You Aren’t Doing It Wrong

I’m tired of all of these mommy blogger posts about how I’m doing it wrong. Or how you’re doing it wrong. Or, really, when it comes down to it, how the blogger seems smugly sure they are doing it right.

It’s all pretty ridiculous. You’re just not. I’m not. Hell, they aren’t either, likely.

Here’s a pretty horrible idea, if you have enough time and energy to fight online about the best ways to raise kids, it’s likely your kids are going to do just fine. There’s a lot of privilege that comes along with that kind of time, and the statistics show that it’s privilege that makes “the difference” as far as a child’s future financial success.

There’s no one-size-fits-all that works. No two families that are the same. No two moms. No two dads. No two kids. No two job situations. No two financial situations. When you add up the strange arithmetic that is the equation of your parenting situation, it’s likely going to come up with a unique answer that works for you.
If you try to apply that answer to another parenting situation, it’s going to be a false sum. The numbers are different. The children are different. The parents are different. The needs are different. The cultures are different.

These things really do matter.

People get heated about their answers, though. People like Stephanie Metz over at The Metz Family seems to get heated about her answers.  She wrote a blog post that’s getting some attention about… well really about a whole lot of different stuff. She started with the statement that her children are not the center of her world.

Tell that to the mother of newborn twins when she is clusterfeeding around the clock, as has happened to many other twin moms I know. Tell that to the mother of a child with profound special needs who has to set her schedule by her child’s medical needs. Tell that to the parent of an Olympic athlete who works hard to get her child to practice meets and competitions, sacrificing much of their own for their child’s extraordinary talents. Tell that to the parent who doesn’t have enough money or assistance to feed the whole family enough that sacrifices their own meals to make sure their children somehow aren’t left crying twenty minutes after every meal because it was so meager. Or how about the abusive parent that decides to seek help before hitting their child? Should that parent not have their child be the “center of their world?”
Tell that to somehow who lives a different life than you.
I’m sure that’s not what Ms. Metz meant. I’m sure she was talking to the “general” parent, but there are times in every parent’s life when their child is the center of their world, generally speaking, and that’s okay.

One of the horrible problems with blogging with such an authoritative voice is that the blanket statements end up covering far more than you ever intended to cover. So I’ll give Ms. Metz the benefit of the doubt, just like I give the benefit of the doubt to all the other parents out there just doing the best they know how.

Speaking of the benefit of the doubt, I doubt Ms. Metz knew how horrific bullying has truly become when she seemed to state that the only real bullying was physical assault in her screed.

30 years ago I was horrifically bullied in school. So much bullying I can’t even begin to stomach recounting it all. Only the smallest portion of it was physical. Maybe one or two physical assaults a year at most. The rest was whispered (or shouted) horrors. It was all so much that one day one of my bullies sat next to me and tried to talk to me as the person he had never treated me like. He asked me how I could handle all of the constant verbal abuse. He asked me, sincerely, why I didn’t kill myself, as he could see no other option if he were me. He was not being a bully at that moment, I can assure you. It was a strangely human moment wherein we were separated from our normal school environment and peers. We were forced to relate as peers in this environment and the situation forced him to assess his behavior and my own perseverance. He wasn’t telling me to kill myself, he was asking how I managed to not.
It was a fairly valid question.

That was 30 years ago. Before social media made it possible for the bullies to always follow you. Even if you switch schools. To make fresh starts impossible. To make escape impossible.

I doubt Ms. Metz truly understands that it’s not just Facebook, it’s also Instagram, and Twitter, and Snapchat, and a thousand other avenues into a child’s head, where hours and hours every day can be spent telling a girl she is ugly. She is a bitch. She is a whore. She is stupid. She is, in short, unacceptable, and always will be. I doubt Ms. Metz knows that the global village that children are a part of now means that all the people those bullies know, all the virtual friends, have also been told that the bullies’ targets are unacceptable. They have laughed and escalated it to a culture that is so lockstep that Anorexia is hitting as young as 6 now, with girls (and boys) dying to somehow achieve acceptable to their peers. To achieve acceptable to the face they see in the mirror.

Should that child not be the center of their parents’ world? That child who peers into a mirror and sees unacceptable because that is what is pinged at them from when they wake up to when they go to bed, should they too not be the center of their parents’ world because that will somehow ruin them for future success?

That’s not the end of Ms. Metz screed about how everyone else is doing it wrong, either. She talks about guns for a while, and about how her boys like to play good guy vs. bad guy. Okay? Does she want there to be more gun acceptance at schools? Is she living in the same country as me? As the Pozner’s?

The Pozner’s aren’t really into there being more gun acceptance at school. Despite the NRA making a concerted effort to get the parents of the Sandy Hook children to speak up about wanting more armed guards or armed teachers or armed anybody, they pretty much all stood up and spoke for less arms all in all.

I’m sorry if that makes your children pause before choosing a toy to bring to show and tell. I really am. I wish things like that had never happened. I wish we didn’t live in a place where we would have to worry about guns – toy guns or real guns – in schools, but we do. Perhaps your own wish to shelter your child from a world where he has to choose a less loved toy is really more at issue for you than the collective pain of people hoping to shelter their own children from a world where guns on a school’s campus may very well mean dead children.  I assure you, for the rest of us, it’s that these calamities happened.

She then goes on to randomly rail against proposed grown-ups who have been so horribly raised by their parents that they are now gibbering in hallways after every random proposed encounter. As the internet likes to say, cool story, bro. It’s an interesting take on the psychological affects of attached parenting that is grounded on… not a whole lot other than smugness from what I can tell. I say smugness because she then goes on to tell the proposed story of her own two children and their proposed encounters in the world. She peers into her crystal ball and sees true, y’all. You can tell, because, hell, she speaks with authority. She said it! It must be true!

And hell, it probably is. Her sons will likely grow just fine. They’ll suffer the slings and arrows that people have been suffering for aeons, with new twists provided by new technology. They’ll have success and they’ll have failure. Maybe not in equal measure, because that’s just the way the old ball turns.

They’re likely to mostly be successful, though, by whatever terms she deems acceptable. She has the privilege to think hard about her parenting choices, and that means she’s getting to actually make parenting choices when a lot of people simply have their back to the wall as far as choices.

That’s really what I take exception to in her screed against other parents Doing It Wrong. The smugness she inadvertently comes across with (hey, benefit of the doubt, again) in her summation of all the ways she’s Doing It Right rubs me wrong. I’m sure that’s not how she meant it. She was just writing some thoughts out. I’m sure she has a lovely family, and beautiful boys who are a delight to be around. I’m sure she is a wonderful person with a lot of compassion.
I know I screw this blogging thing up all the time, too. I don’t always speak with the most compassion, or insight, or all the facts in place. Much as I try, I fail. I’d want someone to speak up when I fail. So, hey, I’m speaking up.

Parents Aren’t Causing Autism. Quit It.

You want a rant? I’ve got one.

This was shared on my feed and I pretty much had my brain spasm all over the place. Here’s what I said, try to ignore the twitching anger:

I can’t with this. I mean, I can’t even read it. I mean, I can’t read it and continue to not be seriously heated. 

You want to celebrate diversity? Here’s one for you: people on the Autism Spectrum? They’re people. 
Here’s another shocker: not all of them are “difficult to reach.” 
Autism is a spectrum “disorder.” It’s a collection of learning disabilities, and neurological conditions. Not all of them present, or at the same levels with all people on that Spectrum. 

We haven’t really delved very far into where ASD comes from as much as we have a new scare every month about what’s causing it, and how we’re being bad mothers if our children are affected by it. As though, somehow, we are the sole gatekeepers to our children. As though they are our possessions, and everything that happens with them, or everything they are is a reflection on us. 
This is a tool that has been used to beat women for centuries. It is a tool that women use to beat other women. It is a tool that women use to beat themselves. 

Early in the history of ASD as a disorder it was believed to be caused by mothers who were too cold to their children. Not surprisingly this was during much of the early 2nd wave Feminism when women were beginning to discover identities outside of only being mothers. 
You want to have a career, or a life outside of the home? You’ll cause your child to be irreparably damaged. Now take off those shoes, get back in the kitchen, and do your duty to your family, or else your children will suffer, and it will be your fault. 

Much has evolved since then, and we have come to learn more, but so much of that knowledge is a chaos of continued blame sourcing that seems to end nowhere other than hocus pocus faux scientific “medical” quackery. 

What do we know? There seems to be a genetic link for Autism. It runs in families. 
We know that the numbers of those with ASD have likely been underreported for decades. So many people lay in the wings of Autism Spectrum and were so “lightly” affected that they simply were never reported. They were considered late talkers. Exceptionally picky eaters. Late bloomers. Shy. “Weird.” Etc. Parents simply never understood what they were seeing and never reported it if they did suspect. Perhaps fear of the stigma of a diagnosis that would follow their child around for life gave them caution. More likely that they just truly did not know what they were seeing. “Uncle so-and-so was a late talker, and then he went on to be successful,” went family legend and the friendly advice of neighbors. And so they put their suspicions on hold. 
Lord knows the backlash that I incurred when I put my son in Early Intervention at age 2 was bad enough. I can not imagine how bad it would have been if I had not had the wherewithal of my own knowledge and the courage to listen to my own inner voice AND the luxury of time that comes with being decidedly upper middle class to back me up. If I had been fighting the daily grind of a 9-5 (or a 3-11 for that matter), and trying to put food on the table, keep the gas turned on and water running, and the kids in clothes? Would I have fought so hard? 
It’s pretty hard to say. 

I’m pretty insulted by this whole essay and it’s tone. I’m being frenetic and chaotic in my refutation of it. 

What I have to say? 

ASD isn’t the end of your child if your child has it. Not all ASD looks alike (my son could not be more sweet, more open, more funny, more loving, or more empathetic toward others). Mothers aren’t “causing” Autism. 

Continuing to feed any of the three beasts I have named right there? Not. Very. Awesome.

One Size Fits Some

Kelly Rose Pflug-Back wrote this piece that appeared on The Feminist Wire. Then it appeared on Huffpo. Then it appeared within my social media.

Then I went crazy.

So here’s where I present my creds, right? Here’s where I state that I’m part of the estimated one out of every four women who have been sexually assaulted. And yes, it’s true.  Multiple times, in multiple ways, and with multiple accompanying levels of other trauma that were inflicted at the same time.

It’s also true that that does not define me. Nor does it define my sexuality. Nor does it define my ability to have a healthy sexuality. And frankly, I’m kind of getting sick of this presumption that it does, or that it should. Or that there’s something wrong about me if it doesn’t.

The assumption that all women should be treated as victims of sexual assault, or even that all women who have been victimized by sexual assault want to be labeled as victims of sexual assault forever and ever is a pretty big assumption.

It’s not all of me, and it seems part and parcel of the kyriarchal worldview that the actions of those in oppressive power positions leave no option for those who aren’t in those power positions to be nothing else but receiving vessels of the oppression. As I said angrily after reading this article, I am more than the sculpture that was left behind after the wax and mold of  the assaults have been removed. I resent the implication that it was a molding act at all for me. I don’t resent it if it was such to someone else, but for me, I resent it.

Culturally we do not expect a man who has been held up at gunpoint and robbed to feel defined by that forever. Nor do we expect them to always live in fear. Or to always need to be approached with caution. Or expect them to want to be called victims of gun violence forever. Yet we do so with women who have lived through sexual assault. We expect them to feel broken. To feel as though all sex is suspect. To have flashbacks if touched wrong, perhaps, and then we give them the title sexual assault survivor forever.

That doesn’t really work for everyone. It certainly doesn’t work for me. I don’t want to be treated with kid gloves like I am a wounded creature ready to bolt at the first sign of a trigger warning. There’s a level of condescension in the assumption that you know how I feel that is pretty intolerable for me.

I caution that I do not feel it is wrong to feel any of these large spectrum of things, from the man who was held up at gunpoint having flashbacks to the woman (or man, because hey, it happens to men too) who was sexually assaulted to feel however they feel about it.

Maybe instead of assuming that there is one right way to behave, we treat people as the individuals we all are. There definitely is a universality in the spectrum that is the human existence, and common experiences often tie us together, but our actions and reactions are so much larger than a simple narrative gives room for. Let’s start actually asking people how they feel and how they want to be treated, and give room for any answer to be acceptable, even if it doesn’t fall within what we can personally do. There’s a few billion people on this planet. We don’t need everybody to treat everybody like lovers, best friends, family, co-workers, or even acquaintances. There’s this concept of boundaries within psychology wherein we expect different levels of deference and awareness from different people. Boundaries are often some of the first things to blur when we start having any sort of trauma or tough time, mentally. This is sort of my plea to get back to some level of them.

If we are coming to a place of acceptance that beauty is a spectrum, can we also come to a place of acceptance that sexuality is a spectrum, and that also the sexuality and psyche of those who have lived through sexual assault is also a spectrum?

If the point of feminism is to open the door of possible expressions of human existence, rather than closing them, should we not also leave this door open?

Biases

I’m caught up right now in a jury pool, and haven’t had time to think or post anything. I’ll give you a snippet of something I found rather shocking about myself on the first day.

I’ll start with the fact that I’ve got a lot of conflicting feelings about the jury system as it works in the US. In theory it’s great. In practice, it’s… not so great. It mostly relies on people being as uneducated and able to be easily manipulated (either intellectually or emotionally) as possible. The combination can be pretty horrible, and it often is.

I try to counter that, as many people do, with feeling some sense of civic responsibility toward this service. Unfortunately, the realities of the fiscal and cultural lives that people in the US deal with, taking the standard 3 days to many weeks out of their lives to find alternative care for their children, to keep their jobs (though you can not be fired for serving jury duty, your workplace is in no way responsible for paying you, and jury duty itself pays such a small amount that it can not be relied upon as an alternative to a paycheck), or to in other ways keep their lives from sinking, it just makes jury duty impossible for large swaths of people.

Nevertheless, I try. I have sat once before on a jury, and it was an exceptionally disturbing experience. It was on a murder case where it was not disputed that the defendant did murder, but what legal level of murder they committed. The death sentence or life imprisonment were not in question, as neither were up for possible sentencing for the defendant.

The first thing they do with jury duty is that you swear an oath to be unbiased, and listen and judge each bit as best as possible. I find this oath part particularly important, and take it very seriously, searching myself carefully for the most truth.

When deciding whether or not you will be an unbiased juror for a particular case before the court, some questions are asked of each juror. They untangle some of the particulars entanglements that may trip up a juror and create bias. Are you related, by blood or fiscally, to any of the parties or witnesses?

We came to something that is going to make me a near impossible juror for all criminal cases in the US during these questions, and not something I had considered about myself. It wasn’t always true, you see.

They asked me if I was biased against any law enforcement agent of the US, federal, state, or local.

I completely shocked myself by saying yes. Of course I am biased against law enforcement agents in the US. Thousands of psychology studies have taught me that the very position is one that is a perilous balance to nearly automatically slant someone towards tyranny. Hundreds of thousands of incidents have occurred, just in the last ten years (though, they go back much further), that show that law enforcement agents in the US are strongly motivated to harass the public rather than serve them.

My own personal experience was with law enforcement agents as they tangled with the Occupy movement, and what I saw there was so moving that I can no longer state that any general law enforcement agent is serving the public rather than targeting them. I’m immediately biased. Though there are many, perhaps the majority, who are serving their duty toward the public to the best of their abilities, the few who don’t have so egregiously acted that it has cast suspicion upon the lot because of their position of power and the impact of such power.

No. Of course I have a bias against law enforcement agents in the US.

Then I laughed because of how shocked I was to find this out about myself. I laughed in a district court in the US because that is such a troubled place to be.

We’re in a bad place, y’all.

A very bad place, indeed.

 

I Don’t Matter

I’m going to go off record here for a second and say something sort of horrible.

We are not important, geopolitically.

We just aren’t. I’m not. You’re not. The people all over the world (46 different countries* by my last count) who are reading this aren’t important geopolitically.

What we are is important, individually.

See, there was this discussion I got involved in about will we or won’t we with Syria in regards to the US doing anything strategically. It doesn’t even matter what my position is. It really doesn’t. A million people, ten million, could march on Washington tomorrow… and it isn’t going to matter.

We aren’t in charge. Nobody asked me my position on Rwanda before Rwanda happened. Nobody cared about my peace protests before Gulf War 1 (I was young, I simply did not understand my place in geopolitics at the time).

I don’t matter. You don’t matter.

The people with money matter. They look at their money, and they look at the different power plays available. Do this, and what will be the net gain or net loss. Don’t do it, and what will be the net gain or net loss.
That’s it.

I have no illusion that it is otherwise.
The only difference I can make in the world is in being kind. In raising two kids to be stellar adults who are also kind. Hopefully. In making every day count and being compassionate and thoughtful in every interaction. In trying my hardest to make apologies where I need to, and doing better next time if I screwed up this time.

That’s all most of us can do.

Politics don’t change; the people with money are the ones who make the policy. The last time “the people” effectively spoke to those in charge? That was the Magna Carta. As much as I would love to say it was the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, those were both made by people with money and power.

That was pretty much the crowning achievement of all of us “little people” when it comes to geopolitics. Don’t feel bad, it was a doozy, but damn we’re due for a new one, or hey, I’d even go with reinstating that one. Then again, try not to let it get to your head, the rebellion that caused that one was led by the rich and powerful, too.

I’m not trying to get you down. I’m trying to remind you to turn your head to the things you can change.

It sounds small and meaningless. The armchair political quarterback position feels so much roomier and comfortable. I sit in it a lot myself, but it isn’t a position of power, and it isn’t a position in which I can change the world.

Change the world by being good. By actively not being bad. By stopping the bad that happens all around you. By saying sorry and helping people up when they get hurt in front of you. Not because you did it, but because somebody needs to say sorry, and it might as well be you.

Try to say kind words. Be good in deed. Be good.

It doesn’t sound big: be good. Sorry. It is, though. It really is. It eventually moves mountains. Change political options by changing your part of the world. Be good by not being bad, most especially.

 

 

* and can I just take a minute out to thank all of you from all of your different countries who stopped by to read my little tiny words? Thank you! Hey Estonia! Hi Åland Islands! Hello Hong Kong and Jamaica and the Republic of Korea and the United Arab Emirates and Ireland and Israel. Greetings France! Hello to all of you too numerous to list! It’s so nice that you took the minute or two to do that. Thanks!

Food Allergies and the Right to Bodily Autonomy

In allergy circles (which is a special level of hell that people with, or who have loved ones with, food allergies exist in) there’s been a lot of exchange lately of food allergy scares and even a death.  I shared my own story fairly recently, from when we found out Pie was allergic to tree nuts.
A common thread that is heard in comments to these stories goes something along the lines of, “well, how can I take food allergies seriously when everybody walks around saying they’re gluten intolerant and they’ve never even been tested? Or they just say they’re allergic to something at restaurants because they don’t want it in their meal.”

Well.

I’m ready for that to stop. Not for people to stop saying they have a food allergy when they don’t. I mean, that’s not really honest, and not super awesome, but it’s also not life threatening, nor is it aggressive in it’s intrusion. What is aggressive in it’s intrusion is this idea that we have that the only reason we should honor someone’s wishes about what goes into their body. If saying that they are allergic is the only way that people will take it seriously? I have a hard time getting upset about that.

I say that because I’ve spent many years with many varied diets. I’ve been vegetarian, I’ve been a pescetarian, I’ve kept kosher, I’m highly intolerant to shellfish (which is sort of a new development, I had previously tested at a low reactive allergy to it, and after a particular incident with a crawfish boil, even the smell of shellfish makes me nauseous, and remember the 24 hours I spent feeling like I was being beaten with a crowbar recovering from it), and I’ve also caretook my daughter’s allergy to tree nuts for the past 2 years.

I’ll tell you something sort of nasty, that last one is the only one people took seriously, and even that they don’t take that seriously. People tell me I’m overreacting when I say she can’t have a bakery made cupcake or slice of birthday cake. I don’t know a bakery that makes things without tree nuts, and they pretty much all carry such a disclaimer (heck, my local supermarket carries that disclaimer even over their meat displays).

As someone who chose to not eat meat, I regularly had dishes set in front of me that contained meat. As someone who chose to keep kosher, I consistently had people try to push food on me that wasn’t the least bit kosher.

I’m not saying that everyone should feel entitled to walk into any restaurant and make an ass of themselves by forcing the chefs into contortions based on personal dietary choices. I’m saying it’s reasonable to be up front about ingredients, preparations, equipment sharing, and let the consumer of food make informed choices from there. This includes letting the consumer know that they simply can’t be served there.

It doesn’t include lying and telling them it’s not in there if you know it is, or that you know it isn’t if you aren’t sure. Why does it have to be life or death for that to be respected? It also doesn’t include you making a snap judgement that somebody saying they are intolerant isn’t as important as somebody saying they are allergic. I’m not going to explain how serious food intolerances can be, even though I know several people with chronic immune system disorders that have well taught me how serious they can be. Because that doesn’t matter.

This idea that we, collectively or individually, have a right to gauge your right to bodily autonomy based on if it will kill you or not? It has to end.
I’d really like to change the paradigm on this discussion, because I think it’s focusing on the wrong thing. It also really takes the focus off of the thing that is dangerous: ignoring people when they say they don’t want something and giving it to them anyway. That’s what endangers people with food allergies. It’s not people saying they have food allergies when they have food intolerances. It’s not people making dietary choices and then claiming it as a food allergy. It’s simply people’s disregard for the bodily autonomy of others.

I’m Outraged That You Give A Damn

So this recently happened.  I could have linked more things. I linked four, separate horrible things, but it would have been just as easy to link four hundred. Four thousand. Those are just the first four that spring up when I open the news. The first four things that are actually news, that is.

A friend recently asked how [things like this are happening in today’s world]? My only answer is exhaustion. Information exhaustion. Outrage fatigue.

How in the world would a song like Blurred Lines become one of the two big pop hits of the Summer in the US after a year that included the Steubenville trial? That included story after story of girls committing suicide after being raped and then shamed over “their responsibility” of the crime?

How could we, again, be on the edge of a war in the Middle East, possibly, after over a decade of this?

How Russia is raiding people’s homes over suspicion of them being gay, and we’re still, as a world, seemingly going forward with the Winter Olympics there?

Some of my other friends were completely ignited over the fact that Miley Cyrus’s performance at the VMAs was actually a topic of conversation all over their Facebook, but damn. Seriously, damn. With all that up there? A little light outrage is actually sort of a relief.

I get that from a lot of the people around me. I stay fairly plugged into the news, and a lot of people very close to me don’t. It’s not because they don’t care. They care. They just care too much, and it honestly takes too much out of them. It makes it impossible for them to do the things that need doing like going to work, taking care of their children, or doing much besides raving at the top of their lungs or crying in a corner.

I used to get really upset at that reaction. When people want to look away from the dead body, so to speak. Then I realized that the very mechanism that allows me to look is what makes them not want to look.

I don’t feel like there’s much all I can do about these things. I’m pretty powerless to stop it. Awareness is about all I have going. I feel detached from power to change it, so I feel detached from anxiety over it. Those around me who get overwhelmed by these things so completely? That very feeling of powerlessness is what makes them hurt.

Despite the fact that the authors of this article mistake correlation for causation, I can’t say that they’re not onto something here. This is how most people seem to operate. Powerlessness tends to make most people feel anxious, depressed, or other negative emotions. I’m sort of the oddball out on this one. Facebook is a platform for news, rants, and the daily snippets of life. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s not necessarily making people happy.

It’s easy to get attached to, and interested in, fluffy news. That’s what it’s there for. It’s a distraction. There’s a lot to be distracted from, too. Bills, depression, chronic pain, debt, anxiety, employment, sickness: they mount up, along with all of that evening news stuff that is so ever present in our 24 hours news cycle that has now broken through to even being part of our social interactions. Is it any wonder that people turn to something else instead? Hobbies and crafts, religion and philosophy, entertainment.

That’s really okay, and not a thing to get upset about.

This is pretty fluffy, too. It’s just talking a little bit about the fact that when people are being social and chatting about stuff, there’s no reason to judge them on some social scale of how important what they’re talking about is. I’ve seen some version of this sort of outrage about what people use “their corner of the Internet” for going all the way back to the alt.net days. I’m sure it goes further, but that’s when I was getting my legs under me a coming of age adult, so that’s when I first noticed it.

The answer has pretty much always been the same, too. You don’t like it? Scroll on by. Try not to let the outrage overwhelm you that someone else isn’t doing it right, wherein, you’re the one decided what right is.

After all, there are so very many things to be outraged by.

 

Edit: God (on Facebook) gets it right. But that doesn’t really change that it’s actually really sort of okay to not want to feel powerless all the time.

You Be You

My friend Darlena over at Parentwin posted this today.  It’s basically a response and a plea to a great post by Hands Free Mama about how she learned to stop worrying and love the bomb time she spends with her kids. Which is great. I mean, great that Hands-Free Mama has worked that out, but, damn that’s a lot of pressure.

In the mommy blogging world (which somehow includes Pinterest, for reasons that mystify me) there’s all this pressure to “keep up with the Joneses.” The Joneses in the year 2013 aren’t just middle class American House Beautiful cover stories any longer, though. Not only do you have to have a well kept house and garden, beautiful clothes, and cook exceptional meals. Now we all have to be the best mom we can be, the best cooks, the best birthday party throwers, the best crafter, the best educational supervisor, the best organizer, the best social justice warriors, the best eco-warriors, the best feminists, the best at everything, really. Not to mention that we either have a career to prove how self fulfilled we are outside the role of parent, or fill up every moment with emotionally satisfying and rewarding activities to prove how fulfilling and worthwhile it is to be a stay at home parent as an equally worthwhile choice also.

It’s too much pressure.

This life thing is not a competition. There’s no awards and no real recognition of the hard work put in.

And another truth is, this job, this parent thing, it sort of sucks sometimes, and it’s sort of joyful sometimes, but mostly it just is. It’s common and everyday and blasé and sometimes even boring, or unpleasant, or, yup, rushing and harried. It’s not that I don’t want to do it. Put that aside. That’s not it. It’s that when one is tired from taking care of a house full of sick people, or just trying to get the daily stuff done, it’s not sustainable to always be worried about if one is enjoying it enough in a am-I-doing-this-right? sort of way.

What is that even? Are you doing what right? Being you? Hell, Boo. You’re doing it just right. You’re being the best you, and frankly, that kicks the pants off of being the best imitation of someone else’s idea of what you should do to be fulfilled and be a great person.

One of the first lessons I ever got in being a parent was in being a failure. See, Pie refused to nurse, and P refused to bottle feed. Unfortunately for P, I never produced more than an ounce or two of milk in a whole day. Ever. We tried everything. We tried the cookies, we tried constant nursing, we tried the medicines, but many combinations of factors put P in the hospital at around 3-4 weeks with a diagnosis of Failure to Thrive (he was far below his birth weight at that point), about to get a g-tube installed so he could actually get some nutrition into his quicky failing body.

We were lucky, and had doctors that were willing to try to do a lot of weird things to avoid that. By the end of 24 hours in the hospital we had found a combination of nipple types that worked for him (fast flow, orthodontic shaped), and a specially made nutrition-dense formula that helped bring him back to birth weight within a full 72 hours of being at the hospital.

Those hours were something of a nightmare of round the clock feedings, changings, reportings to doctors and nurses, and very little sleep. My husband had to work, and no one could take care of Pie, so she came with. Which meant that I was taking care of two newborn babies in a hospital room where only one of them was a patient, about 40 minutes or so away from home. There was no time off for meals or sleep or showers or just about anything. Add that on top of the fear that one of my babies was in such precarious health, and it was nightmare fodder for a new mother. Add in that it was my own fault because my own supposed-to-be-working, not-supposed-to-fail, ready-made feeding system known as my breasts simply didn’t work? Oh lordy. I won’t say I felt guilty, because I didn’t. What I felt like was a failure.

So I built a foundation of parenthood on that. I said to myself, “you know what, self? You’re going to fail. Anything worth doing is going to be a lot of failing. That’s okay. The work of it is to keep going. To keep doing, and to not get down on yourself for what you can’t do, or what you don’t get right every single time.”

Many of us, I’d hazard to say most of us, but I intuit there must be some people out there who felt they had idyllic childhoods, well the rest of us didn’t. Our parents failed us. Now many of us have arrived here in parenthood and we’re scared to death of failing our kids in the same ways.

All I can say to that is: hey, guys, calm down. Cut yourself some slack. Yes, get help if you need it. Don’t abuse your children or neglect your children, sure. But failing to stop and smell the roses every time you are running the morning gauntlet of getting the kids dressed, fed, and out the door on time to get to school when one of them is dawdling over ladybugs on the sidewalk to the car or bus, and frack, you just told them to rush, and crap, isn’t it great that they notice the ladybugs on the sidewalk? Yeah. Totally, but they really are going to be late, and frankly the school does not care one bit about what it was that made the child, your child, late. So. Yes, you told them to stop dawdling, and hurry up.

You’re not a failure for that. Just try to not be an jerk about it, okay? If you were? Buck up, camper. Say sorry, and do better next time.

One of the actual lessons we need to impart to our children is how to fail, and then how to keep trying anyway. How to say sorry. How to be wrong. How to change. How are they supposed to do that when we don’t accept it within ourselves? I repeat, how are we supposed to teach our children that failure is not the end of trying if we don’t accept failure as part of the learning process in ourselves?

We can not actually function at a level of accepting nothing less than an outwardly dictated level of perfection as outlined by someone else in a different set of circumstances than ourselves and simultaneously accept our children as the beautiful messes they are.

You want to stop telling your daughter to hurry, Parentwin? Start by stopping telling yourself to be Hands-Free Mama. I’m pretty sure she’d say the same thing.

The World Is Full Of Poison

Parentwin had a contributor post today that smacked me right in the head. It’s about food allergies, and what it means to be the parent of a child with food allergies.

See, my lovely and bright 4, nearly 5 year old daughter Pie has a food allergy. She’s allergic to cashews, pistachios, and to a lesser extent, English walnuts. The allergies combined mean that all tree nuts are dangerous for her, as they are not in the same family.  I’m going to tell you about the day I found that out. I wrote this originally for my own private journalling the day after the event happened, and it’s a bit emotional. I warn you about that, because it has upset people to read it more than once in the past.

 

June 29th, 2011
I’m going to try to write this out to let go of it. This is what it is to find out your child has a serious food allergy.

Around 4 yesterday the kids starting asking for a snack. This is fairly reasonable, so I starting making a simple sandwich for them to cut in half and share. While I was getting ready to make it, they danced around my feet like eager puppies and investigated the different food bits on the counter.

One of the food bits was a bag of cashews. I hadn’t yet fed the kids any nuts because up until now their chewing skills were not that remarkable. They were far more apt to just try to swallow it whole.

So, I gave them each a cashew while I was making their sandwich and told them to chew it up really well before swallowing. They both eagerly put their cashews in their mouth and started chewing like crazy.

I went back to making the sandwich, and looked down a few times to make sure they were swallowing okay. P chewed his up, and then promptly spit it out. Not that unusual a response for a 2 year old, especially him. Pie seemed excited by hers, so I gave her two more and told her that I was making a sandwich and she could eat those while she waited. She said okay, and then stood there watching me for a minute. Instead of eating the two more in her hand, she put them on the counter, said “no thanks,” and tried to spit out the one she had already swallowed.

“Oh, you didn’t like it? Okay. Here’s your milk. Just wash the taste out of your mouth and I’ll give you your sandwich in a second.”

She tried to drink some milk and stood in the gate to the kitchen. P decided he had some very important business in the living room and pushed through her to get there. “No! No pushing, P. I’m sorry, Pie, are you okay?”

She looked up at me from the ground where she was crying. “P pushed me!” “I know, baby, I’m sorry. No pushing! Ow! Pushing hurts!” I picked her up and put her on the couch so I could get the sandwich to them. When their blood sugar gets too low, like a lot of other 2 year olds, they are much more likely to cry, much more likely to push, and just generally aren’t happy.

I was hurrying trying to make the sandwich, while Pie was on the couch crying a little. It wasn’t a big cry, just a kind of complaint cry. The kind I usually try to hug her through. I finish making the sandwich, cut it into fourths, get out their little plates and put half on each plate. Then I bring it out to them and give a plate to each and go back to the kitchen to clean up the sandwich mess.

In the meantime, Pie has gone from complaint crying to just crying. This isn’t great. I go and check on her. She’s laying on the couch. “I got your sandwich, baby, you hungry?” “Noooo!” she says and itches at chest. “You okay?” “Nooooo!” with more itching.

Crap. Crappity crap. I pull up her dress and look at her stomach and chest where she’s itching. Raised swatches of white welts. Her skin is angry and red. Oh. Oh no. The cashew. Oh. OH FUCK. I pull her dress off and look at her whole body. All of her trunk is covered in the welts. I look at her eyes and lips. No swelling. Her eyes look a little puffy, but I think it’s the crying.

I run to the kitchen and pull out the liquid children’s benadryl, and make a dose for her with an oral syringe. “Hold on, baby! Mommy is making some medicine for you.” She’s just whimpering and scratching horribly. I grab the oral syringe and my hand hits the calamine lotion, so I grab that, too, and some cotton.

“Okay baby, take this medicine.” “nooooo!” “Come on, you need to take this medicine.” I put it in her mouth and she manages to take the whole dose. I fumble with my phone and call our pediatrician’s office emergency line.

“Is she coughing or are her lips swelling?”

“No.”

“Drive her to urgent care. Now. If she starts coughing or facial swelling, call an ambulance.”

“Okay.” I am dabbing the calamine lotion on her while talking. Just keeping my hands busy. I hang up. “Okay guys, we’re going to go see the doctor. Mommy is going to get some extra clothes quickly for Pie.”

I run through the house now. I grabbed the first shirt and pants I can find. Grab the second. Pie often throws up in the car, and I want to make sure she has a change of clothes. I shove everything in the backpack and get Pie quickly dressed in a shirt and pants. The dress I took off of her was hard to pull over her head and I don’t want to pull it back on her again. I throw on the kids’ shoes.

“We go in car? I need my purple glasses,” Pie tells me through wisps of hair and a tear stained face. I grab her sunglasses, throw the iTouches in my purse, backpack on my back, and grab P’s hand. Throw Pie on my hip and rush out the door.

P promptly walks over to his side and waits there patiently while I buckle Pie in. This is pretty much against general protocol, but he’s being fairly cooperative. I buckle him in, “thank you for being so awesome, baby,” and give him a kiss on his nose. “You’re being very helpful.”

I jump in the car, and dial my husband on speed dial and put it on speaker phone. It takes all of one ring to get through to him. “Hey, I’m on my way to urgent care. Pie ate a cashew, and it looks like she’s allergic.”

“Uh. Where’s urgent care?”

“Remember where we took the kids last time? Over by the Burlington?”

“Oh, yeah. I think so. I’ll meet you there.”

“K. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I hang up and try desperately not to speed. Every half a minute or less I look in the rearview mirror and see her head nodding downwards. She’s not crying anymore. She’s just laying there in her seat with her hair covering her face and her body limp. At every red light I put a hand back and shake her a little. “Talk to mommy, baby. You okay?”

Her voice is tiny. Tinier than I’ve ever heard it be. So tiny and so tired. “Ya. I’m fine.” Sometimes she says, “I don’t feel well.” So tiny. So tired.

Halfway there and she stops responding. I hear her retching in her seat, and see it happening in the rearview. “Oh no! I sick,” she says and drops her head again.

“I’ll clean you up soon baby. We just gotta keep driving this time. Okay? You hear me?”

She says nothing. Her hair is over her face. She’s covered in vomit. I have a hand on her foot and pull on it a bit every now and then. She stretches her leg back sometimes, and that keeps me going.

Sometimes she doesn’t, though. I think about her eyes being a little bit swollen from crying. Maybe it wasn’t crying. Maybe it was the allergy, and I should have called an ambulance. I keep squeezing her foot and pulling a little. P reaches over and pulls on her a bit. We’re very close. I can’t quite remember where it is, but I have a good general idea, and expect that I’ll recognize it when I see it.

I keep looking while I’m driving and squeezing her foot. I’m scared that she might have thrown up the benedryl. I keep driving, though.

There it is! I was as close as I thought. Oh thank you.

I park and jump out with the backpack already on my back somehow. I get P out of the car, and run around to her side. I wrap her up in a towel and carry her in. “I sick. You gotta clean me up. Oh no.” Her voice sounds less tiny and tired. I kiss her cheek.

“We’ll get you cleaned up soon, we got to see the doctor first, though, baby.”

I run in carrying her wrapped in a towel and with P holding my hand. “You carry me? P hold your hand cross street.”

“That’s right baby. You have to hold hands to cross the street.”

I run up to the the nurse and she says to sign in. “I can’t write right now, I’ll give you the information, just ask me the bits.”

So, she does this, quickly. As soon as she gets to “reason for visit” she puts the pen down and she says to follow her. I put Pie down on the table and pull off her vomit covered shirt. The nurse puts a child’s dressing gown on her. It is purple with koala bears riding rockets on it. Then she puts a meter on Pie’s finger.

“Her oxygen saturation is 100%”

“Oh thank god.”

She looks at her face. She is white and bruised looking. Red and purple splotches cover her. Her eyelids and the creases under her eyes look like dark purple holes. Bruised. Her body is still limp, but she’s sitting okay. The nurse raises her gown and looks at her body. It is also white as can be and bruised looking. Red splotches. The welts are gone. “How long ago did you give her the benedryl?”

“I dunno, 20 minutes ago? 30 minutes ago? She threw up in the car, so I was scared she threw it up.”

“No. If she held it down for 10 to 15 minutes, it’s in her.”

“Okay.” P is running in and out of this little corridor between the waiting room and the offices. I let him run.

“Okay, the doctor will see you soon. You can wait out here.”

I take the kids to the waiting room and pull the iTouches out and set them up with games to play. I convince Pie to let me change her vomit covered pants. She’s mad, though, because her pants are purple and the pants I want to change them to are red. The dressing gown is purple, and she wants them to match. I show her the red rockets on the gown, and she agrees to the pants. I smile at this simple Pie-ism. It is so her.

P insists on sitting next to Pie, and pulls her blanket out of the open backpack at our feet and gives it to her. “You’re so sweet, P. Thank you for being so nice,” and I give him a kiss and hug. He smiles and then starts concentrating on his game. Pie isn’t really concentrating much and it’s constantly switching off and she’s asking me to fix it.

The nurses call us over to get insurance info and such. The kids share a chair and play with their games while I do it. Again, I don’t seem to have it in me to write, so I give information and try to hold it together. I am scared that if I hold a pen it will just shake jitteringly all over the paper. My mind keeps thinking of her not responding in the car. Of the nurse saying that her oxygen is 100%. These two bits flashing back and forth between each other over and over in my head. I think I look calm, but I am not.

We finish and then we wait a tiny bit more. Then we go back to an exam room and wait there. P cries briefly when we go in the room but I tell him that we are there for Pie, and no one is going to mess with him. That seems to calm him down.

“The doctor is going to come in a minute and look at you, Pie. She’ll ask you some questions, and listen to your heart and lungs, and look in your ears and mouth.”

“She’ll use a stethoscope?”

“Yup. She’ll use the otoscope to look in your ears and mouth.”

“Oh. She’ll look in my ears and look in my mouth?”

“Probably, babe. It’s what doctors do. She might give you a shot, too.”

“A shot to make me better?”

“Yup.”

The doctor came in fairly quickly and asked us about what happened. She said that we’d give a shot, except she didn’t say shot out loud. I told Pie that we’d have to give her a shot, and it would hurt, but then she would start to feel better. She told me she’d give me some medicine to give her for the next three days, and to repeat the benedryl in 4-6 hours because tree nut allergies are notorious for reactivating (the reaction going away and then coming back).

My husband called right then and I told him what exam room we were in. He came back right before the doctor left. Everyone was happy to see daddy. Me, especially, I think.

The doctor left. My husband looked at me. “So, a cashew, huh?”

“Yeah. The worst I was afraid of was them not chewing it enough and choking on it. It never occurred to me to worry they might be allergic.”

“He ate one, too?” he said, indicating P.

“Yeah, it looks like he’s not allergic.”

“So, epi-pens for both of them, huh?” Yeah. At least with him, we can generally be able to keep him away from dogs. It’s not an allergy like nuts.

“Yup.”

The nurse came in then. She had some prednisolone for Pie to take by mouth, and then a shot of epinephrine. The nurse tried to tell Pie that the shot wouldn’t really hurt much.

“This’ll hurt some, Pie. It’s probably going to hurt a lot. But it’ll be over really quick, and I’ll hold you the whole time.” She just looked up at me, bravely. I held her and she giggled nervously when the shot went in, but she didn’t move, and she didn’t cry. It was over very quick.

And that was that. We’re supposed to keep up on the prednisone liquid for three days, and keep an epi-pen with her. No tree nuts at all until we get a testing done. I’ve talked to her doctor today and we’re on the quick road to getting that done.

So, if you want to know what it’s like to find out that your kid is allergic to cashews, well, this is it. There were many outcomes that could have been so much worse. I feared all of them while I drove.

Today she’s running around and talking about how she was sick and went to the doctor and the doctor gave her a shot that made her better. Her face looks pink. Her eyes bright and dancing. There are still shadows under her eyes, but they are light. The shadows in my head are harder to banish.

 

——-

This happened on June 28th, 2011, and I sat down to exorcise the demons of it on June 29th. Since then we had Pie tested and found her allergies confirmed. We carry epi-pens with us, always. Right now I feel in a bit of a free-fall about her allergies, specifically.

See, my kids started pre-k on Monday, and for her to have access to her epi-pens she has to have a current medical note and an unopened box with two epi-pens. These pens cost near a hundred dollars even with our medical insurance, and have to remain at the school. Which means we need another set for her personal carry around set. Which means another hundred dollars. I might fight that one, one day. The safest place for her to have her epi-pens is directly on her, not in a cabinet in a school nurse’s office. Her allergy appointment this year to get that note and the new pens is 8 days away. It’s a gap in coverage while she’s at school.
A gap wherein any schoolmate could offer her a snack that she should not eat. She’s pretty good about such things, and asks regularly if something is safe for her to eat, but that doesn’t actually keep her safe. Heck, the epinephrine pens don’t actually keep her safe. They merely provide a 10-15 minute window (first application) and then about a 5-8 minute window (second consecutive application) wherein she has a chance for emergency personnel to save her.

There’s even a chance that she’ll outgrow the allergy. Around 10% or so of children with the allergy do. That’s not a large chance, but if your chances were that good to win the lottery, why you’d play every day, wouldn’t you?

We’ve learned a lot in that time. Learned about how very many foods are made with tree nuts, or made in places where things are made with tree nuts. Pie talks about the day sometimes, too. It’s a part of her personal mythology. She tells of “the day I ate the tree nut” and about getting sick in front of the fridge. She’s mixed it up with a different period of sick wherein she threw up on the kitchen floor, but that’s okay. Personal memory and mythology are a private and individual thing, and attempting to alter someone else’s are usually futile. She does remember the doctor giving her a shot, and the scary car ride (a ride that should have never happened- always call an ambulance, always).

The most surprising thing to me, consistently, has been the almost personal outrage of others about people with food allergies. The insistence that it’s an inconvenience to not be able to eat the peanut butter sandwich at school, for instance. That if a child’s life was in such danger, why that child should simply not go to school so the hundreds of other children shouldn’t have to suffer the fate of a lunch without peanut butter (I mention peanut butter, even though Pie is not allergic to peanuts at all, because it is the most usual and often most sensitive and dangerous allergen – one where sometimes even a grain of the allergen protein can provoke anaphylaxis and therefore cause death – and yet it is often at the center of the self indulgent anger of the non-allergic).

There’s also a lot of debate about antihistamine use for anaphylaxis, just to be clear. Our allergist wants us to keep it on hand (and to keep the liquid kind specifically as chewing and swallowing may not be possible in the case of anaphylaxis) and apply it in emergency. Some say that it does not slow down anaphylactic shock, and that it wastes precious seconds when trying to save a life.

In that time we’ve also finally identified what Pie’s “first exposure” was. See, the first time someone is exposed to something they will be allergic to, they will not have an allergic reaction. As a matter of fact, allergies can simply develop from things that you’ve had plenty of. With Pie it was her second exposure to tree nuts that got her sick. Her first exposure to it was a happy time, and so blase that we had totally forgotten it happened at all. When she was around 11-16 months old or so, my husband and I were grocery shopping with her and the store we were in were giving out samples of pesto. Pesto has nuts in it, you see. Often pine nuts, but sometimes walnuts. She loved the pesto, and we were so pleased with her burgeoning palette that we just filed that memory away in things that had happened.

Is there anything you should be aware of when it comes to food allergies and children? Lots. 

Oh, and also? She wears a medic-alert bracelet that identifies her allergy, and gives emergency info on what to do along with contact info for myself and her doctor.  More than once I’ve seen an eagle-eyed person spy her bracelet and ask her about it. It’s probably the one thing a person can do that makes me breathe a little easier. First, they realized what the bracelet was, second, they knew enough to ask her about it, and finally, they are aware of a very serious but not obvious danger.

I know this entry is sort of all over the place, but that’s part of how I feel about Pie’s allergy: all over the place. It is an invasive species that has planted itself in the garden of my family, and we deal with it’s shoots and tendrils in lots of places, and in lots of ways. It doesn’t diminish the love, joy, or fun we have, but it is a scary fact that we live with, and Debby’s guest post at Parentwin smacked me right upside the head with a lot of those feelings.

Your Beauty

I didn’t really want to write this. I’ve already written versions of this, over and over. I’ve even touched on it here in the past.

But then someone did write about it, and they did it well. And I shared it on my personal Facebook. Because that video had been making the rounds on my Facebook. And I didn’t want to take away from how people were feeling about it, so I hadn’t been sharing the video, but I had been noticing them feeling good about themselves, and I can’t, I don’t want to, shit on that.

People feeling good about themselves is pretty important, and I am certainly not going to pretend that we are somehow divorced from the biological imperative of being attracted to people who are biologically attractive. But those two thoughts themselves sort of aren’t even related.

Forgive me leaving the rules of grammar and editing behind as I’m writing this because damn if this isn’t an immediate and strong reaction. I don’t want to break my flow.

Because. Because here’s the thing, what our culture states as attractive has very little to do with biological attraction.

Let me put a box around that sentence and drive it into your head with a soft hammer made of love and compassion for the sack of flesh and muscle and bone and other tissues that you move around in and is so completely sacred a thing that it is fucking derived of nothing less than stardust.

You are stardust.

Okay. Yeah. Sure.

Everything is stardust. Step away from the reverence for a second and let’s attack it from another angle, though.

What we consider to be culturally beautiful and attractive has little to do with biological attraction. Biological attraction is about fitness to mate, strength for survival, acuteness of intellect.

That’s the bare bones of it. It can be summed up by a few simple things, though.

In the modern Western world, the ability to provide a steady income can indicate both strength for survival and acuteness of intellect. There’s also sickness. So we look for healthy teeth, clear eyes, clear skin.

Then there’s fitness to mate. In a man, this is generally biologically gauged by your lizard brain in glutes and abdominal muscles. The hips, ass, and stomach that indicate an ability to thrust the penis well into the vagina, and deliver it’s payload.

In a woman, it’s gauged by hip to waist ratio. Hips that can carry a wide load of baby, and deliver it without dying.

And that’s pretty much it. If you look throughout history, you’re going to see an awful lot of human portraiture that emphasizes our genitals, and the muscles and bone structure surrounding them. Because that’s it.

That isn’t to say that is all there is to attraction. Or that without the ability toward fecundity you are outside of the measure of biological attraction. Different chromosome arrangements seek out complementary arrangements. Tall. Short. Skinny. Fat. Red hair. Black hair. Dark skin. Light skin. Hard working taskers. Big picture thinkers. Smart. Average. Passionate. Driven. Etc. Etc. Etc. Ad infinitum. Ad astra. The variety is endless, and biology moves us towards that, too, because it loves to mix things up and find out what will happen.

But.

What we have arrived at, currently, as a cultural ideal archetype for, specifically, women, has little to do with biological attraction. Yes, clear skin, clear eyes, good teeth. Sure. Preternaturally (sorry, Ms. Rice, I know you feel an affinity towards that word, but sometimes it really is the appropriate word to use surprisingly enough) so to the point that we use photo editing to achieve beyond human clear skin, good teeth, and clear eyes.

If people walked around with the glow and manipulations of Photoshop, it’d actually be intimidating and sort of scary. Grotesque even, in many cases.

Aside from that is our obsession with a nearly flat and prepubescent body on women who have the height of full grown adults. This truly has more to do with the complexities of fashion design than any nefarious plot in marketing, though.

It’s far easier to commodify and complete clothes that are designed for a standard prepubescent woman who has far more than the height of a nonstandard adult woman. Her shoulders don’t have the width that makes male design more difficult, even. There are less curves and angles than a fully grown woman. Those curves and angles play havoc with the dressmaker.

Ask anyone who sews clothes for a hobby, and they will understand immediately what I am talking about, too. The difference in fit between two size 2 women is far enough as it is. Bring them to a size 12 or 14 (the standard size in the US) and you are talking many inches of difference all over the place just from woman to woman. Bring them to a size 20 or 22, and it’s enough to make a clothesmaker weep and simply offer clothes that are likely to fit at the widest point, and drape otherwise. And an awful lot of knit.

This, by the way, is why knits and stretch materials of all sorts are so incredibly common in ready to wear fashion. And why they become even more common the higher the size.

I’m starting to drift into major essay here, and haven’t even hit all the points, though.

So. Let’s set that aside. Let’s set aside attraction and standards of beauty.

That last bit of that Dove commercial is disturbing as hell.

“It impacts the choices in the friends that we make, the jobs we apply for, how we treat our children. It impacts everything. It couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.”

Your beauty. Remember, that’s what this Dove ad campaign is talking about here. Your beauty.

 

ETA: I didn’t address the inherent racism because it’s been addressed by people who are infinitely better qualified than myself. But holy eff, y’all. That was some racist shit right there.