David Minerva Clover

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.

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.

Straight people, it isn’t that you aren’t awesome; so many of you are! It’s just that, while you enjoy the numerous advantages that your straight privilege allows you, I’d like to celebrate the little things that make being queer totally rad.

When I finally realized I was trans, it was after almost a year and a half of therapy, a lot of trauma, and after becoming a parent.

We’re trying to raise him with a lot of options and very few assumptions, but I won’t be mad at you if you call my kid “handsome little boy” or something. It’s fine. People have a hard time talking about babies without gendered labels. Even I have a hard time with it, and I’ve put a kind of ridiculous amount of energy into analyzing this stuff.

However, I do have one favor to ask. Please, for the love of everything that is good in this world, stop calling him “little man.”

I’m a poor person. I live below the U.S. poverty line. And yeah, I deserve to make my own financial decisions. The reality is that I did not become poor because I ate a meal in a restaurant one too many times, and while it’s true that eating out less can affect one’s budget, refusing to ever eat out again won’t make me not poor.

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.

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.

In today’s world, children may be a financial liability, but that shouldn’t make them a luxury item.

I’m not scared on the street very often, but y’all, this time I was scared. But if there’s one thing I know, it is that you do not answer these guys, because that only makes it worse. So I held my breath and hoped that if I didn’t engage, he’d drive off eventually. I felt for my cell phone in my pocket, wondering how quickly I could get ahold of someone if I needed to.