suspect he’s not about to start developing an interest in wearing girls’ clothing all the time, because I think we’d probably have seen that by now; he just likes the color light blue.

I shoulda just put it on him. He’d have had another fit about the sleeves and we’d have been done. Instead, my wife sucked it up and told him it was a girl coat and he couldn’t wear it. I’ve got a tiny bit of a dirty feeling in my mouth about it, but only a tiny bit.

In case you’re wondering if my mood’s improved

On July 17, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics7 Comments

Note to men: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE for how you act toward and around women. Not the women. Not the women’s fucking clothes. You.

Fucking idiot asshole scumbags.

I… wait, what?

On April 17, 2014April 17, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics13 Comments

I’m not good on gender/sexuality issues, okay? I admit it. I’m trying to get better about this stuff but half the time just keeping track of the pronouns and the prefixes and the abbreviations is so fucking exhausting that I just try and default to “leave everyone the hell alone” and try not to worry about it beyond that.

But… okay, the author of this article is being a prat, right? A word that I very carefully chose because as far as I can tell it’s gender-neutral while still being insulting? I want to take real problems seriously but I don’t think you get to simultaneously complain that 1) you use the ladies’ room because you feel safe in there and 2) you are constantly assaulted in the ladies’ room because you don’t look like a lady. Those shouldn’t both be true. And apparently this person identifies as trans, but is biologically female and not looking to transition, which is the part where my lack of knowledge screws me up because I thought “trans” meant you were biologically female but wanted to present as male (or vice versa) which… once you’ve made the decision to go out of your house looking like a man, should mean “just use the damn men’s room, nobody makes fucking eye contact in there anyway?” Right? I think?

(Men do not talk to each other in the men’s room. You could be a goddamned three-legged blue-skinned space alien with an echidna dick and so long as you didn’t try and peer over the damn stall dividers ain’t nobody gonna look at you. This is known!)

Somebody help me out here and let me know what I’m missing.

(EDIT: relevant detail: I have been a man with long hair, long enough and curly enough that I’ve been addressed as “ma’am” by people who weren’t approaching me from the right angle to see my beard. Never had a single second of trouble with anyone in a men’s room. I call bullshit on the “every long-haired male” line.)