David Minerva Clover

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.

Thin women can overeat, and it is seen as a quirk, or a one-time indulgence they deserve, or even proof that they aren’t anorexic. Fat women though? We are expected to constantly prove that we’re doing our best to not be fat.

Faced by the extreme pressure to conform to impossible beauty ideals, I followed my instincts (and my budding feminism) and rejected them wholesale. I wasn’t going to play like that; I wasn’t going to let my gender require that I wear makeup or perform a certain way.

My kid, who turned three the day after Mary the duckling died, wasn’t old enough to get any of it. Yet talking to toddlers about death is part of life.

I expected it was only a matter of time until someone sent it my way. I mean... friends have even called my relationship with my wife “inspirational.” [...] [O]nce I noticed that I still hadn’t been invited, I started to notice something else: Everyone that I saw posting “love your spouse” pictures was straight....

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.

Despite our relative insulation from homophobia, my wife and I are not unaware of the situation. There are plenty of people in this country who don’t believe that we have the right to exist, to be married, or to raise a child together.

I believe in reproductive justice. I believe everyone deserves a say in how, when, and if, they choose to reproduce. I believe comprehensive sex education and access to safe and legal abortion are important parts of giving women, girls, and other people with uteruses full agency over their reproductive lives. Could we extend this to cats, too?

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.