For the past four days, I’ve been sucking snot out of my darling daughter’s nose with a bulb syringe. She hates it. I feel bad, but she does need to breathe. We’ve both had head colds this past week and are in the last snotty stages before being completely well. Besides all of the nose blowing, I feel good.
Life is good, the weather’s getting colder. I just went shopping for winter clothes for her. Why are all of the girl clothes plagued with so much pink? I don’t mind pink on principle - I actually like it a lot, but the intensity of the baby gendering that is happening kind of alarms me. And every time I’ve taken Stella out dressed in anything but pink, people assume she’s a boy. Even if it’s yellow or orange, if it’s not pink, she’s in drag. Sometimes I don’t even correct them, but sometimes they do remember to ask. I mean, newborn babies don’t give a shit about gender - why can’t I find some nice earth tones to dress her in that don’t cost more than my clothes? There was a great sale happening at Kohl’s, but that means I have pink, flowers and baby leopard print patterns to choose from (unless, of course, I want to get into Disney Princess mode. Fuck that.) And of course, the boy clothes all have to have some sort of athletic symbol stuck on them somewhere, to keep these babies from accidentally wandering into a state of sexual ambiguity. I saw a really nice blue jumper with a lion on it, but a football decal had been randomly stuck on it. This is true of many items - very cute and relatively gender neutral, except for the random picture of some variety of sporting equipment.
Would it really be so bad if there were a few baby garments available that just had nice colors and patterns? Would our children all dissolve into a chaos of gender confusion and unhappiness? Is it really such a problem just to ask if it’s a boy or a girl if you must know? I know, I know - this isn’t really such a big deal. But if you think about it, what is the purpose of being so insistent upon these gender distinctions. Why is it so important to sexualize our freakin’ babies in this way? Yes, it is a form of sexualization, when we are so insistent upon declaring gender and so afraid of infants being mistaken for the wrong sex. Such a mistake doesn’t affect them, it affects adults. It annoys me and creeps me out a little. I don’t want to make a gender declaration, I just want some cute, reasonably priced clothes for my babe.
Anyway, enough about that. I’m still waiting for my new hands-free pump to arrive. I’m hoping it gets here today. Speaking of which - I need to feed Little Miss soon and make some more milk. I’ll check in again with more about how we’re doing. Until then, it’s all good…
Atena McSnotsucker
