1. My First Rattle Was an Improperly-Sealed Bottle of Prenatal Vitamins
2. Misandry Began At Home
3. I Am Not One Of Your Commenters
4. No One Provided Me With An Adequate Explanation of the Difference Between Crocodiles and Alligators
5. So Few Barbies, So Many Gay Penguins
6. I Did Not Need To Know That My Parents Fucked On Their First Real Date
7. Mommy, Please Put Down Your Phone
8. Sometimes I Wanted To Have Feelings Without Processing Them With an Adult
9. I Was Popular In High School, And My Mom Didn’t Know What To Do With That
10. I Never Liked The Eagles
Tags: family, forgive me my sweet child, humor, i am a monster, moms
10’s the one that would hurt you the most, right?
11. Did You Really Need To Livetweet That?
I fear that when I have children, that will be their future…
Jsyk, gators have U-shaped heads and you can only see their upper teeth when their mouths are closed. Crocs have V-shaped heads and their upper and lower teeth visibly interlock when their mouths are closed. (This message brought to you by goddess-only-knows how many hours of Steve Irwin.)
For some reason, I can’t ever remember this. I feel like I’ve read it a million times, yet it refuses to stay in my head.
YUP
TRUE FACTS
As I was reading it, all I heard was Charlie Brown’s teacher.
also, alligators will see you later, while crocodiles will see you in a while.
Gharials won’t see you at all. They’re too busy catching fish and going extinct.
Also crocs are like giant prehistoric submarines that can swim in the open goddamn ocean! I recently learned that Florida is the only place with alligators AND crocs and it blew my fucking mind.
what is even the point of having two of them
why can’t they just be called “scary water lizards”, like dinosaurs
aquadinosaur, scary water lizard. there I fixed it
This is What a Preverbal Feminist Looks Like
Homemade Kale “Chips” Don’t Count
Fight For Your Right to Gender-Normativity
I Rolled Off the Couch Twice Before She Stopped Just Leaving Me There
I fear that, given my track record, my (unlikely) children will have this same memoir title: I Did Not Need To Know That My Parents Fucked On Their First Real Date
But mine get the added benefit of it either being after a Tinder date where I talked about wool for 30 minutes and that’s evidently arousing or after I did karaoke and knew all the lyrics to every Madonna song in the repertoire.
(pls note i was looking for a gif of victor garber on 30 rock saying VERY WOOL and then like, CAPTIONED THAT? bc who can tell that a man is saying VERY WOOL in a deeply impressed tone just from his eyebrows??)
(anyway)
You’ve given me such a great gift in showing me these gifs. A long love of Alias combined with a love of wool added to a love of the absurd results in me weeping with joy. Thank you.
My parents were telling me how they almost named me after the city in which I was conceived LONG before I knew what conception entailed. I think I turned out moderately well-adjusted, considering.
Ron Howard is famous for this (Bryce Dallas Howard, Paige Carlyle Howard, etc.) I will also never forget the girl in my fourth grade class who proudly told everyone her “middle name is Lahaina, because that’s where my parents made me!”
WAIT, BRYCE is RON’s DAUGHTER?!?!? I clearly need to read more celebrity gossip.
My normally very prudish mother suddenly decided one day (when I was trapped in the car, naturally, because that is The Way to have awkward or difficult conversations) to tell me the circumstances of my conception. Apparently, my father was on leave from the mandatory military service, and there you go.
For many reasons I think my memoir will be called Mom, Why Would You Say That
edit: to be fair, my future kids’ memoirs will probably also be called that
“My Mom was a Feminist and I had to fight to be a Varsity Cheerleader and an Ice Skater”
“Ballerinas Can So Be Feminists!”
My daughter’s sad tale of woe
I have a friend IRL who’s mystified at how she ended up with one daughter who’s an ice skater and another who’s a cheerleader. If I know of two people it happened to, it must be a demographic!
My brother and I displayed fairly traditionally-gendered markers of child development (I was verbal earlier, my brother walked earlier and couldn’t sit still, etc), and I was terrible at sports. My mom was actually worried that she’d somehow imposed gendered expectations on us and subconsciously influenced our development.
My mom grew up pre-title 9, and really HATED that girls weren’t allowed play sports. It was so important to her that her daughter be able play sports – partly because feminism and partly because she’s naturally athletic. And then she had artistic, nerdy, non-athletic me.
She tried so, so hard to get me into sports, or really anything athletic at all – she kept signing me up for things that never took – gymnastics, volleyball, soccer, tennis, swimming and I’m probably missing one.
It took me a long, long time to understand where my mom was coming from – I didn’t see playing sports as a hard won, wonderful right, I saw it as something I was bad at I had to survive.
All I Wanted Was Some Goddamn Glitter, Why Was That So Hard?
Seriously, Would It Have Been So Hard to Just Get Along With the Other Dance Moms?
My daughter’s memoirs
She’ll understand the dance mom difficulty when she’s older. I think my mother might still be scarred.
Everything I Need To Know I Learned From The Wild Kratts
Comedy Bang! Bang! Is Funny, and Other Lies My Father Told Me
Chicken Butt, or: How I Learned To Resignedly Accept My Parents’ “Jokes”
Dude. My daughter has learned SO MUCH from Wild Kratts. She actually knows the difference between alligators and crocodiles, for one.
“She never let me paint while standing on the $600 wool rug and other lamentations of my youth”
Team #10!
I Asked My Mother Where She Kept Her Eyeshadow and High Heels and She Said My What Now?: A True Story
Have we ever considered though that Christina is clearly some kind of malevolent spirit?
So wait. Crocodiles have heads shaped like an A and alligators have heads shaped like a C? That hardly seems sporting.
But I somehow manage to remember “stalagmites MIGHT fall, but stalactites are TIGHT … except it’s the opposite,” so I suppose this might actually work.
Stalactites hold on tight (to the ceiling)!
I was taught at the age of 8, very inappropriately, that “when the mites grow up, the tites (tights) come down” which has stood me in good stead.
When I was a youngster in piano lessons there was a song I learned called “Stalactites & Stalagmites” and the “Stalactites” part was higher notes, and “Stalagmites” was lower notes. That is the only reason I remember which is which!
I did it with “Stalactites hang down like a pair of of wet TIGHTS, Stalagmites stand up, like a MITE-Y mountain”
Remember: stalagmites MIGHT hang down from the ceiling, but they don’t.
I learned this from Dilbert, and it remains one of the only useful things Scott Adams has ever said.
I hate this one because I can never remember whether they MIGHT hang from the ceiling, or MIGHT grow from the floor.
I’m sorry but who was teaching you this elaborate scheme?! The G and C trick is so much simpler, it seems like someone was setting you up to fail.
Re, #9 – My husband and I have no children as of yet and we already have plans for indoctrinating them in all things nerd and geek as early as possible. There shall be no popularity here, future spawn.
My partner and I have seriously discussed the fact that we could end up with a jock on multiple occasions. My parents were athletes! 50% of my siblings are very jock-y! What would we even DO?
My husband was a Popular Kid in high school and I was a nerd, so I have no idea how that will turn out.
Baseball, basically.
I will offer blood sacrifices if I never have to go to another baseball game again for as long as I live. I would do it for my kid if they reaaaaaaaally loved it, but. But! How can a past time be so boring and people still consider it to be so fun.
Beer in plastic cups, is the correct answer.
My brother was somehow both a Popular Kid and a nerd? And a goth for a little while, and he also played middle school football? IDK, my brother is a rich tapestry.
My husband and I are both engineers, and got our 6-year old daughter a physics workshop for Christmas last year. This year it will be a chemistry workshop. She has no hope of being the popular kid. 😉
This reminds me of a professor I had once who tried very very hard to get his son to love chemistry as much as he did. His son insisted on becoming a playwright.
This just makes me think of Ada Lovelace.
We are trying to do the same, but it turns out that she’s like 10% our interests, 90% her own. Which is as it should be, but it’s a little disheartening, especially when she feels sorry for me when she sees me trying. She’s in first grade, and has actually patted my arm and said sorrowfully, “I’m sorry Mama. I’ll probably like Harry Potter later. Like when I’m 10 or something.”
That just means that teenage rebellion will be going full on Heather.
‘Twould be a pleasure to catalog all of these. Truly.
I have a two parter: “My Mom Was Captain of the Cheer Team And Thus Adamant That I Do Sports Instead Of Dance Or Cheer” followed by “But Now I’m In My Late 20’s And Taking Afro-Brazilian Dance.”
If you had to squeeze it into one, you could go with “She’s Cheer Captain and I’m on the Bleachers (doing Afro-Brazilian Dance).”
A .
For my mom’s autobiography: “Cheerleading Was Stupid and I Mostly Liked It Because I Knew All the Rules to Sports: The Middlemarch Mom Story.”
Ugh, if your daughter writes the Alligator vs Crocodile one she should get in touch with my daughter and they can collaborate. I use them interchangeably. And confusingly, my daughter also thinks “escalator” and “elevator” are pronounced “alligator” and assumes this means there’s some deep connection between them, an impression I’ve not yet tried to correct because it’s adorable.
^^^
TERRIBLE PARENT
Is your daughter scared of escalators and elevators as a result? Or maybe convinced alligators are the helpful engineers of the animal kingdom?
My mom grew up pre-title 9, and really HATED that girls weren't allowed play sports. It was so important to her that her daughter be able play sports – partly because feminism and partly because she's naturally athletic. And then she had artistic, nerdy, non-athletic me.
She tried so, so hard to get me into sports, or really anything athletic at all – she kept signing me up for things that never took – gymnastics, volleyball, soccer, tennis, swimming and I'm probably missing one.
It took me a long, long time to understand where my mom was coming from – I didn't see playing sports as a hard won, wonderful right, I saw it as something I was bad at I had to survive.
My son’s will be, Yes, Mom, I’m Sure I’m Straight.
Oh my GOD.
Life changing.
Wait, probably not. I mean. How often will I need to know that?
But I remember there being a time of my life when it was so stressful that I couldn't remember the difference. Why? Why was it so important for me to know this?