More and more often, women today are asking themselves the important question: have I already had children? If so, when? Where are they?
The most important issue facing modern feminists in today’s Easy-Squeeze, public bathroom, instant timer world is whether or not women have already had children, and if so where they saw them last. It’s hard enough trying to balance a career with the children you can find inside of your house. Women shouldn’t have to balance work, play, and a family they can’t remember if they have or not.
Have I given birth to anyone? Do I have a life partner, and if so, did the two or more of us decide to adopt? These are real questions that every woman has to ask in her lifetime. It’s time we stopped being embarrassed about it.
Sometimes women find themselves juggling a career, a husband, and trying to figure out whether the children they’re with are part of their family, someone they’re babysitting, or just standing near them. I know I’m not the only one among us who’s stopped dead in her tracks in the park and whispered in terror to herself: whose hand am I holding?
Sometimes I see children in airports. Is one of them mine? There’s really no way to know. You’ll just know, other women reassure me. And sometimes I think I do, but then some other woman starts screaming at me when I start to wheel the stroller, so I’m not really sure I can trust my own instincts.
Sure, there are Cheerios in the cupholder. That’s a clue. But are they from a child? Or are they mine? Adults should be allowed to eat Cheerios and maybe have children if they want to, I think.
Are my dogs my children? Do I have dogs? I can’t be expected to remember all of these things. I’m not Superwoman.
“You’ll change your mind when you get older,” people told me. Did I? Some people aren’t physically capable of bearing children. Others aren’t financially or personally equipped to adopt. I wonder if I’m one of them.
Did I decide to have a biological family? Or did I decide to take control of my own body and rent out my uterus as a storage unit for a growing small business?
Have I found a husband? Did I settle for Mr. Right Now because my biological clock started ticking, or am I in a multigenerational polyamorous cuddle collective? I tried looking through my wallet, but there aren’t really any clues in there.
It’s really a money issue. Paying for childcare, saving for college, re-entering the workplace: Heaven help the woman who fills out a health insurance application and writes “I’m not sure” under “Children.”
Let’s not forget, too, about the women who get mommy-tracked: plucked from their own homes in the dead of night, taken to Indianapolis, and forced to join up with a gang of helmeted mothers-only speed racers and detectives on the hot-rod circuit.
It’s okay if you don’t want to have children, either. I might not have. It’s entirely possible that long ago I made the deeply personal decision not to become a mother, and to a lesser extent, a father. I just hope I made that decision before I had children.
If I chose to stay at home and raise my children personally, that’s my decision. I wonder if I made it. Many women are asking themselves that question right now. It’s not just me. Many women are wandering aimlessly through the rooms of their house, trying to see if there are children in them. If you have children in your home, that’s a big clue.
Also, the biggest problem facing feminism today is when I can’t remember where I parked my car. How are we supposed to get anywhere if I can’t find my car?
Tags: children, do i live here, feminism, problems, where is my car, work life balance
The Internet needed this. Or I did, at least.
Oh, shit, why DO I have all these cheerios on my floor?
And do I actually have a kid, or did I just shrink all my laundry? It’s probably just a laundry problem, right? Right.
Someday Science will invent a dryer that unshrinks tiny clothes and then we will have solved this mess once and for all.
I just imagined someone wearing a onesie.
I saw adult-sized footie pajamas in Target last week, if you need more fodder for horrifying visions.
I would wear the hell out of adult-sized footie pyjamas though
These ones were a little too…sexy Grover? to let me recommend them to anyone in good conscience.
Aaaaand now I have an answer to Mallory’s question about my gender representation in art: SEXY GROVER
I may have done a striptease on my wedding night to “Natural Woman” beginning with “slipping into something more comfortable” and emerging in adult-sized footie pajamas.
This is about the only thing I have ever read that makes me want to get married some day (or am I already married with kids. who knows.)
I think having foot knives on your footy pajamas defeats the purpose.
Like the cleavage though.
I think more articles of clothing should come with build-in knives.
Ren faires are the place for you! Your wardrobe might become unsettlingly doublet-based.
I have some; I love them. I wear them all winter. The only problem is there is no butt flap, so I get cold when I have to pee.
I bought some last fall. They were perfect for Pajama Day during Corporate Spirit Week. The other woman who does my job also coincidentallygot a pair. We rocked the footie pajamas at work that day.
The local lingerie store sells $300 adult onesies with little reindeer on them. The owner will try and convince you that they’re ok for work. I think maybe they’re only ok for work if you work in a lingerie store.
I love everything about this.
I am so waiting for the day when my children finally get big enough so I can wear their clothes. They have so many more clothes than I do, after all. I reckon by the time the oldest is ten, in two years, I’ll totally be able to steal his tshirts.
When I passed her shoe size (I was in it for about 6mo and climbing fast), she bought me ALL THE SHOES. She said if she got me seven pairs there was no way I could ruin or wear out more than one or two of them, and then she got them as hand-me-downs.
One of the most terrifying moments of my life took place at a skating rink as I was lacing up my skates. A toddler waddled over to me, held its chubby hands up and said with a winsome smile, “Mommy?”
haha what’s that kid sorry I can’t hear you over the sound of me skating the fuck away as fast as I can
Dear god, that is horrifying.
I was asked to hold a friends newborn once and it tried to nurse on me. I almost dropped it, I was so surprised and grossed out.
And this is the tragedy only mothers know: when they really are yours YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO SKATE AWAY
Joining a mothers-only speed racer/detective hot rod circuit is possibly the only thing about motherhood that has ever sounded attractive to me.
I assume this means we’ll all get badass nicknames, a la roller derby.
And we get to ride with Smithers and Burns. “Now let’s burn rubber, baby!”
Being the terrible matriarch who keeps an enormous family under her demanding thumb always sounded pretty good to me.
(You know, when the kids are all adults, and your only interaction with the children is to have a couple who mow the lawn twice a week and occasionally spill juice on something so you can wedge their parents further under your thumb.)
A good trick for remembering how many children you have is to tie a string around your finger, one for each child. But this approach is less helpful if you also have dogs to remember.
Separate fingers, or possibly color-coded strings.
Yeah, but how do you remember which color goes with which species? What, am I psychic?
Hairties around your wrist for dogs, because then if you need to put your hair up, you can forget you have a dog.
Or cats, because they may try to eat the string off.
Where do I sign up to become part of a cuddle collective?
ugh NOWHERE
god bless you, robot
god bless YOU Mallory, for everything you do.
the worst experience of my life was going to laughter yoga, no way a cuddle party would be good. boundaries, people. just… have them. laugh when appropriate. cuddle people you know and like. etc.
There are totally some in the Bay Area. When I asked someone who went to the events, the first thing she said is “They weren’t creepy at all!”
Which is a pretty creepy thing to say. Not, like “Oh, they took some of my blood for reference.” creepy, not “We all have to wear sexy Grover footy pajamas” creepy, but still, pretty creepy.
D: Yeah, pretty creepy is right! Perhaps I should rethink my enthusiasm about this…
Here’s the link! It’s so enthusiastic and warm I feel a little bad about my baseline level of smarm.
http://www.cuddleparty.com/california-north/
“It’s entirely possible that long ago I made the deeply personal decision not to become a mother, and to a lesser extent, a father.”
I chortled.
“Let’s not forget, too, about the women who get mommy-tracked: plucked from their own homes in the dead of night, taken to Indianapolis, and forced to join up with a gang of helmeted mothers-only speed racers and detectives on the hot-rod circuit.”
this is the exact life I want, or maybe the exact life I currently have, or maybe the life I had in the past but no longer have, not sure, no clues, yeah, sounds good though
The insidious part of the Mommy-track kidnappings is that they pluck you from your home and then let you sleep uninterrupted for 24 hours. Those women will do anything for the sinister forces that let them almost catch up on sleep.
As someone who grew up and fled Indianapolis as soon as possible, I can vouch that all of my former childhood classmates who stayed became mommy speed racers and they’re so damn smug about it.
If I did have children, am I attachment parenting them? Or tiger momming them? Or maybe are they free-range? I saw a child wading in a creek near my house once; it could have been free-range, but was it mine? And if I’m not a tiger mom, who have I been standing over, threatening not to feed until they learn to play their scales?
Do I co-sleep? If not, who have I been sleeping next to? Who or what is in my bed right now? Do I watch them–it–as it–they? sleep, or do they watch me?
Well that’s delightfully sinister. A+
I thought the high-pitched wails coming from somewhere within my apartment were because I had left the TV on, but maybe I am a mother and I am using the Cry It Out method of parenting!
It’s the cat. You ran out of “salmon and venison and no grains” cat food, and grabbed a can of “corn paste with pork scrapple” cat food from the store to tide you over, and he MUST have MORE of this amazing cat crack, it tastes like scrapple and corn!
I sometimes feed the cats wet food with chunks of rabbit meat in it. The husband objects to this on the grounds that we have pet rabbits as well and it wouldn’t do to give the cats ideas.
Hey, my cats (or possibly children? what kind of parenting is “poop in a box, eat from a bowl on the floor”, exactly?) almost never vomit their salmon and no grains food! I cannot even fathom the nightmare of getting partially digested corn paste and pork scrapple out of the carpet.
Okay actually there is a cat draped across my lap right now. Or a really weird human child. I think it’s a cat though, but this does not rule out the possibility of secret children.
*shudder*
Free-range children are not only more environmentally responsible–they’re extra tasty, too!
Well if they aren’t a child I hope you’re making $150 an hour.
We went apple-picking this weekend and, whilst enjoying apple cider donuts in the middle of the shop, a man called for everyone’s attention. His wife held up a small girl and the man said, “Is this someone’s child? Is this someone’s child?”
So, yes, you do have children and they are currently being held in an orchard in DeKalb, Illinois.
Idea: walk around theme parks and other family venues, find their “missing child stations,” see which of the children react positively to you. These are probably your children. Maybe.
Be careful, though. Some of the children may be the orphans of murdered circus acrobats and, if you take them home, you may be forced to train them to become strangely-clad crime fighters.
That is what happened to Buster Keeton, and he became a movie star, soooo…
(None of these things happened to Buster Keeton except that his parents were acrobats and once he fell from the net when he was three and Houdini caught him.)
I like to think this was more a metaphysical question. “Is this someone’s child? Did this child manifest on earth in some other fashion? To whom does such a child belong? Is this someone’s ‘child’?”
“Do you really possess a child enough to call it yours? Is that not a presumption of nearly Satanic grandeur and delusion? Are we not all God’s children, and thus our own?”
“Is this your child? No, surely this child belongs to herself alone.”
I opened my cupboard and saw a Hello Kitty sippy cup and panicked, until I remembered that that was the sippy cup I bought to drink wine out of when I had a fruit fly infestation. Close call.
A single thumbs up cannot adequately convey how much I admire your problem solving skills in the face of fruit flies.
I was about to comment, “I’m pretty sure I know someone else who did this,” and surprise: it’s you! I should probably read usernames more carefully.
The sippy cup is my proudest achievement and I will never stop talking about it on various internet platforms!
Feel free to post a pic of it on Friday’s Open Thread. Please.
Women’s essays on choosing or rejecting motherhood read like forced confessions written by accused counter-revolutionaries in a Cultural Revolution-era Maoist re-education center.
That reminds me, Mallory, can you pick up the kids from school this afternoon? I forgot which school they go to.
Also their names or what they’re wearing.
…and how many there are. I want to say two? Are they twins?
I haven’t gotten any calls from any schools, so I assume Mallory picked up our kids.
Okay, so I have been having a lot of crazy dreams lately, and chief among them is the dream that I have a child/children that suddenly appear and I realize I’ve forgotten about them all this time and am immediately stressed about how to feed/clothe/generally take care of them. The second most reoccurring dreams are the ones where I’m pregnant (There is no chance that I am actually pregnant). Now that I’ve entered my thirties, these seem to be taking over from the “Forgot to attend a college class all semester and now it’s exam day” nightmares. Help!
No help, but while i was pregnant, I would often dream that I left the baby in a box or drawer, and forgot about it, only to find it weeks later having shrunk down to kitten size and very hungry. (So far this has not actually happened, but I guess it’s always possible!)
I dreamed once that I had had a child when I was sixteen and given it up for adoption and had ENTIRELY BLOCKED IT FROM MY MEMORY. I woke up thinking “How could I have forgotten that?!…oh yeah, it didn’t actually happen.”
I’ve never had kids.
I think.
Oh my god I have this dream all the time. Usually I go to my parent’s house and there is a baby in a cot in the kitchen and I’m all like, ‘I wonder if these parents I have stopped speaking to have any crisps,’ and I go through the cupboards and the baby cries and SUDDENLY I REALISE IT’S MY BABY. Then I go do something else, forget about the baby, and later in the dream I’m like, ‘Oh shit that baby,’ and then I have to find it and it’s MISSING
Maybe the dingo ate your baby, husband, and work-life balance?
Kate Harding’s piece from Link Roundup (which was great), in sum:
Kate: Did I have children?
Kate’s husband: No. You had this adorable chihuahua.
Kate: Oh that’s right.
(cuddles chihuahua)
There is definitely SOMETHING following me around, but is it a small child or existential despair? Maybe both? Can one have both a child and existential despair?
I hope not–“have a kid” was kind of my go-to plan for curing my existential despair. Back to the drawing board…
Just be careful, they might both exist on the same plane of reality, I don’t know!
No, one cannot, as having a child eats up all the brain cells you might have been using to ponder the dread of existence. It’s not that everything is roses and unicorns; it’s just that you can no longer be bothered to ponder anything.
Pros of having a child: not enough brain cells for existential dread. Noted.
That is one of my great hopes for having children
This is absolutely real and one of the best things about becoming a parent. (The actual kid is pretty okay too.)
I was as a kid (and still am, honestly), SO FREAKED OUT about getting pregnant and not knownig it, and then popping one out while I’m pooping or something. The first like, year and a half after I started having sex with a dude was like, constant anxiety about that.
I was an intensely logical and literal child. This explains why as a very small child taking communion worried me. I knew that a) a person needed a body AND blood. b) Somehow someone else’s body and blood got inside you and grew in your tummy, and that was how you had a baby. c) The only instance of how this might happen was at church. “This is my body broken for you…” et cetera. The only obvious conclusion was that f you let the bread and the juice touch in your mouth, you got pregnant.
My mother was bemused when I told her in my late twenties, that I used to be extra careful about making sure all possible bits of bread were out of my mouth before my thimble full of grape juice in case I got pregnant.
This is an example of the difference between logic and truth. If only we could teach internet neckbeards to understand it.
Solarsister, me too. A couple of weeks ago I dreamed that I had a baby. In the dream I had the kid, but then I forgot about it. Like, maybe I left it at a store? I don’t know. A feeling of terror descended over me as I realized, “oh shit I might go to prison for this.” The dream caused me to jump out of bed, and during my sprint towards the living room I tripped over a pile of clothing and shoes, which then caused me to face plant into the door frame. That’s when I realized I didn’t have any fucking kids, and I went back to bed.
We need a dream interpreter to tell us what’s going on. I’ve always been ambivalent about having kids myself but these dreams are quickly tipping me over to the “no way in hell” side.
“It’s entirely possible that long ago I made the deeply personal decision not to become a mother, and to a lesser extent, a father. I just hope I made that decision before I had children.”
#GPOMYMOTHER
Do I have a cat, or did all this weird hair come from my husband. He DOES have a lot of hair.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, well… do I have any children?
My actual recurring nightmare is that I had a baby 2 months ago and only now do I realize that I should have been feeding and changing it.
My most favorite joke in the whole world is when someone asks me if I have kids and I say, “Not that I (WINK TONGUE CLUCK AND FINGER GUNS) know of.” No one ever laughs.
Today, after long last, I feel laughed with. Probably at, as well. Probably by my kids who do not exist…that I know of. Ah, the laughter of undetermined children. It warms the cockles of the relative region of where my heart would probably be if I maybe had one.
I would laugh! I will also steal this response shamelessly because it’s awesome.
…that you KNOW of!
OK, so this really happened. I was at the park with all four children. The youngest was still a baby and was strapped into the pram near the parents, and the other three were running around on the playground. I went over to check on #3 because I couldn’t see her clearly, and she was only a toddler at the time. I found her, then #1 came up to me and asked me a question, and I lost #3 again, and I said to #1, ‘Hey, have you seen #3? I can’t find her anywhere!’ And I was starting to panic just a little, because she was JUST THERE and I couldn’t find her, and #1 looks at me and giggles in a ‘oh-Mummy-you’re-such-a-kidder’ way and it was then I realised that I was holding #3 on my hip.
So, you know. It really is a problem. REALLY. Or perhaps it’s the sleep deprivation that’s the problem…
I live in Indianapolis. I see that gang and they are SO COOL. I wonder if they miss their old lives, though…
Somewhere in here is the germ of a really terrifying novel or movie.
When I passed her shoe size (I was in it for about 6mo and climbing fast), she bought me ALL THE SHOES. She said if she got me seven pairs there was no way I could ruin or wear out more than one or two of them, and then she got them as hand-me-downs.
As a father and primary caregiver of my two wonderful and terrifying toddlers, I recently had a realization when the wife took the kids so I could go get a passport: I have adopted this perpetual air of being well-meaning and trying had but being critically short on focus could you please walk me through this. And it works wonders, socially, when I'm out with the kids. But when I don't have them with me, people look at me as if to say "what's wrong with you?" I told this to a fellow stay-at-home with two of her own little ones and her response was "And when you have the children with you, they immediately know what's wrong with you." Ooh boy.
Once I was at a park and this kid was happily playing with his (I assume) mother for a while before suddenly stopping, staring off into space saying “they’re hurt.” to which the assumed parent who was visibly freaked as there was nothing in the immediate area that would have lead the child to make an observation or anything replied:”who’s hurt?” to which the child said, in the same trance-ish voice “people” before continuing with the happy dance he had been doing before.