David Minerva Clover

This morning my son woke up laughing. My son woke up laughing and I woke up crying. My son woke up laughing and his little squeaky voice was a light in the darkness to me. I went into his room and moved towards his crib and he smiled at me. And I was so grateful, grateful for him and who he is, but also grateful that he is still a baby and I do not have to explain what happened last night.

None of us follows any one parenting philosophy to a T; we’re all making split-second decisions about what is and isn’t dangerous.

Yes, we should be criticizing these straight, cisgender dads. We’ve been far too easy on them for too long. It’s straight out of the patriarchy playbook.

After the solstice, the light very slowly begins to return, and every day is a little longer. Yule is a promise: winter sucks, but spring will come again.

There’s just no getting around it, and other than one half-hour spell where he sat with a good friend of ours while both of his moms took a swim, one of us had to be with him the entire weekend. And let’s be honest, because I’m “boob mom” and he was nursing even more than normal, it could never really be divided 50/50. All of that was fine, but it was often just fine, and there’s just no denying that it was a very different trip than it would have been without a kid.

Teeth are inseparable from class in this country. I have gotten by in life largely by being able to “pass” as middle class, by being white and articulate and confident. People meet me and assume that I must have gone to college. Middle class people talk to me like I’m their peer. But I am not their peer. I will never be their peer.

The whole concept of salaries for stay-at-home moms reveals both the classism in parenting culture and what we really think about poor people.

Getting rid of all of your stuff is all well and good if you are childfree, but if you have the fortune (or misfortune) to have children, they literally will not let you.

One of the most insidious things that patriarchy does is the complete and utter devaluation of anything that is considered “women’s work.” Not only does patriarchy limit what women (and all trans and nonbinary folk) can do in the world, it also takes what we do manage to do and tells us it isn’t worth anything.

I don’t want to deprive my child of these magical Halloween memories, I just also want to light candles and talk about our ancestors.